One of the biggest mistakes that a startup website can make is to totally ignore SEO right from the start. It is definitely a large task to attempt, especially if you’re new to online marketing, but we feel it’s an effort worth making, even at a minimal level. The main reason why is that you’re giving Google an incorrect message right away. They will make an attempt to index your pages, and if your pages are devoid of any SEO, often times they are either unable to index, index the page incorrectly, or because on-page SEO is such a big part of the search algorithm, rank them so far down the search results as to be invisible. That’s too bad, as there are some very easy methods for getting started with SEO that don’t require a full-blown SEO firm to get implemented.
Heard about Minimum Viable SEO?
Priceonomics.com coined the term, minimum viable SEO, which means basically what it says: exactlty what can you get by with in terms of SEO to begin with. While this is by no means an ideal strategy, it’s a lot better than doing nothing. Here are a few of the things they pointed out, with a few of our own ideas tossed in.
• Decide on a keyword strategy – This should help you see not only what your site structure will look like, but also how quickly you’ll be into profit. One option is to go after the long tail of search, meaning keywords that are commonly 3-5 words long, often with product or model numbers. They don’t get a ton of searches each day, but are infinitely easier to rank for. Add a few thousand of these up, and you win. An alternate way to go is to go after a single keyword, like “auto insurance San Diego” you’ll typically be attempting to rank only your home page. If you have a business with a local presence, you should definitely have local geo-modifiers on your keywords, as in the aforementioned example.
• Use bread crumb navigation – You’ve seen this on many web pages. It is a set of links that show where you’ve been on the site, and where you are now. This is helpful for the searcher, (which Google likes) and covers a good deal of internal linkage. Here is what it typically looks like: Home & Tablets & Apple
• Use accurate title tags – Ensuring that the title tag on your page is accurate, which means it is or contains the keyword you would like that page to be ranked for, could very well be the most important SEO task that you can do. Using local geo-modifiers is very important here too.
Doing minimum viable SEO is a start, and much better than doing nothing. Just don’t allow it to be the end!