5 ms·

I'm Getting Pretty Tired of Startup Advice that Doesn't Include Any Mention of SEO

59 points by utnick 19y ago

naubo 19y ago
yes that is true..that was one of the reason we tried to gather news on VC&Startups and SEO/SEM in our site at naubo.com under the blogs section. The ideas was to make it useful and raise the issue as they go hand and hand...
wavesplash 19y ago
And we're getting tired of linkbaiting posts.
- utnick 19y ago
  maybe linkbait... but it has a lot of good examples, seo is really something overlooked here, and it is relevant to this site obviously
  - timr 19y ago
    The irony is that this link-bait is a prime example of SEO. Still want to buy what they're selling?
- deleted 19y ago
  [deleted]
- dejb 19y ago
  The article delivered exactly what it promised and in my opinion that was something that needed saying.
admoin 19y ago
I actually found this quite interesting. Although most people would love to grow virally through word of mouth, top search rankings bring in enormous amounts of traffic day after day. I know of blogs that haven't updated in years that still get hundreds of visits per day solely from Google.
parker 19y ago
One site I used to manage used to have an unexplained high ranking for "animal porn"... talk about the gravy-train. But seriously, thanks for the article. SEO is definitely one of those areas that hackers tend to downplay in significance, probably because it's not rocket science to learn or implement. Not to mention it introduces a bunch of generic looking language on your page. Ie: just having Adpinion in the title bar may be worth the gain in aesthetic alone... just a thought...
_lc1i 19y ago
I found the post ridiculously condescending. Insinuating we are idiots and then stating 'For fuck's sake people - get a clue.' and then attacking specific small startups unprovoked does not seem like a very proper way to spread the word for your company or SEO in general. Unfortunately, I'm sure the post has garnered the desired attention by 'dropping the F bomb for the first time'. I would hope search optimization is really important to SEOmoz given it's their entire concentration as a company. But, I work in a startup as well. Our concentration is not in the field of search optimization. When we have a spare moment or the resources to tackle SEO, I am sure we will. In the meantime, I would refrain from calling me and those in similar positions idiots.
- SwellJoe 19y ago
  As a founder (and the website maintainer) of one of the startups "attacked", I'm not too bothered by the criticism. It is valid...we aren't showing up in all the right places on Google, and we're currently paying a buck or more per click to occasionally appear in those right places in ads. But, it's also worth noting that while we'd never turn down more traffic we also aren't experiencing significant pain due to that lack. Our site gets 1800 uniques per day, and is growing at a very respectable clip--I remember vividly celebrating our first week of 1000+ visitor days just a few months back and it won't be long before we're celebrating 2000+ visitor days. For a site that sells a product (rather than sells eyeballs), that's a nice stream of potential buyers. Actually, I sometimes chuckle when I read about sites that are selling nothing but eyeballs bragging about 100,000 monthly pageviews (or whatever) when our product site does significantly more than that (and our four sites combined see an order of magnitude more traffic than that). We consider our biggest website problems to be conversion rather than bringing the eyeballs in...so even though I readily admit that we're weaker in the engines than we'd like to be, my current focus with the website is on getting those people who come to our site excited enough to buy our product (or, even better, ask their hosting provider to buy it for them), and better serving those customers that have bought. So, I don't know that we're really a good example of a truckload of SEO fail, even if our SEO results are poorly, since we don't actually live or die by search engine traffic. Only recently did the majority of our incoming traffic shift from our Open Source project pages to other sources, for example, and those clicks from Webmin.com are still far more valuable to us than search-related clicks...they are about 10 times more likely to buy from us than natural search result users. Likewise for users of our Open Source Virtualmin version at places like Joyent, who are proving to be extremely likely to upgrade to the commercial version. This tells me that getting more people using and talking about our Open Source products is a better marketing tactic than almost anything else we could do. So, we balance our efforts, and SEO unfortunately gets put on a back-burner. (We do try hard to have good URLs, though, but mainly because I consider URLs a usability issue, and not because I care what a search engine thinks about them. I just wish Joomla didn't suck so bad for stuff like that.)
davidw 19y ago
I always thought that "SEO" was some basic good practices wrapped in a bunch of snake oil. At the last place I worked at a full time job, we had an "SEO expert" come in, and the boss and I concluded that 1) he was basically full of it, and that 2) the boss had a good handle on what needed doing to make various things visible. Just one anecdote, but there seem to be a lot of dubious people touting their "SEO" credentials.
- antirez 19y ago
  Yes basically the really important point is to avoid to develop an anti-crawler site, but this is a side effect of site with good pages semantic, structure and so on. So simply the SEO problem can be optimized away.
- dejb 19y ago
  Yes it is just one anecdote. Probably not enough evidence to condem the whole area of SEO. Now if you had 2 anecdotes that would be a laydown.
- edw519 19y ago
  "SEO experts" are a lot like "real estate experts". If their advice was so good, what are they doing here? They'd be way ahead if they were just out there implementing their own advice.
