To quote from the article:

“All company owners know they want to market and want to take their product or service to the masses, they just aren’t sure how best to do it. Luckily for them, the basic principles of marketing a new venture are easy and can be effectively done by anyone.”

So, without further adieu, you can find the article here.

• Company Name: Task Smashers
• Domain: www.tasksmashers.com
• Product: Online Project Management Application

Keep in mind that some of the below implementations do require the research that was mentioned in our first article, but others simply require a little know how and some elbow grease.

Relevant Titles

When creating content on your website, it is logical from both a usability and search engine standpoint to make your titles as explicit as possible. The more relevant your title tags are, the quicker that users can find what they want on your website and the easier it is for search engines to categorize the content. Using relevant titles applies to both your site’s pages and blog posts, so avoid creating flowery titles such as “Ways to get in touch” in comparison to “Contact Us” or “Web-based project management tool ” when you can say, “Online project management”.

As you are determining your titles, the research you have done on targeted search terms can really make all the difference in your website’s visibility. Let’s say that Task Smashers wants to name their home page, “Task Smashers – Online Project Management”. This title is a great start since they are being descriptive, but “online project management” doesn’t get searched for very much on its own (only 40,500 searches monthly in Google). Naturally, Task Smashers wants their website to be found by as many people that search for project management as possible, so let’s expand upon the title and bring it to be much larger targeted audience. Adding in some more terms that describe their product’s functionality, we can create a title such as “Task Smashers – Project Management, Task Management and Collaboration” that has 3 major search phrases instead of 1 and an estimated 2,440,500 searches per month – what a huge difference in potential visibility!

Organized Content

Header tags (H1, h3, H3, etc) are designed to allow website owners to define the importance of text on their page and organize it accordingly. With the exception of the title, the H1 tag is the most prominent text on a page to both users and search engines and is used to help establish the theme of the page; in addition, the other heading tags are used to label subheadings under the H1 tag in order of importance. For example, if Task Smashers has a “Tour” page highlighting the various features of their product and they name the page, “Take a Tour of Task Smashers Project Management”, the H1 tag should be something like, “Project Management Features Tour”. The H1 tag can be used multiple times if you have a few important headings, but using a sole H1 tag and then categorizing the rest of your content using h3, H3, H4, etc tag yields a more organized, keyword targeted page. However, you should not encase large sections of text in the header tags to attempt to spam the search engines – your goal is simply to organize your content and define the overlaying themes on a specific page.

By default, header tags are not the most attractive pieces of text on a web page so you can use CSS to style them. For example, we use the below css code here on Forge Search Marketing for our H1 tags:

.post h1, .post h1 a {
font-family:Georgia;
font-size:28px;
margin:30px 0 10px 0;
font-weight:normal;
line-height:32px;
}

Readable URLs

By default, many websites are structured using dynamic URLs and while these do not greatly hinder your search engine rankings, utilizing readable URLs has a variety of benefits:

• Easier to remember and associate with a specific website
• Higher keyword visibility from search engines
• Users can identify what content the link provides, creating trust
• Higher click-through rates on search engines, emails, IM’s, etc.
• More easily read by all major search engines
• Website analytics becomes much easier to read and decipher

A caveat to implementing readable URLs is that if you already have a dynamic structure in place and your website is live, it is best to NOT convert it over to a readable/static URL structure unless you are working with an SEO professional. Changing your URLs without taking certain preventative measures could be catastrophic to your search engine rankings – as we said before, dynamic URLs are not bad, they are simply not as preferable.

Implementing readable URLs depends on what platform you developed your website, so here are a few resources to help get you started:

• WordPress – Pretty Permalinks
• Drupal – Readable URLs
• Moveable Type – URL Structure
• Joomla – URL Routing
• Expression Engine – Cruft Free URLs
• SilverStripe – URL Rewrite

Meta Tags

One of the most commonly overlooked tasks when doing basic search engine optimization is implementing the appropriate meta tags into your website. Let’s take a look at the example below:

<head>
<title>Task Smashers - Project Management, Task Management and Collaboration</title>
<meta name="description" content="Task Smashers online project management is easy to use, easy to track, and won't break the bank." />
<meta name="robots" content="index, follow" />
</head>

Some of you may be asking, “Where is the keywords meta tag?” Due to the keywords meta tag being abused by spammers some years ago, all major search engines with the exception of Yahoo do not currently use it as a ranking factor. If you do choose to use it, only fill it with a few central keywords to your product or service so that you are not seen as attempting to spam.

The description tag content shows up on the SERPs right under the title of your website and should be limited to around 160 characters. If you do not have a description meta tag in place, the search engines will automatically generate this text for you based on the content of your website; however, you should always fill this in so that you can accurately describe your site and convince searchers that your site is of value to them.

Description meta tag shown on the Forge listing on Google

Define Your Brand

One of the largest mistakes startups make is that they want to jump straight into marketing their product or service without clearly defining their brand. Your brand is your personality and culture, how you want to be perceived and more importantly how people actually perceive you. Branding is incredibly important for search engine optimization because you need to convey a uniform message and people need to be able to find you based on your brand, not just your products or service.

Research the Market and Competition

When starting a company, chances are that you have competitors in your market. There are several free to use tools such as Google’s Insights for Search and Keyword Tool that you can utilize to accomplish basic research regarding search trends, competition, and relevant terms to your business. When doing research, you want to not only establish what the most popular terms in your industry are, but get ideas on how people search for your product or service. Matt Cutts has a great example of the semantics behind the flash (or thumb, or usb) drive that elaborates on the differences of how people search (jump to 12:40 in the video).

Google's Insights for Search shows basic search-based market information

Early Implementation

A common misconception is that search engine optimization is a service implemented after your website is live. Any search professional will tell you it takes time to remove bad or inaccurate information from Google/Yahoo/Bing’s index, but that doesn’t mean that positive changes by SEO professionals cannot be made to strengthen your presence and increase your website’s traffic. By planning your SEO strategy in advance and developing your website with it in mind, you lay the foundation for strong organic rankings in the search engines and save yourself a lot of headache compared to restructuring your entire site a few months down the road.

Make Your Website User Friendly

The flashiest website (pun intended) is great when you want to make a grand entrance into the market, but that doesn’t mean it is the most user (or search engine) friendly. A key part of your overall SEO strategy is to make your website simple to navigate and easy for the user to obtain the information that they want. Driving traffic to your website with a search engine marketing campaign is great, but if people get confused and quickly leave your site you are not only wasting their time but your budget. If you can, take advantage of a user experience professional when planning your site – they are wonderful resources that will help you get the maximum number of conversions for your web traffic.

Further Reading

In our next installment on SEO for startups, we dive into the fundamentals of on-page, white hat SEO practices that create a solid foundation for more advanced search engine marketing campaigns.