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1. 

   Alok Rodinhood Kejriwal April 17, 2011, 2:45 am

   Abey and Aji on therodinhoods.wpengine.com are JEDI knights of SEO. They could help.

2. 

   Abey John April 17, 2011, 3:08 am

   Sourav the absolute best guide to SEO is SEO Fast Start (seofaststart.com).  It is a free PDF.  If we are the Jedis these guys are the Jedi Masters. 🙂 

    

   I’ll try to give you more pointers in a few hours.  BTW what is your website about.  URL?

3. 

   Abey John April 17, 2011, 6:46 am

   Hey Sourav, 

    

   The first place to start your SEO is with keyword research. Answer these questions:

   1. Who are your customers and what are they searching for?

   2. Where are they located?

    

   Write down a list of 5-10 keywords that can possibly fit your product/services.  Next go to go to the Google Keyword Tool and search use these keywords as the seed to get an exhaustive list of keywords.  At this stage you want to do two things:

    

   a) Narrow the focus to your target country

   b) Select exact match in the keyword type (lower left side).  This will show you people who are using the exact search terms in the search engines and this is a more accurate picture of the actual searches. 

    

   Unless you are targeting the entire planet with your content look at only the local results. This gives you an estimated volume of the searches for that exact term in a month.  

    

   One additional tip click on the columns button and select local search trends.  This will show you if the traffic is seasonal or uniform throughout the year and can form an input into your marketing plans. 

    

   Once you’ve got this list sort it by local traffic volume in descending order.  Most likely you will have the first keyword with a massive traffic volume which then quickly peters off.  The first keyword is the head and the rest of it is the so called long tail.

    

   The next is to estimate viability if you gain #1 for the head keyword. Take the traffic volume and multiply it by 30% which gives you an estimate for the number of visitors who land on your site.  Take that number and halve it.  Assuming that 50% of visitors bounce off for various reasons. Of the remaining half depending on which industry you are in estimate the conversion rate. 

    

   Eg

    

   Head keyword = 100

   Traffic to site = 30

   Traffic after bounce = 15

   Conversion rate:

   Ecommerce site – 1% – 0.15 visitors buy the product

   Lead gen site – 10% – 1.5 visitors contact you to start the sale process

   Content site – e.g. articles, videos, games, etc – the conversion rate in this case is a function of “time on site”; not too sure what the “good number” is for this but if you get average time on site at around 2 minutes plus you should be good but this will vary.

    

   You can adjust the conversion rate to based on specific verticals – e.g. software ecommerce is higher than say retail/clothing.  But there are exceptions everywhere and is just a chalkmark in a rainstorm to give you some place to start. 

    

   Multiply your conversion count by visitor value: for ecommerce it will be average price of sale, lead gen it will be average price of converted order bucket; and for content consumption (unless it is a paywall strategy) assuming you are monetizing the traffic with advertising it would be CPM (cost per 1000 page impressions).

    

   This gives you an approximate idea of the revenue you can hope to earn off that keyword. 

    

   The next question is does it make sense to go chasing after that keyword.  If the volumes are low, then obviously your online market has not yet reached maturity so for now just pay attention to the keywords that matter and organize your meta title, description, on page content and images to best reflect this keyword and forget about it.

    

   Switch to other avenues of traffic building.

    

   If your keyword has sufficient traffic then the next step would be organize your site structure to provide relevance to the search engines (see SEO Fast Start) and then scope the competition and start building external links with anchor text.

    

   If competition is high for your primary (head) keywords your initial strategy will be go for the secondary keywords with lower traffic and therefore lower competition. 

    

   SEO is not a set it and forget it option. Not if you are in a competitive space. However the payoff can be tremendous once you get ranked.

    

   Let me know your doubts and I’ll try to reply in more detail later…

    

4. 

   Sourav April 17, 2011, 2:34 pm

   Sir, Thank you so much for your inputs. It means a lot for budding student entrepreneurs like us. It’s an e-commerce portal and we use a user’s social graph and print personalized posters, collages (really huge size), laptop skins, etc at a very nominal rate. We are taking one product at a time and we will be launching by month-end.

    

   We are also offering socially inclined companies new mediums to interact to their customers by using their twitter following. We have developed app for extracting the followers’ profile pictures, etc and we plan to provide unique ideas for different companies to use these resources.

5. 

   Abey John April 18, 2011, 4:52 pm

   Sourav looks like you are into the cutting edge.  Yatin’s pointers are excellent and you should follow those with your CMS/shopping cart system.