  - kingnothing 19y ago
    I disagree. Some of those people may be experts at SEO but not have the first clue about how to make a good web app. The best they may be able to do is write a blog and apply SEO techniques to it to get it to the top. On that note, If I was ever to pay someone for SEO, I'd probably Google the term and pick one of the first consulting companies that comes up.
astine 19y ago
I've always understood that it was more important to have a good product than to have good SEO. Who cares if your site appears at the top of a Google search if it isn't for what people are searching? They'll come across it, be like "this sucks," and not click on you again. SEO is only one aspect of marketing, which in turn is only one aspect of running a startup. I would argue that not mentioning SEO is not an act of negligence. Also, SEO has gotten a bit of a reputation for being dishonest, with people placing references to recent scandals in their html headers to attract hits. This can kind of stuff can be like spam and doesn't necessarily help users find something useful. Especially if what you are selling is a piece of crap. So it pretty clear why someone would not mention SEO in an advice column, even legit stuff: because they don't want to associated with crap.
- danielrhodes 19y ago
  I agree. Just by its nature, SEO is bad. Of course there are some simple things that you can do to make your page better understood by search engines, but using these self-proclaimed tricks and methodologies employed by most SEO companies is a total waste of time and money. Focus on putting something out there that's good, not trying to find shortcuts.
  - jwesley 19y ago
    "Just by its nature, SEO is bad" This statement is ridiculous. You are a fool is you don't do everything you can to rank for relevant terms. This is the best, most targeted traffic you can get. Gaming the engines is bad, but not trying to rank in them is idiocy.
    - danielrhodes 19y ago
      I mostly meant the gaming part and the industry of SEO 'experts' who are involved with that. You are obviously right that search engine traffic is great. However, it is a waste of time focusing on doing "everything you can" to rank in the search engines, instead of for instance, working on making a good product in the first place. Search engines today usually use a QA feedback loop to figure out what ends up being the most relevant result for people. So if your site is good and the best, it will rise to the top anyways.
webwright 19y ago
Here's what I put on the post-- thought I'd repeat it here for those who don't want to wade thru all of the people bashing Matt Maroon. :-) --- Hehe. The obvious solution for this is to, uh, submit articles to News.YC. FWIW, a good percentage of my posts (which often appear on YC News) have to do with SEO ( http://www.tonywright.com/category/seo/ http://www.tonywright.com/category/seo/ ). (Disclosure: I am a YC08 Founder) I think it's a "devil you know" issue, to some degree-- I actually offered to help some other YC founders with their SEO plans and didn't get a lot of uptake- people prefer to tackle the problems they understand. Another issue (and this might be controversial) is that maybe SEO doesn't matter a damn bit for most early stage startups... At least in the very early stages (which is what most people tend to write about). I always look at startups as a bucket with holes in it. You can focus on increasing the flow of water into the bucket (SEO, viral, PR, marketing) or you can work on patching the holes in the bucket (adding value, improving product/market fit, improving the "lower" part of your funnel). With time being the most scarce resource in a startup, any time you spend improving "flow" takes away from "patching the bucket". If you've got a great "bucket" (a product people freakin' LOVE and love to talk about), all of the "flow" tasks get a lot easier. If you've got a mediocre"bucket" with lots of holes, great "flow" isn't going to help make patching the bucket easier. So (as a guy who has built and sold 2 businesses and the third is looking pretty darn good), I'd recommend ignoring a concerted SEO effort in favor of making your product better (if you have to make a choice). Ideally, you're funded and you don't HAVE to make a choice (but most startups do).
deleted 19y ago
[deleted]
brett 19y ago
April Fools?
- brett 19y ago
  Ha. I guess that wasn't very helpful. What I meant to say is that it's kind of silly to suggest that basic startup advice should automatically include something about SEO. Even if we assume that SEO is highly important and every startup should spend time on it, it's an implementation detail. It's no more germane to general startup advice than how to deploy a web app, even if both are vital to a web startup's success.
dejb 19y ago
First rule of effective SEO : Nobody talks about effective SEO.
- dejb 19y ago
  Oops! I obviously broke the rule.
rob 19y ago
Proper SEO can mean the difference between making $10/day and $100/day.
- marcus 19y ago
  It all depends on the keywords you rank highly on, and the value is almost boolean in nature. Appearing in the first 3 links can be very valuable, appearing in the third page practically worthless. Ranking first on Mesothelioma, a form of cancer only caused by asbestos exposure, can generate a few millions a year, as there is almost always someone to sue for the exposure (btw CPC for related search terms around 70$ ). Ranking first on "purple dragons with red horns" will probably not generate a dime.
wumi 19y ago
read this about SEO and Techcrunch: http://www.podtech.net/home/3579/a-secret-sauce-to-top-100-blogging-success http://www.podtech.net/home/3579/a-secret-sauce-to-top-100-b...
nextmoveone 19y ago
For the start up I work at, SEO brings in at least $450 a day, 30 days a month. I believe in SEO and think it works great when you are selling a product or service. When you are giving a product or service away for free, I don't think the SEO juice is worth the SEO squeeze.

