SEO for Startups: Top 7 Lessons + A Trip to Y Combinator | Hacker News Reader

SEO for Startups: Top 7 Lessons + A Trip to Y Combinator

seomoz.org

107 pointsdavecardwell41 comments

It was excellent of Rand both to give this presentation and for him and YC to post it publicly, because I think the startup community has a giant blind spot where SEO is concerned. It isn't just black magic, goat entrails, and snake oil.

My one qualification, on advice #7 ("you should have sources of traffic other than Google"): while it is certainly dangerous to have 90% of your traffic coming from Google, in certain niches you have little other choice. If you're pitching a product in a niche with lots of linkerati in it, you're going to have lots of non-Google traffic. If you're pitching a product on Facebook, you're going to have lots of non-Google traffic. If you're pitching a product to forty-something ladies, you're probably not going to have lots of non-Google traffic, because Google is the Internet's navigation for these users. They don't have a regular blog they trust, they don't spread links around themselves at nearly the velocities y'all do, they don't tweet. But they do Google. The sites that they might click through to you from? They got to those by Google, too.

Since I tend to pitch to non-technical users and need marketing that scales out of proportion to time invested, Plan A: Google. Plan B: AdWords. Plan C: I've been looking for a good candidate for 3 years now. (P.S. If your startup has an option I will pay you money for it.)

I'm surprised you're not doing media buys for your software as Plan C, that's by far the best way to reach forty-something ladies at large scale.

I have looked into it but it typically strikes me as totally insane in conversion math perspective. Have you seen the rate cards for teaching magazines, the NYT educational supplement, etc? Egads. And then I have to get them to read it AND get them to the website AND get them into the trial AND make the sale... and then I get $30.

I'll stick with my 5 cent CPC ads, thanks.

If you're not listed on all the 'free stuff' sites, you should definitely get on them all.

Easy enough to get listed for free, and it's a good, non tech, ready to buy(ironically) audience with an middle age female bias.

Things that do fantastically well which may be similar - "Get free business cards, just pay shipping" etc

(I own a small UK based free stuff site)

Yeah if I was getting 5 cent CPC I would stick with Google too :)

Do you get more than 5? I've just started doing it, but I think I pay no more than 2.

.50-1.50 for apartment related things, 3.00-4.00 for doctor/appointment scheduling related things :-(

It'll cost you, what, $5k to try it once?

You have your other variables tracked well enough that you should be able to see the difference pretty well and see if it's worthwhile.

If you go for the low hanging fruit first (a holiday) where the effect should be biggest you might get a nice surprise - or possibly not, but at least you'll know for sure.

You can probably halve the price on the rate card to get the real price you'll pay after negotiating a bit. But agreed, still seems expensive even after that.

Is buying ads on Facebook targeting teachers too expensive? I use the FB ad-buying tool to do a lot of market research (it gives numbers of target audience), but have yet to pull the trigger on actually buying the ads.

I kid you not: selling software is a TOS violation.

Ouch! That's horrible. You made me look it up. http://www.facebook.com/ad_guidelines.php It seems like in section 14, Downloads, they're against malicious downloads. Did they accuse your software of being malware, or did they straight up say NO software?

Or did he misread it?

It seems my information was out of date. They used to have a total prohibition on it: "No ad is permitted to contain or link, whether directly or indirectly, to a site that contains software downloads, freeware, or shareware."

http://successfulsoftware.net/2008/01/23/facebook-dont-need-...

So this is great news, right?!? I mean, it's not even my business and I'm really excited for you. :D

  Posterous (I learned the official way to pronounce it - "pastarus")

Actually, the two founders of Posterous pronounce their startup differently, unless one of them caved recently.

it rhymes with preposterous

from: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=855744

It depends on if you use the American or British pronunciation of "pasta."

That has not been my experience. While no one here would correct you, I've never heard it pronounced otherwise except when discussing the pronunciation (which comes up a lot).

This seems like decent advice, but I think such a marketing oriented crowd would do well to hive off a new name for "doing things the right, honest way" that's not "SEO", which I think at this point has been more or less permanently tarnished with the image of a zero sum game where competition is for rankings rather than improving the product, and there is, to put it mildly, a lot of bullshit involved.

The first one gives me a bit of pause. It seems awfully close to saying that you should design around SEO--- designing for users sorta, but always with an eye to how you can "leverage" your users for SEO purposes. Doesn't that come close to suggesting you might make decisions that, if they were made without taking SEO into consideration, would be a clear loss for user experience, and are really not what your users want?

Are you building something like Yelp, Mahalo and Stack Overflow or something like Gmail and Basecamp.

If you have a site full of content - then you should be designing around SEO. Spolsky's thought that the front page of SO is Google.com is very true. Discoverable content is useful content.

If you have a Private web-app (think gmail) then Search Results aren't all that important.

However, there might be classes of web apps where Search Results can help attract new users, albeit maybe not at scale.

Well, much of this week's HN discussion, to my satisfaction at least, held up Mahalo as an example of what you don't want to do. ;-) To my mind, building a returning base of satisfied users ought to be the main goal: what is missing on the internet, and how can I provide it? That is, what's missing for actual users? The other approach seems to teeter on the edge of the gray-hat SEO abyss.

I agree completely. Sites like Mahalo and Scribd are just wrapping up content and duping people into clicking through SEO to their site, and then clicking on adSense adverts to get what they really wanted in the first place.

