SEO for Startups: Top 7 Lessons + A Trip to Y Combinator

It was excellent of Rand both to give this presentation and for him and YC to post it publicly, because I think the startup community has a giant blind spot where SEO is concerned. It isn't just black magic, goat entrails, and snake oil.<p>My one qualification, on advice #7 ("you should have sources of traffic other than Google"): while it is certainly dangerous to have 90% of your traffic coming from Google, in certain niches you have little other choice. If you're pitching a product in a niche with lots of linkerati in it, you're going to have lots of non-Google traffic. If you're pitching a product on Facebook, you're going to have lots of non-Google traffic. If you're pitching a product to forty-something ladies, you're probably not going to have lots of non-Google traffic, because <i>Google is the Internet's navigation for these users</i>. They don't have a regular blog they trust, they don't spread links around themselves at nearly the velocities y'all do, they don't tweet. But they do Google. The sites that they might click through to you from? They got to those by Google, too.<p>Since I tend to pitch to non-technical users and need marketing that scales out of proportion to time invested, Plan A: Google. Plan B: AdWords. Plan C: I've been looking for a good candidate for 3 years now. (P.S. If your startup has an option I will pay you money for it.)

<p><pre><code> Posterous (I learned the official way to pronounce it - "pastarus") </code></pre> Actually, the two founders of Posterous pronounce their startup differently, unless one of them caved recently.

This seems like decent advice, but I think such a marketing oriented crowd would do well to hive off a new name for "doing things the right, honest way" that's not "SEO", which I think at this point has been more or less permanently tarnished with the image of a zero sum game where competition is for rankings rather than improving the product, and there is, to put it mildly, a lot of bullshit involved.

The first one gives me a bit of pause. It seems awfully close to saying that you should design around SEO--- designing for users sorta, but always with an eye to how you can "leverage" your users for SEO purposes. Doesn't that come close to suggesting you might make decisions that, if they were made without taking SEO into consideration, would be a clear loss for user experience, and are really not what your users want?

Is there a way to link to a specific slide in Scribd? I think slide 14 should be required reading.

Is it only me, or almost all SEO advice is pretty much the same? Nobody ever says anything new or different. Why are such posts such a rage on Hacker News?

Do Y Combinator events always have such a large offering of pizza and coke?

SEO advice is bullshit, I mean really it basically comes down to a) make a site that has internal links b) figure out a way to get links to your site from other sites c) modify your internal links so only the pages you want are getting link juice.<p>Oh and D don't do anything stupid like Keyword stuffing, scraping, fake content or anything else that can get you banned...well unless you are Mahalo...then you are off the hook.<p>Personally I don't think YC startups actually need SEO link building. The mere fact that they are a YC startup, means that they'll get on the front page of Techcrunch, ReadWriteWeb, VentureBeat and dozens of other huge blogs with a ton of PR when they launch. A single post on Techcrunch is worth more link wise, than a million PR1-3 blogs posting about your latest link bait strategy.