SEO, or Search Engine Optimisation, is imperative for any start-up that hopes to make any kind of impact with its website. Plenty of small businesses throw money at designing slick websites, but many are simply invisible to their target audience due to a poor search engine ranking.
Wai Hong Fong, co-founder of OzHut and regular StartupSmart contributor, is an expert on all things SEO. If you don’t know your title tags from your meta descriptions and your website is a barren wasteland in terms of visitors, Wai Hong will have some inspired words of advice for you.
1. SEO for Start-ups
Wai Hong Fong
OzHut
Oliver Milman
StartupSmart.com.au
Sponsored by:
2. What is SEO and how does it work?
SEO is the active process of optimising a website in order
to increase traffic directed to the site from search.
3. Why is SEO important?
Search engines are where people are finding
everything. More than two billion searches are
performed on Google worldwide every day.
4. Why is SEO important?
The majority of web traffic is driven by major
search engines. In Australia, Google dominates
an estimated 94% of all search traffic.
5. What are the consequences of not having
good SEO?
If the search engines can't find your
site you are losing out on customers
who are actually looking for services
and products that you may have.
6. What does Google think your website looks
like?
Text only
Site version
search
7. What you need to do to improve your online
presence
Title tag
URL Meta Description
The three primary pieces of information that
make up your listing are your title tag, meta
description and URL.
8. Title tags
Title tags are arguably one of the most important
on-page factors in SEO.
They can potentially
affect your website’s
rankings with
immediate effect.
9. Title tags
Ensure all relevant keywords to the page that
you are describing are contained in the title tag.
Use no more
than two or
three
keywords in a
title tag.
10. Title tags
Bear the user in mind:
Titles will show up in the search results, the number of people clicking
through to your website will be determined by how relevant and humanly-
readable these titles are.
11. Meta Descriptions
The meta description is the blurb of text that
appears below the title tag in the listing...
...and is
limited to
155
characters.
12. Meta Descriptions
Meta descriptions do not affect your
rankings, but they do have a very
important part to play in the SEO
process.
13. Meta Descriptions
So what makes a good meta description?
• Use the keywords that you're targeting for that particular page
• Find the balance between having relevant keywords in the meta
description and making it humanly readable
• Include a value proposition for the potential visitor to click on
14. Content
Content is king when
written with SEO in mind.
15. Content
• Always look to create content that adds value to your target
market
• Start identifying which keywords you'd like to target for the page
• Ensure the content matches the search intent
• Stuffing: Google’s smart enough not to be
fooled by it
16. Free Tools & Resources
• Insights for Search
(http://www.google.com/insights/search/#)
• Google AdWords Keyword Tool
(https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal
• Wikipedia
