Most people involved with online marketing are familiar with the term ‘SEO,’ or search engine optimization — but it doesn’t mean they really understand it. John Gannon, an associate at L Capital Partners, a VC fund, admits to being an SEO ‘newbie,’ but says he has been tackling the learning curve and has gained some valuable knowledge. Accordingly, he offers these “tips from a guy who doesn’t know SEO”:

Content is king: Make sure you have lots of content on your site, and that you update it regularly, Gannon advises. Create an editorial schedule that states when you will post — and on which topic — and then stick to it. “Although frequent updates are good, just getting started and sticking to a regular schedule (even if it means you’re only posting every couple of weeks or once a month) is still very useful,” he says.

Acquire links to your site — the more relevant, the better: The more links you get from relevant and respected sites, the better your SEO ranking will be, Gannon says. “For example, one link to your company’s website from a nytimes.com article about your industry is going to be weighed more highly than 10 links from blogs that have nothing to do with your industry,” he asserts.

Make your content SEO friendly: There are consultants as well as products and services that can help you make your site SEO friendly; make sure you are making your site more appealing to the search engine crawlers. “In some cases, especially if you’re a web-based business, it may make sense to develop the SEO expertise in house,” Gannon offers. “One SEO friendly-practice is using META tags with the specific keywords you’d like to rank for, and to include those keywords within your content text as well.” On the flip side, he warns, sites that are too Flash-heavy often don’t index well with Google.

Source: Yet Another (ex-)VC Blog

Posted December 1st, 2009 under Intellectual Property Marketing

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