59 points by utnick 19y ago

naubo 19y ago

yes that is true..that was one of the reason we tried to gather news on VC&Startups and SEO/SEM in our site at naubo.com under the blogs section. The ideas was to make it useful and raise the issue as they go hand and hand...

wavesplash 19y ago

And we're getting tired of linkbaiting posts.

utnick 19y ago
maybe linkbait... but it has a lot of good examples, seo is really something overlooked here, and it is relevant to this site obviously
- timr 19y ago
  The irony is that this link-bait is a prime example of SEO. Still want to buy what they're selling?
deleted 19y ago
[deleted]
dejb 19y ago
The article delivered exactly what it promised and in my opinion that was something that needed saying.

admoin 19y ago

I actually found this quite interesting. Although most people would love to grow virally through word of mouth, top search rankings bring in enormous amounts of traffic day after day. I know of blogs that haven't updated in years that still get hundreds of visits per day solely from Google.

parker 19y ago

One site I used to manage used to have an unexplained high ranking for "animal porn"... talk about the gravy-train. But seriously, thanks for the article. SEO is definitely one of those areas that hackers tend to downplay in significance, probably because it's not rocket science to learn or implement. Not to mention it introduces a bunch of generic looking language on your page. Ie: just having Adpinion in the title bar may be worth the gain in aesthetic alone... just a thought...

_lc1i 19y ago

I found the post ridiculously condescending. Insinuating we are idiots and then stating 'For fuck's sake people - get a clue.' and then attacking specific small startups unprovoked does not seem like a very proper way to spread the word for your company or SEO in general. Unfortunately, I'm sure the post has garnered the desired attention by 'dropping the F bomb for the first time'. I would hope search optimization is really important to SEOmoz given it's their entire concentration as a company. But, I work in a startup as well. Our concentration is not in the field of search optimization. When we have a spare moment or the resources to tackle SEO, I am sure we will. In the meantime, I would refrain from calling me and those in similar positions idiots.

