SEO for most startups isn't about doing all sorts of trickery to rake in tons of traffic, it's about letting people find you easily. The most important part of

SEO for most startups isn't about doing all sorts of trickery to rake in tons of traffic, it's about letting people find you easily. The most important part of the SEO process is keyword research, figuring out what people are searching for. This is the stuff you build and optimize your copy around. Figure out what the most searched phrases are and look at the competition for those results. Why would you use the term 'get a blog' repeatedly in your copy if 'start a blog' had 20x the search volume? If your site includes embeddable widgets for users you probably give yourself some kind of back link. Why would you waste that link anchor text on just your domain 'ManageProject.ly' instead of a term you want to rank for, like 'Online Project Management'? If you totally ignore SEO and call it 'bullshittery' then you can't complain when your site doesn't rank well. Google primarily focuses around a site's authority. You get authority by incoming links from reputable sources, for a startup these would be places like Techcrunch, Mashable, RWW, etc. And it's not a numbers game, it's a quality game. Your site needs to be authoritative, people need to like what you do and recommend it before good search rankings will even be possible. But when Google's trying to figure out which blogging platform to rank for the term 'start a blog', given two sites with similar authority, they're going to rank the one that is optimized a bit more for that term than the competitor.