I'm Getting Pretty Tired of Startup Advice that Doesn't Include Any Mention of SEO

Yes basically the really important point is to avoid to develop an anti-crawler site, but this is a side effect of site with good pages semantic, structure and so on. So simply the SEO problem can be optimized away.

Yes it is just one anecdote. Probably not enough evidence to condem the whole area of SEO. Now if you had 2 anecdotes that would be a laydown.

"SEO experts" are a lot like "real estate experts".

If their advice was so good, what are they doing here? They'd be way ahead if they were just out there implementing their own advice.

As a founder (and the website maintainer) of one of the startups "attacked", I'm not too bothered by the criticism. It is valid...we aren't showing up in all the right places on Google, and we're currently paying a buck or more per click to occasionally appear in those right places in ads. But, it's also worth noting that while we'd never turn down more traffic we also aren't experiencing significant pain due to that lack. Our site gets 1800 uniques per day, and is growing at a very respectable clip--I remember vividly celebrating our first week of 1000+ visitor days just a few months back and it won't be long before we're celebrating 2000+ visitor days. For a site that sells a product (rather than sells eyeballs), that's a nice stream of potential buyers. Actually, I sometimes chuckle when I read about sites that are selling nothing but eyeballs bragging about 100,000 monthly pageviews (or whatever) when our product site does significantly more than that (and our four sites combined see an order of magnitude more traffic than that).

We consider our biggest website problems to be conversion rather than bringing the eyeballs in...so even though I readily admit that we're weaker in the engines than we'd like to be, my current focus with the website is on getting those people who come to our site excited enough to buy our product (or, even better, ask their hosting provider to buy it for them), and better serving those customers that have bought.

So, I don't know that we're really a good example of a truckload of SEO fail, even if our SEO results are poorly, since we don't actually live or die by search engine traffic. Only recently did the majority of our incoming traffic shift from our Open Source project pages to other sources, for example, and those clicks from Webmin.com are still far more valuable to us than search-related clicks...they are about 10 times more likely to buy from us than natural search result users. Likewise for users of our Open Source Virtualmin version at places like Joyent, who are proving to be extremely likely to upgrade to the commercial version. This tells me that getting more people using and talking about our Open Source products is a better marketing tactic than almost anything else we could do. So, we balance our efforts, and SEO unfortunately gets put on a back-burner. (We do try hard to have good URLs, though, but mainly because I consider URLs a usability issue, and not because I care what a search engine thinks about them. I just wish Joomla didn't suck so bad for stuff like that.)

seekely - I'm the author of the post and am very sorry for being condescending. That wasn't my intent and on re-reading, I can see that it came across that way. I offer my apology.

I was writing a bit more emotionally than I usually do, and, as I said in the post, am much more frustrated with those who provide startup advice ignoring the power of SEO than I am with startups who don't engage in it. Startups have a million things on their plates. Those who make lists recommending marketing practices have just one task, and I think it's negligent to ignore such a valuable marketing tactic for web-based companies.

"and then attacking specific small startups unprovoked does not seem like a very proper way to spread the word"

DH2. Responding to Tone.

http://www.paulgraham.com/disagree.html

I agree. Just by its nature, SEO is bad. Of course there are some simple things that you can do to make your page better understood by search engines, but using these self-proclaimed tricks and methodologies employed by most SEO companies is a total waste of time and money. Focus on putting something out there that's good, not trying to find shortcuts.

there's a direct relationship b/w the level of commoditization of your product and the importance of SEO (let alone relevance of SEO).

if i sell "shoes" SEO means one thing to me, if i sell [insert unique thing here] it means another.

irrespective of the ultimate popularity of [unique item], if it is unique, what am i optomizing for?

maybe another way to look at SEO primacy on this news site is to think about how much the dominant vision is to compete with "what else is out there in your space"- in terms of not only search results, but business model, services, footprint, pricing...- versus how "new" or original you are in addressing unsolved problems.

i get paid by a place that cares about SEO and paid-placement services, and i know that if we simply bothered to innovate within our niche, SEO would take care of itself (i.e. be supplanted by the Real word-of-mouth, positive press, no-brainer reputation that comes with actually being 'the solution' as opposed to 'a possible solution, maybe, but we paid/tried really hard to have you look at us')

It all depends on the keywords you rank highly on, and the value is almost boolean in nature. Appearing in the first 3 links can be very valuable, appearing in the third page practically worthless.

Ranking first on Mesothelioma, a form of cancer only caused by asbestos exposure, can generate a few millions a year, as there is almost always someone to sue for the exposure (btw CPC for related search terms around 70$ ).

Ranking first on "purple dragons with red horns" will probably not generate a dime.

Ha. I guess that wasn't very helpful. What I meant to say is that it's kind of silly to suggest that basic startup advice should automatically include something about SEO. Even if we assume that SEO is highly important and every startup should spend time on it, it's an implementation detail. It's no more germane to general startup advice than how to deploy a web app, even if both are vital to a web startup's success.

maybe linkbait...

but it has a lot of good examples, seo is really something overlooked here, and it is relevant to this site obviously

The article delivered exactly what it promised and in my opinion that was something that needed saying.

Oops! I obviously broke the rule.