Strategic SEO for Startups
kalzumeus.com
kalzumeus.com
I've also chitchatted with a few people here who asked me about this topic. Feel free to chime in if you want me to share what I told you with the group -- I default to Facebook 2004 privacy settings regarding specific advice. ;)
There are all sorts of people who will fiddle with tags and whatnot to try to perfectly shape their site because they're scared/lazy to not make good content. But there is nothing that has a higher ROI on time than making interesting content. Sure, try to make interesting content around the long tail terms that you can optimize for, but at the end of the day, you have to make interesting content.
Also your statement about spending time on interesting content gives your the highest ROI is not true. Hollywood and the game industry prove from time to time that they can create hypes and market B quality productions and still make tons of money. This also counts on the internet. Content is evaluated by machines (Google, Bing etc) who determine if it is interesting or not. Doing A/B testing to test which landing page works best is better time spent than spending your time hiring people to create interesting content. Just changing your button can increase sales by over 100%.
Ask the developers in the appstore whats more important, interesting content or a position in the top 5.
But people spend insane amounts of time and effort trying to get on TechCrunch, when they could spend that time writing pitches to blogs whose owners will melt to know anyone who is reading them, or writing systems to make pillar content which will be attract qualified, interested prospects for the next decade.
And even for those few (arguably) lucky folks who make it onto Techcrunch, they might assume that if getting a big splash "gains" traffic then subsequent big splashes are needed to "sustain" it, throwing an increasing amount of resources to further pessimize their business to fit the preferences of a narrow, fickle audience who does not spend money on the stuff they have to sell.
1) they send less traffic than they did back in, say, 2006. It's only 3,000-4,000 uniques. 2) one backlink from them doesn't appear to be worth crap any more in Google. Google (as far as I can tell) looks much more at the heterogeneity of your linkbase than it does any individual link from a high PR site (maybe Wikipedia's excluded here, but I don't know).
Patrick and Peldi's advice to target 40 smaller blogs with personalized pitches (there's that interesting content thing again - interesting to an audience of one each time) is probably better than TechCrunch traffic in every single way you slice it.
Before you'd be on the front page for a while, and now you are off by the middle of the day.
Which also explains the Page Rank thing. Front page is PR8, 2nd page is PR6, 3rd page is PR4, 4th page is PR3, 5th page is unranked.
That's my experience at least.
And to get linked to, you need to become some sort of an authority/celebrity. A good example is Jason complaining about ComScore and getting posted about on Techcrunch. If you or I wrote that same post, we wouldn't get a single link out of it. But when you are a celebrity, every little tidbit gets your more coverage.
Granted sometimes you do get some recognition. i.e. I got linked to from LA Times for my post comparing Techcrunch to Kid's Choice Awards....but that was because the post got some recognition by being on HN front page for a day.
Mo matter _how_ good your "interesting content" is, if your web design has it hidden behind a flash splash page or your entire site navigation is in some dynamic javascript menu system with no regular html links for spiders to find, you will not get traffic.
Good content is the number 1 best thing you can do for your website. Not wasting the potential of that good content is, however, equally important.
In my experience with ViEmu and Codekana, recommendations by highly respected bloggers are what help sales the most. In most areas, there already is a "network of trust" out there, and getting in through someone up in the food chain can make a great difference.
I do think some presence in Reddit, Hacker News, etc... are helpful in order to establish credentials and a solid background from which to do more specific actions.
This is something my startup does poorly. We haven't yet gotten into that habit, and since we don't pay attention, weeks go by without a post, even though we have great ideas on things to write about. This is one thing we've talked a lot about making sure we improve upon in the future.
A few years ago, prior to starting my current day job (and long before I started participating on HN), I blogged three times a week or more. I wrote a few gems and a lot of, ahem, filler, got a wee bit of traction but not too much (though it was PR6 at one point, which is great for geek bragging rights and of no use whatsoever otherwise), and burned out eventually.
I think blogging regularly is a practice which auto-commoditizes your content, which is probably not the best idea for a time pressed startup which has sharply limited resources. For instance, a fairly typical article for me would have been a 30 minute exploration into a thought I had that day. Roughly one of those in ten would attract attention outside of the folks already reading my blog.
These days, I blog about a fifth as much or less, but am much smarter about topic selection. While I still have scratch my own itch articles every once in a while, if I'm going to spend my time on something, I try to do it right such that it doesn't just fall into the background noise on the Internet. That means being choosy on topics, going for stuff I know will probably be popular, making smart tactical choices like writing self-consciously for reading on the Internet (H2 tags, bolded call-out bits, visual engagement, etc) rather than doing my usual stream-of-consciousness rambling, etc.
However, at least in my situation, I've got double digit numbers of ideas of things that would be interesting to write about, that I could probably write up in just a few hours (each). But I just haven't, because I haven't made "write an article for the blog" into a legitimate to-do item yet.
I guess the other nice thing is that I'm in a niche that few people know about. I could blog about things that are fairly basic, but many people would still find them interesting.
It's definitely not a quick fix for any startup, and you might well be better off focused on improving your landing page conversion rate if you want an immediate return on your time. It's been a massive long-term help for me though, both teaching me how to communicate and market much more effectively, and making connections with my readers. Multiple times I've walked into meetings cold and it's turned out someone knows me from my blog, which has been a massive help.
Plus, it's actually a lot of fun!
Funny that with teddy bears, the example he blindly chose, Wikipedia happens to be the 8th result: http://www.google.com/search?q=teddy+bears