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>>>maile ohye: hi, i'm maile ohye. i'm a developerprograms tech lead at google. i've been at google since 2005 working with our searchand our webmaster tools teams. but if i were a consultant for your startup, here's allthe advice i would give in under 10 minutes. this talk is aimed for companies who havetheir main content below about 50 pages. for those sites that are looking to rank for thousandsof unrelated keywords, like an ecommerce site or a news agency, you might wanna invest moretime with seo. my objective for this talk is to provide you the basics in the most efficientmanner possible and to help you feel assured that you're not doing something totally wrongrelated to search, and last, to provide pointers for more information. the first thing to dowith your domain is to decide whether you

want visitors to see the dub, dub, dub versionor the non dub, dub, dub version. at which point your 301 redirect users from your nonpreferred to your preferred version. now, many large corporations, like google and facebook,actually keep the dub, dub, dub version, but you're free to do whichever you want. thereason why we use a 301 and not a 302 is because a 301 is a permanent redirect and that wayit signals to applications like search engines, to actually transfer all those indexing propertiesfrom the source to the target. the next step is to verify ownership of your site in webmastertools. and i don't just say this because i work with the team, but i think this is reallyvaluable. i encourage you to sign up for email forwarding. email forwarding allows google,when we have any message for you, like when

we think you might have been hacked or wethink your site is hosting malware, or we're having trouble crawling your site and we founda high number of unreachable urls. so any of those messages can be forwarded to googlewebmaster tools and if you have email forwarding enabled, it can be forwarded directly to theinbox that you check every day. one more research tip is to perform a background check on yourdomain. for example, if it was previously owned by spammers then you're not going torank very well now. so, one good way to check is to look at the keywords listed in webmastertools for your site and see if you see any unwanted words there. also, you can see ifyou're indexed by performing a site colon search with your domain. and if you see anyproblems the webmaster guidelines can be found

at this url. and if you have questions aboutpenalties or reconsideration requests and that entire process, my friend tiffany oberoihas a great interview listed here. i'd like to highlight the fetch as googlebot featurein webmaster tools. it's a great feature cause you give us a url and then we'll perform acrawl as googlebot, and you can see exactly whether we've been redirected appropriatelyand exactly what content we download. an additional part of this feature, and i think this isreally useful, is that you can actually tell us to not just crawl but to submit to indexfor that url. and this way, any time you update a page or you create an entirely new page,you can trigger that entire process to happen by google and have it available to searcherseven faster. my next advice is to include

analytics code whether it's google analyticsor another provider. now you wanna start collecting this data even if you're not ready to useit because once you hire someone it's better to have some historical information aboutyour site. the next part is the strategy in your site design. you'll want to create agreat experience for all your visitors and their different personas. so, consider yourcustomers. also your investors and what content will they see? or even the press. some questionsto ask when it comes to site strategy are utility. does our site design meet the needsof each persona and does each persona have a great experience? navigation, if a searcherlands on a child page, and that's common with search results they don't funnel directlythrough your homepage all the time, can they

figure out where they are? and can they easilynavigate to where they want to be? another question is about whether or not your siteis focused. does each page contain one logical topic that's obvious to visitors? it's commonwith startups that because you're tight on time and resources, that as you collect moreand more information, you just add that to existing pages and make those extremely longforcing users to scroll. but, instead, think about your site design and if that shouldbe broken up into separate pages. the next step, and this is especially helpful for startups,is to define your conversion whether that means for "group foo" visitors to sign upfor the newsletter or to contact bizdev lead or to try your product, you want to have arelevant conversion possible on every page.

like a call to action. and not force usersto make extra clicks. when it comes to your copy or the actual information that you haveon each page, it's great to include relevant keywords naturally in your text. these keywordsare like query terms that normal people would use to find your product or your business.so, for example, companies might call themselves as selling athletic footwear but in your actualcopy it's better to include terms like running shoes which is what people actually searchfor. one more thing i wanted to mention about the copy on your pages is to answer your visitorsor the personas questions that they might have. for example, is the product reputable?perhaps show reviews or let other users review. or if a user might ask, "what if this productdoesn't work" then explain the customer satisfaction

policy. every page should include a uniquetopic, a unique title as that can be displayed in search results, a unique meta descriptionwhich might be displayed as the snippet and then for non-dynamic sites, this is just abest practice, but it's good to have keywords in the filename, lowercase and hyphen separated.and then, of course, descriptive anchor text for every link whether you're linking internallyor externally to another site. so here's anchor text that could use some improvement. formore information on our product specifications, click here. click here is not that descriptive.better way to have it would be, for more information please read our product specifications. sothat's what you wanna aim for. a good example of a site that has a unique topic on eachpage as well as a unique title and descriptive

anchor text, can be showing with this searchresult for nasa. now, nasa doesn't only have their homepage shown, but also has generatedsite links. these site links algorithmically by google but they can influenced by greatsite design, having a unique title as well as great anchor text. i'll quickly cover somepotential pitfalls. please do not hire a rogue or shady seo. if they guarantee any rankingsit is too good to be true. please don't participate in link schemes or buying links for the purposeof passing pagerank. and last, i know it's great to have a fancy site but try not tofocus so much on site fanciness that you don't actually have indexable and searchable text.another thing to consider about your site is the page low time. i've noticed a lot ofstartups don't necessarily have time to focus

on this. but, it's good to know that akamaiactually did a study of ecommerce sites and found that 2 seconds is the threshold forecommerce sites acceptability. at google, we aim for under a half second. in general,the longer your page takes to load, the more likely it is that users can click away. now,let's talk about ranking. check that you rank for your company name. hopefully number oncewas site links. if you want to rank for other terms, you can use webmaster tools' searchqueries. and, i put this link earlier, but here's the link to a video on using webmastertools. then, get involved. for startups it might be the case that no one searches foryour new kind of product or service, so you have very low query volume. at that point,you could prioritize, finding a potential

audience or community through existing forums,blogs or social media sites. know that, to rank well and to stay on top, provide an awesomeproduct or service. and then, generate buzz. startups often ask me about social media marketingand whether they should invest their time. well, i think that social media is terrificand one big reason is that rather than just having an avenue of users coming through search,this really diversifies your approach and you can get visitors from different sources.but here are a few tips. first of all, think holistically. so, you might create an identityon key sites, and then participate. but, remember, you eventually wanna connect users to an entrypoint of conversion. so think about that entire user experience from a social media site directlyto conversion on your site. also, and this

is fairly obvious, but focus your energy whereyour audience hangs out. and last, play to your authentic strengths, it's likely thatyour company has limited resources. so, if your ceo likes to tweet, then go ahead andlet them, or if you have a salesperson who really enjoys facebook then that's terrific,or if you have a developer who's already on google plus or stack overflow then have themrepresent your company and interact with the community there. my last takeaway is this,even with great advertising and terrific marketing, valuable conversion still happens on yoursite. so please, stay focused and make sure you're ready. thanks so much for your time.

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