SwellJoe 19y ago
As a founder (and the website maintainer) of one of the startups "attacked", I'm not too bothered by the criticism. It is valid...we aren't showing up in all the right places on Google, and we're currently paying a buck or more per click to occasionally appear in those right places in ads. But, it's also worth noting that while we'd never turn down more traffic we also aren't experiencing significant pain due to that lack. Our site gets 1800 uniques per day, and is growing at a very respectable clip--I remember vividly celebrating our first week of 1000+ visitor days just a few months back and it won't be long before we're celebrating 2000+ visitor days. For a site that sells a product (rather than sells eyeballs), that's a nice stream of potential buyers. Actually, I sometimes chuckle when I read about sites that are selling nothing but eyeballs bragging about 100,000 monthly pageviews (or whatever) when our product site does significantly more than that (and our four sites combined see an order of magnitude more traffic than that). We consider our biggest website problems to be conversion rather than bringing the eyeballs in...so even though I readily admit that we're weaker in the engines than we'd like to be, my current focus with the website is on getting those people who come to our site excited enough to buy our product (or, even better, ask their hosting provider to buy it for them), and better serving those customers that have bought. So, I don't know that we're really a good example of a truckload of SEO fail, even if our SEO results are poorly, since we don't actually live or die by search engine traffic. Only recently did the majority of our incoming traffic shift from our Open Source project pages to other sources, for example, and those clicks from Webmin.com are still far more valuable to us than search-related clicks...they are about 10 times more likely to buy from us than natural search result users. Likewise for users of our Open Source Virtualmin version at places like Joyent, who are proving to be extremely likely to upgrade to the commercial version. This tells me that getting more people using and talking about our Open Source products is a better marketing tactic than almost anything else we could do. So, we balance our efforts, and SEO unfortunately gets put on a back-burner. (We do try hard to have good URLs, though, but mainly because I consider URLs a usability issue, and not because I care what a search engine thinks about them. I just wish Joomla didn't suck so bad for stuff like that.)

davidw 19y ago

I always thought that "SEO" was some basic good practices wrapped in a bunch of snake oil. At the last place I worked at a full time job, we had an "SEO expert" come in, and the boss and I concluded that 1) he was basically full of it, and that 2) the boss had a good handle on what needed doing to make various things visible. Just one anecdote, but there seem to be a lot of dubious people touting their "SEO" credentials.

antirez 19y ago
Yes basically the really important point is to avoid to develop an anti-crawler site, but this is a side effect of site with good pages semantic, structure and so on. So simply the SEO problem can be optimized away.
dejb 19y ago
Yes it is just one anecdote. Probably not enough evidence to condem the whole area of SEO. Now if you had 2 anecdotes that would be a laydown.
edw519 19y ago
"SEO experts" are a lot like "real estate experts". If their advice was so good, what are they doing here? They'd be way ahead if they were just out there implementing their own advice.
- kingnothing 19y ago
  I disagree. Some of those people may be experts at SEO but not have the first clue about how to make a good web app. The best they may be able to do is write a blog and apply SEO techniques to it to get it to the top. On that note, If I was ever to pay someone for SEO, I'd probably Google the term and pick one of the first consulting companies that comes up.

astine 19y ago

I've always understood that it was more important to have a good product than to have good SEO. Who cares if your site appears at the top of a Google search if it isn't for what people are searching? They'll come across it, be like "this sucks," and not click on you again. SEO is only one aspect of marketing, which in turn is only one aspect of running a startup. I would argue that not mentioning SEO is not an act of negligence. Also, SEO has gotten a bit of a reputation for being dishonest, with people placing references to recent scandals in their html headers to attract hits. This can kind of stuff can be like spam and doesn't necessarily help users find something useful. Especially if what you are selling is a piece of crap. So it pretty clear why someone would not mention SEO in an advice column, even legit stuff: because they don't want to associated with crap.

