SEO for Start-ups

One of the common mistakes start-ups make is not to start SEO in the concept phase of their site, but instead after the site is built. Let's take a look at some Internet marketing ideas to have in mind even before starting to build a website.

Quality Content

Search engine optimisation starts with building your site and writing its content. Making your website full of interesting and useful content is one of the best ways of aiding its future SEO process.

It's important that your articles are unique, which means they shouldn't be duplicates of text already published elsewhere on the Internet. Focus on building text content and building a good structure of internal links between them. Other things to keep in mind while building your website are to build search engine friendly URLs and make all pages on your website as easily accessible as possible (with as few clicks as you can make it).

Keyword Research and Targeting

It's best to research your keywords even before you start writing content for your website. Keyword research, although sounds terribly boring, is actually one the most important steps of search engine marketing. The goal of keyword analysis is to find the search phrases that are most relevant to your business and are used most often by search engine users.

So where do you start? Start off with brainstorming all the keywords you think people might use to search for your services or products on the Web. If you offer more than one product or service, this list can be very long. You can use online tools (like the Google AdWords Keywords Tool) to help you in this process.

The hardest part of keyword research comes next. You have to evaluate which keywords it is best to target by comparing their commercial value and how frequently they are searched for.

Once you have the right keywords, target them on your website. Include them in the text of your pages, in headings and page titles, as well as in internal anchor text.

Link Building

One of the most important factors search engines use to rank websites is the amount and quality of inbound links. That's why it's essential that you develop ways of acquiring good quality links from relevant websites. This is usually the most time and cost consuming part of search engine optimisation and often it's a good idea to find an SEO specialist that can assist you in the process.

Social Media

Use social media to help promote your website. While it's still not clear how and to what extent search engines are using signals from Facebook or Twitter in their ranking algorithms, building up buzz around your website can help bring new visitors to your site and aid you in your link-building efforts if leveraged properly.

Combine all these methods of search engine optimization to make your site rank for the most valuable keywords and bring in quality traffic for your website.