There's a reverse incentive at work there - they have no incentive to provide a better user experience, since then, users would get what they want, and wouldn't need to click on the ads.

Google could, and definitely should IMHO detect that user behaviour, and penalize sites for it. For example:

  * If a user clicks on a natural search listing
  * If that same user quickly clicks on an adSense advert at the site
  * We can assume that the landing page was bad quality
  * Now penalize them either by not paying the adsense, or
    reduce their ranking for that page.

If you have a valuable site, Google should only be there to provide you new users, not all your users.

I think the quote about Google being the frontpage to stackoverflow is pretty ridiculous personally.

"I think the quote about Google being the frontpage to stackoverflow is pretty ridiculous personally."

Why? Because its true?

There's a lot of content sites I use all the time but never visit directly. Yahoo Answers comes to mind.

I just don't think it's a useful state of affairs once a site has tens, even hundreds of millions of pages indexed by google.

Why wouldn't you go to Yahoo answers and do a search there?

I'm just not too into the business model of "We know about everything", lets get listed for every single search on google.

For stackoverflow, personally I don't usually find the content useful, so it's just irritating to have to specify I don't want stackoverflow results. It'd be good if Google could better judge quality of pages, as in "Is this just user generated / scraped content, or is it verified reliable fact".

You don't go to Yahoo answers directly because you can either search one, or search them all at once. Do you still go to the bakery, then the butcher, then the vegetable stand, or do you go to a supermarket?

As for judging quality and verifying as a reliable fact, I agree, that would be excellent. This is something I was thinking about as part of a potential startup. Unfortunately, it's wicked hard to do without resorting to (probably paid) human experts.

>> "Do you still go to the bakery, then the butcher, then the vegetable stand, or do you go to a supermarket?"

I often still go to the bakery, then the butcher, then the farm shop actually. The quality is far better than anything you get in a supermarket.

Heh actually I wish I had all of those things located nearby, I've never been disappointed when I've spent the time to go to all of those.

I think you really have to build SEO into any business, regardless of what type. And it doesn't have to compromise anything about the user experience.

As an example, my current project is an online tutoring site. There are literally thousands of online tutoring sites out there, and dozens of ones that are good enough to rank well on Google. So even though the thing I'm building is head and shoulders above what's out there today, nobody will ever know about it if it's not ranking well for something like "online spanish tutoring" or "learn spanish online".

With that in mind, it's fundamentally important to the success of my business that SEO is baked in from the start. The tutor profile URLs need to be simple vanity ones that people are proud to give out via Twitter, on a blog entry, their school's homepage, or even scribbled onto the back of a business card. The browse results in the marketplace need to have good titles and meta descriptions so that people will actually want to click them if they show up in a Google search. We need to offer a way for existing Spanish Schools to embed a co-branded version of our site into theirs if they want.

There are dozens of architectural and business decisions that stem directly from SEO. It's not something that you can tack on at the end and hope for the best.

And if you look carefully at the above, you might notice that each of those things above actually improve the user experience in some way.

Is there a way to link to a specific slide in Scribd? I think slide 14 should be required reading.

I don't know if there is but you can link to this page:

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/whiteboard-friday-the-seo-fundame...

Good read indeed.

Is it only me, or almost all SEO advice is pretty much the same? Nobody ever says anything new or different. Why are such posts such a rage on Hacker News?

Do Y Combinator events always have such a large offering of pizza and coke?

Depends on the event, but there's always food. Startup school has bagels and coffee. Demo Day has sandwiches. Tuesday dinners have homemade stuff like chili or stew over rice or pasta.

SEO advice is bullshit, I mean really it basically comes down to a) make a site that has internal links b) figure out a way to get links to your site from other sites c) modify your internal links so only the pages you want are getting link juice.

Oh and D don't do anything stupid like Keyword stuffing, scraping, fake content or anything else that can get you banned...well unless you are Mahalo...then you are off the hook.

Personally I don't think YC startups actually need SEO link building. The mere fact that they are a YC startup, means that they'll get on the front page of Techcrunch, ReadWriteWeb, VentureBeat and dozens of other huge blogs with a ton of PR when they launch. A single post on Techcrunch is worth more link wise, than a million PR1-3 blogs posting about your latest link bait strategy.

"A single post on Techcrunch is worth more link wise, than a million PR1-3 blogs posting about your latest link bait strategy."

I don't have a link to provide as proof but I'm pretty sure based off of my memory and anecdotal evidence I've read on the web that links from the big Nerdy Tech Blogs actually drive little to no converting traffic.

So in that case, I would much rather take the million links in the hope that the people who come along that chain will convert better than the half-literate TechCrunch commentators would.

we are not talking about traffic here, we are talking about SEO, and link juice is logarithmic, the difference from

PR4^10 links = 1 PR5

First of all, based on my own personal experience, I don't buy that formula for one second.

Secondly, a link on a TechCrunch post is by no means a high PR link for any decent length of time. You MIGHT get your link on their front page for a few hours before it rolls off into the archival abyss. Maybe if you're lucky, over time and with enough inbounds link to that post, you'll get some juice out of it.

I guess my point, which was lost because I didn't clarify well, is that a link from TC (in terms of traffic or SEO purposes) is probably overrated.

not even close

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