danielrhodes 19y ago
I agree. Just by its nature, SEO is bad. Of course there are some simple things that you can do to make your page better understood by search engines, but using these self-proclaimed tricks and methodologies employed by most SEO companies is a total waste of time and money. Focus on putting something out there that's good, not trying to find shortcuts.
- jwesley 19y ago
  "Just by its nature, SEO is bad" This statement is ridiculous. You are a fool is you don't do everything you can to rank for relevant terms. This is the best, most targeted traffic you can get. Gaming the engines is bad, but not trying to rank in them is idiocy.
  - danielrhodes 19y ago
    I mostly meant the gaming part and the industry of SEO 'experts' who are involved with that. You are obviously right that search engine traffic is great. However, it is a waste of time focusing on doing "everything you can" to rank in the search engines, instead of for instance, working on making a good product in the first place. Search engines today usually use a QA feedback loop to figure out what ends up being the most relevant result for people. So if your site is good and the best, it will rise to the top anyways.

webwright 19y ago

Here's what I put on the post-- thought I'd repeat it here for those who don't want to wade thru all of the people bashing Matt Maroon. :-) --- Hehe. The obvious solution for this is to, uh, submit articles to News.YC. FWIW, a good percentage of my posts (which often appear on YC News) have to do with SEO ( http://www.tonywright.com/category/seo/ http://www.tonywright.com/category/seo/ ). (Disclosure: I am a YC08 Founder) I think it's a "devil you know" issue, to some degree-- I actually offered to help some other YC founders with their SEO plans and didn't get a lot of uptake- people prefer to tackle the problems they understand. Another issue (and this might be controversial) is that maybe SEO doesn't matter a damn bit for most early stage startups... At least in the very early stages (which is what most people tend to write about). I always look at startups as a bucket with holes in it. You can focus on increasing the flow of water into the bucket (SEO, viral, PR, marketing) or you can work on patching the holes in the bucket (adding value, improving product/market fit, improving the "lower" part of your funnel). With time being the most scarce resource in a startup, any time you spend improving "flow" takes away from "patching the bucket". If you've got a great "bucket" (a product people freakin' LOVE and love to talk about), all of the "flow" tasks get a lot easier. If you've got a mediocre"bucket" with lots of holes, great "flow" isn't going to help make patching the bucket easier. So (as a guy who has built and sold 2 businesses and the third is looking pretty darn good), I'd recommend ignoring a concerted SEO effort in favor of making your product better (if you have to make a choice). Ideally, you're funded and you don't HAVE to make a choice (but most startups do).

deleted 19y ago

[deleted]

brett 19y ago

April Fools?

brett 19y ago
Ha. I guess that wasn't very helpful. What I meant to say is that it's kind of silly to suggest that basic startup advice should automatically include something about SEO. Even if we assume that SEO is highly important and every startup should spend time on it, it's an implementation detail. It's no more germane to general startup advice than how to deploy a web app, even if both are vital to a web startup's success.

dejb 19y ago

First rule of effective SEO : Nobody talks about effective SEO.

dejb 19y ago
Oops! I obviously broke the rule.

rob 19y ago

Proper SEO can mean the difference between making $10/day and $100/day.

marcus 19y ago
It all depends on the keywords you rank highly on, and the value is almost boolean in nature. Appearing in the first 3 links can be very valuable, appearing in the third page practically worthless. Ranking first on Mesothelioma, a form of cancer only caused by asbestos exposure, can generate a few millions a year, as there is almost always someone to sue for the exposure (btw CPC for related search terms around 70$ ). Ranking first on "purple dragons with red horns" will probably not generate a dime.

wumi 19y ago

read this about SEO and Techcrunch: http://www.podtech.net/home/3579/a-secret-sauce-to-top-100-blogging-success http://www.podtech.net/home/3579/a-secret-sauce-to-top-100-b...

nextmoveone 19y ago

For the start up I work at, SEO brings in at least $450 a day, 30 days a month. I believe in SEO and think it works great when you are selling a product or service. When you are giving a product or service away for free, I don't think the SEO juice is worth the SEO squeeze.