1. Bootstrap Web Marketing: SEO & Social Media
Who I am
Disclaimer
Format of the presentation

2. SEO

3. Why SEO Kicks Ass Other than effort, it’s free.
The skillset required for the time intensive work is relatively inexpensive.
SEO is the gift that keeps on giving

4. Why SEO Doesn’t Kick Ass
SEO is a fast-changing world.
You live and die by Google.
It’s delayed gratification (and there’s a chance of NO gratification)

5. SEO Ranking Factors – Markup / Keywords (most startups do fine here)
Title Tag
H1 Tag
Body Text
Domain Name
URL

6. SEO Ranking Factors – Other Markup
Popularity within internal linking (very important for long tail or low competition keywords)
Quality of OUTGOING links
Page updates

7. SEO Ranking Factors – Overall Site Popularity
Global popularity of your site (combination of link quantity/quality)
Age of site
Site performance (time on page, bookmarks, etc.)

8. Inbound Links Relevance of inbound links
Anchor text (Google bomb) and adjacent text.

9. Negative Factors Duplicate Content Keyword stuffing?
Very Similar Pages
Identical Page Titles / Meta Info
Keyword stuffing?

10. Keyword Research (most startups suck at this)

11. How to Evaluate Keywords?
How many people are searching for a particular word/phrase?
How competitive is the landscape for that word/phrase?
How relevant is the keyword?
Actionable keywords? “lowest price wii”
Measure the conversion!
Non-bouncing keywords

12. How do people search? # of words 62% click on the first result
28.9% 2 word phrases
27.8% 3 word phrases
17.1% 4 word phrases
11.4% 1 word phrases
62% click on the first result
21% feel search engines don’t understand their query

13. Keyword Research – Have someone else do it
:$99.95

14. Count, relevance (entered by you) and # of targeted searches per day
Estimated monthly clickthru for 1st, 5th, and 10th position on each major engine.
Competitiveness of each keyword

15. Keyword Research – Do It Yourself

16. Overture Keyword Research Tool (free)
Source: Yahoo and Affiliates
Notes: Doesn’t distinguish singular and plural
Not an ideal tool for exact phrases

18. WordTracker.com ($8/day)
Source: Dogpile (.6%)and MetaCrawler (.4%) (what kinda people use these engines!?)

20. Adwords Traffic Estimator (free, req. AdWords account)
Source: Google
Notes: Not good for long tail phrases

21. Other Resources Yahoo Search Marketing Tool KeywordDiscovery.com
Google Trends
Estimated monthly clickthru for 1st, 5th, and 10th position on each major engine.

22. Best Resource – Pay for It
Buy an Adwords campaign for a phrase. Pay enough to get your ad on the first page. Metrics will show you the number of ad views.

23. Spiderability

24. Can Search Engines Find Every Page/view on Your Site?
Create a “sitemap” (HTML and/or XML)
Be mindful of internal link text
Remember that internal link popularity is important (more than 1 link is better than one link)
“Related content” buckets are valuable
Most important for sites with lots of data hidden behind a search interface

25. Effective Presentation on SERPs
Readable, compelling, objective title (65 characters)
Readable, compelling, objective meta description (155 characters)
Short URLs perform better
Stuffed titles, descriptions, and URLs look spammy and don’t get clicks

26. Title
Meta-Description
URL

27. Npost Example

28. Keyword Research: “Tech Startup Jobs”?
Markup for SEO: Title tag, <h1> tag, referring anchor tag

29. If you were a search spider, what would you click on to find “seattle rails jobs”?

30. What about here? No spiderability!
Site Structure for SEO: Keyword targeted pages linked to (flat site structure). Internal link popularity is important.

31. SERP Title: For the target phrase “rails jobs seattle”, the title should lead with “Rails Jobs in Seattle, WA” or somesuch.
Description: meta description should be unique and compelling.
URL: Short urls perform better

32. Link Building Campaigns

33. Anotomy of a Link Building Campaign
Links from trusted sites.
Links to “deep” pages in your site.
Links with good anchor text
Links from good pages
Home pages
Content pages
Links from relevant pages
No JavaScript / no ‘nofollow’!

34. Value of Building Links
People click on them!
Branding
And, of course, SEO

35. Anatomy of a Good Link Source
Search for your top keywords/phrases – the top or so are worth getting links from.
Content rich page
Links deep to the most relevant page
Anchor text, title tag, h1 tag, etc all match to the keyword in question

36. Who to Ask for Links Any relevant site
Good way to find sites to ask are to find sites that link to your competitions’ sites.
Linkdomain:mycompetition.com
Linkdomain:mycompetition.com “my keywords”

37. How to Ask for Links
First, see if there is a standard procedure for getting links
Second, see if you (as a user) can post a link (comments, look for nofollow), forums, etc. (Be careful of abuse)
If not, ask for it.
If necessary (if you can), buy it.

38. Say Thanks for EVERY Link That You Can
Set up a google alert for your business name
Any time you get ANY mention, stop by and say THANKS
Any time you get criticized, stop by and respectfully engage in the conversation (and keep it going!)

39. Social Media Marketing (Big linkbuilding Opportunities!)

40. Linkbait (It’s Easy!)
Defined as something that people want to link to, blog about, talk about, digg, vote up, etc. The good news is, baiting web geeks words.
Write something
Useful
Funny
Controversial
Better yet, have your standard content pages be
To get a feel for linkbait, head over to popurls.com (list of top digg, reddit, del.icio.us links)
Would you bookmark this? Would you it to your friends?

41. Headlines/titles Win the Day
“Who wants [blank]?”
“The Secret of [blank]?”
Little known ways to [blank]?”
Lists – Top 5, Top 10, etc.
(useful, funny, controversial)

42. Top Social Media Venues
Digg, Del.icio.us, Reddit, StumbleUpon, etc.
Blogs (all blogs matter, top blogs matter more)
(check source for nofollow tag / server redirects )
Forums
Public Profiles (anywhere)
Directories
Design Portals

43. Go Viral
Ideally, using your product is an inherently public act that elicits others to jump on board
Viral is not a marketing strategy, it’s a product strategy
"Tell a friend"
Widget embeds
Addressbook importing
(These don’t make your product viral, but they’ll help it if it is)
First priority is creating something that is useful, funny, controversial enough that people want to share it
Second priority is making it easy