SEO for Startups
How to get traction without
spending a fortune dime.
Ravish Ahuja, Co-Founder,
RankSignals.com & Mpedia
http://www.ranksignals.com
Follow me: @interactivecode

Myths about SEO
• SEO is DEAD!
• SEO is not marketing
• SEO is black hat
• SEO is not scalable
• We got 100,000 Facebook fans and Twitter
followers, we don’t need SEO

robots.txt
User-agent: *
Disallow: /

Search Engine Optimization
• Build it and they will come?
• Nope. Build it, then market it.
• Great product and great marketing goes hand
in hand
• You need to start SEO from Day 1
• Your product should have SEO in its DNA

SEO Success Stories
2.4 million monthly visitors to
18 million monthly visitors in 6 months

SEO Success Stories

SEO Process
Research
Link
Strategy
Building
On-site Product
SEO Design

Panda! Penguin! FTW?
Google Panda Update Google Penguin Update

SEO Research
• Estimate market opportunity
• Identify your customers
• Keyword research
• Keyword difficulty analysis
• Content analysis
• Competition analysis

Keyword Research
Make Something People Want

Long Tail

SEO Strategy
• Brand-able SEO friendly domain name
• Country targeting & domain extension
• Content strategy
• Landing pages
• User generated content
• Social engagement and distribution strategy
• Build something, people want to share

On-Site SEO
• H1 Title & Meta Title Most
Important
• Meta Description
• Image (with alt attribute)
• Content with good keyword
density
• Meta Robots: do not add
noindex & nofollow
• rel=“canonical”
• SEO Friendly URLs
• Use Keyword Variations
• Internal Linking
• Robots.txt

Landing Pages
• Highly Targeted and Converting
• Create landing pages for all of your products /
services
• Optimize titles of all landing pages to match
keywords
• Get backlinks for your landing pages
• Interlink them from your homepage and other
pages of your website

SEO Friendly URLs
• Be descriptive and brief
• Bad example:
http://yourwebsite.com/restaurant.php?id=1234
5&name=the%20big%20chill&city=new%20delhi
• Good Example: http://yourwebsite.com/the-big-
chill-delhi/
• www vs non-www
• Sub-domains vs sub-directories
• Use 301 Redirect to move

Which
result will
you click?

CTR of Google SERPs

Rich Snippets
• Make your SERPs stand out
• Double your traffic!
• Get started with http://schema-creator.org/
• Add Google Author Tag
<a rel=“author” href=“http://plus.google.com”>Ravish on
Google+</a>

SEO Your Product
• Build a product that spreads itself
• Leverage your users to create content on massive
scale
• Build virality into your product. So your users can
spread your content and links all over the web
• Interlink every page of the website
• Create HTML & XML Sitemaps
• Examples: SlideShare, Scribd & Yelp

Link Building
• Public Relations (PR)
• Blogs & Comments -- Participate in conversations
• Competition Analysis
• Design an award winning site and submit it to CSS
galleries
• Social Sites: Reddit, Hacker News, Stumble Upon,
Pinterest etc.
• Forums / Q & A
• Infographics
• Distribute widgets and embeddable content
• Coupons, Deals, Giveaways & Contests

Eat Your Competitors Lunch

SEO & Social Co-relation
• Google QDF algorithm (Query Deserves
Freshness) boosts ranking of fresh content
• Google +1, Facebook likes and Tweets bumps
ranking of fresh content temporarily
• Social media can help you build relationships
and get more links
• Social sites like: Reddit, Hacker News, Digg,
Quora, StackOverflow are great for SEO

Must Have SEO Tools
• Google Keyword Tool
• Google Webmaster Tools
• RankSignals Backlinks Checker
• SEO Quake Firefox and Chrome extension

Final Thoughts
• Do not do keyword stuffing
• Do not load your content with AJAX
• Host your own stuff: Blog, Images, Documents
& Videos
• Encourage users to spread them with an
embed code
• Use keyword variations
• Site Speed is an important factor

Final Thoughts
• Prevent links from spammy sites
• Avoid site-wide links
• Caution with automatic link building tools
• Buy links… oh really?

Thank You!
Ravish Ahuja, Co-Founder,
RankSignals.com & Mpedia
Email: ravish@mpedia.com
Twitter: @interactivecode
facebook.com/realgeek