Bootstrap Web Marketing: SEO & Social Media• Who I am

• Disclaimer

• Format of the presentation

SEO

Why SEO Kicks Ass

• Other than effort, it’s free.

• The skillset required for the time intensive work is relatively inexpensive.

• SEO is the gift that keeps on giving

Why SEO Doesn’t Kick Ass

• SEO is a fast-changing world.

• You live and die by Google.

• It’s delayed gratification (and there’s a chance of NO gratification)

SEO Ranking Factors – Markup / Keywords(most startups do fine here)

• Title Tag

• H1 Tag

• Body Text

• Domain Name

• URL

SEO Ranking Factors – Other Markup

• Popularity within internal linking (very important for long tail or low competition keywords)

• Quality of OUTGOING links

• Page updates

SEO Ranking Factors – Overall Site Popularity• Global popularity of your site (combination

of link quantity/quality)

• Age of site

• Site performance (time on page, bookmarks, etc.)

Inbound Links

• Relevance of inbound links

• Anchor text (Google bomb) and adjacent text.

Negative Factors

• Duplicate Content– Very Similar Pages– Identical Page Titles / Meta Info

• Keyword stuffing?

Keyword Research(most startups suck at this)

How to Evaluate Keywords?

• How many people are searching for a particular word/phrase?

• How competitive is the landscape for that word/phrase?

• How relevant is the keyword?

• Actionable keywords? “lowest price wii”– Measure the conversion!

• Non-bouncing keywords

How do people search?

• # of words– 28.9% 2 word phrases– 27.8% 3 word phrases– 17.1% 4 word phrases– 11.4% 1 word phrases

• 62% click on the first result

• 21% feel search engines don’t understand their query

Keyword Research – Have someone else do it

• http://www.seoresearchlabs.com/ :$99.95

Count, relevance (entered by you) and # of targeted searches per day

Estimated monthly clickthru for 1st, 5th, and 10th position on each major engine.

Competitiveness of each keyword

Keyword Research – Do It Yourself

Overture Keyword Research Tool (free)

• Source: Yahoo and Affiliates

• Notes: Doesn’t distinguish singular and plural

• Not an ideal tool for exact phrases

WordTracker.com ($8/day)

• Source: Dogpile (.6%)and MetaCrawler (.4%)(what kinda people use these engines!?)

Adwords Traffic Estimator (free, req. AdWords account)

• Source: Google

• Notes: Not good for long tail phrases

Other Resources

• Yahoo Search Marketing Tool

• KeywordDiscovery.com

• Google Trends• Estimated monthly clickthru for 1st, 5th, and 10th position on each major engine.

Best Resource – Pay for It

• Buy an Adwords campaign for a phrase. Pay enough to get your ad on the first page. Metrics will show you the number of ad views.

Spiderability

Can Search Engines Find Every Page/view on Your Site?

• Create a “sitemap” (HTML and/or XML)

• Be mindful of internal link text

• Remember that internal link popularity is important (more than 1 link is better than one link)– “Related content” buckets are valuable

• Most important for sites with lots of data hidden behind a search interface

Effective Presentation on SERPs• Readable, compelling, objective title (65

characters)

• Readable, compelling, objective meta description (155 characters)

• Short URLs perform better

• Stuffed titles, descriptions, and URLs look spammy and don’t get clicks

Title

Meta-Description

URL

Npost Example

Keyword Research: “Tech Startup Jobs”?

Markup for SEO: Title tag, <h1> tag, referring anchor tag

If you were a search spider, what would you click on to find “seattle rails jobs”?

What about here? No spiderability!

Site Structure for SEO: Keyword targeted pages linked to (flat site structure). Internal link popularity is important.

SERP Title: For the target phrase “rails jobs seattle”, the title should lead with “Rails Jobs in Seattle, WA” or somesuch.

Description: meta description should be unique and compelling.

URL: Short urls perform better

Link Building Campaigns

Anotomy of a Link Building Campaign

• Links from trusted sites.

• Links to “deep” pages in your site.

• Links with good anchor text

• Links from good pages– Home pages– Content pages

• Links from relevant pages

• No JavaScript / no ‘nofollow’!

Value of Building Links

• People click on them!

• Branding

• And, of course, SEO

Anatomy of a Good Link Source

• Search for your top keywords/phrases – the top 100-150 or so are worth getting links from.

• Content rich page

• Links deep to the most relevant page

• Anchor text, title tag, h1 tag, etc all match to the keyword in question

Who to Ask for Links

• Any relevant site

• Good way to find sites to ask are to find sites that link to your competitions’ sites.– Linkdomain:mycompetition.com

• Linkdomain:mycompetition.com “my keywords”

How to Ask for Links

• First, see if there is a standard procedure for getting links

• Second, see if you (as a user) can post a link (comments, look for nofollow), forums, etc. (Be careful of abuse)

• If not, ask for it.

• If necessary (if you can), buy it.

Say Thanks for EVERY Link That You Can

• Set up a google alert for your business name

• Any time you get ANY mention, stop by and say THANKS

• Any time you get criticized, stop by and respectfully engage in the conversation (and keep it going!)

Social Media Marketing(Big linkbuilding Opportunities!)

Linkbait (It’s Easy!)

• Defined as something that people want to link to, blog about, talk about, digg, vote up, etc. The good news is, baiting web geeks words.

• Write something– Useful– Funny– Controversial

• Better yet, have your standard content pages be– Useful– Funny– Controversial

• To get a feel for linkbait, head over to popurls.com (list of top digg, reddit, del.icio.us links)

• Would you bookmark this? Would you email it to your friends?

Headlines/titles Win the Day

• “Who wants [blank]?”

• “The Secret of [blank]?”

• Little known ways to [blank]?”

• Lists – Top 5, Top 10, etc.

• (useful, funny, controversial)

Top Social Media Venues

• Digg, Del.icio.us, Reddit, StumbleUpon, etc.• Blogs (all blogs matter, top blogs matter more)

– (check source for nofollow tag / server redirects )

• Forums– (check source for nofollow tag / server redirects )

• Public Profiles (anywhere)• Directories• Design Portals

Go Viral

• Ideally, using your product is an inherently public act that elicits others to jump on board

• Viral is not a marketing strategy, it’s a product strategy– "Tell a friend"– Widget embeds– Addressbook importing

• (These don’t make your product viral, but they’ll help it if it is)

• First priority is creating something that is useful, funny, controversial enough that people want to share it

• Second priority is making it easy