    

   However, from an SEO pov, based on what I know (and I am frequently wrong!), your product profile does not look like it will have sufficient searches to justify going overboard with the SEO.  Just make sure that your title tags (max 10 words, 70 characters….SEs don’t index more than 10 words and more than 70 characters including spaces will be visible in the search results), meta description, and on page content are best reflective of what a person searching for your product will type into the search engines and leave it at that.

    

   You could probably leverage FB for consumer interest.  Probably an active FB campaign with in-FB buys (not sure exactly how it works though).  

    

   Your corporate product sounds more interesting.  Don’t forget to charge a bomb for it.  If you are thinking of charging X.  Just make it 3X… 😉

    

   Corporates need to see big budget moolah costs before they realize you are a serious player.  Extracting the social graph and doing something useful with it (right now doing anything with it!) is the next holy grail in the evolution of the interwebs.  If you’ve got it right, you’ve given corporates a road into the emotive pscychography of their target prospect with a scary degree (for the privacy buffs) of accuracy.  For the company who learns how to monetize it they’ll make a killing till we wise them to the trick and develop a blind spot for Yet Another Ad Channel. 😉

    

   If I’ve understood your product right SEO won’t help much except to be found when they search for you.  What you need to do is burn shoe leather and do ppt strip teases to get them to sign on the dotted line. 🙂

6. 

   Sourav April 19, 2011, 11:48 am

   Abey Sir,

   You are spot-on with this. Even I was thinking that SEO wont be that helpful in my case, unless somebody is looking specifically for me. Therefore, instead of wasting much time and money on SEO, i’ll try on invest the same in my products. However, I’ll surely include the suggestions made by you and Yatin Sir.

    

   Thanks for the encouragement.

7. 

   Abey John April 19, 2011, 12:01 pm

   Sourav please point me to the knight hood registry where they have registered me as Abey Sir 😉 

    

   A quick note of caution: you do need to optimize your pages to make it search engine friendly, if your category becomes a hit then generic searches will spring up and you should be ready to grab that traffic by the proverbial spherical shaped thingies 😉

8. 

   Mahesh Khambadkone April 22, 2011, 4:49 pm

   That’s the spirit ! 

    

   Any chance we can get a sneak peek to your app?  

9. 

   Aji (Digital Marketing) April 25, 2011, 5:42 pm

   I liked the title JEDI knights of SEO …. I posted the reply here https://anhour.in/search-engine/seo-advice-from-jedi-knight-of-seo-for-startups.html

10. 

    Vishal Khandelwal April 26, 2011, 5:53 am

    Hi Sourav,

     

    I may be wrong here, but from whatever I’ve read and heard about SEO (and whatever I’m practicing myself), it is akin to farming and not hunting. You need to act like a farmer. You have already sowed the seeds (your product). Now you need to create a story around the benefits that your propects can get from your product. And then you need to tell the story. But, like in farming, it will take a lot of your time and patience to tell your story to the world. But if you are persistent enough, your prospects will start to trust you and then you can offer them your product as a solution to their problem.

     

    Effectively, what I am saying is that for an effective SEO, you need to do just these two things:

     

    1. Have a product worth seling (which you have)

    2. Create a story around that product and share it with the world (through educating your prospects how their lives will be better by using your product)

     

    If you can do that, I believe gradually you will get the right kind of traffic to your website, and would see more people believing in you and subsequently buying your product.

     

    Just remember this – products don’t sell…stories do.

     

    But as I said, these are just my views. I am not a techie but a writer & copywriter, so you can see my bias towards storytelling 🙂

     

    Regards,

    Vishal 

11. 

    Harish Sharma December 16, 2011, 12:44 pm

    Abey, seems like SEO fast start URL is down? can you share the free pdf 🙂

12. 

    Abey John December 18, 2011, 11:21 am

    Harish, this is the link to the 2009 edition:

    https://www.thewebtrafficco.com/books/SEOFS_2009.pdf

    This year though they are coming out with a paid version called SEO Fast Start Pro.  Right now it is going for $7.  With the promise that you’ll get continuous updates up to the official print release of the book plus the final version or something.  I don’t remember the exact terms of the deal.  I just saw the price and grabbed it.  🙂

    Order page is here: https://seobraintrust.net/

13. 

    Harish Sharma December 19, 2011, 6:39 am

    Thanks Abey, i think i too will go and grab that 🙂

14. 

    Abey John December 22, 2011, 12:32 pm

    Good work! I see they still aren’t doing anything by way of SEO.  🙂

15. 

    Sourav December 22, 2011, 12:34 pm

    Yes.. AFAIK they are looking for funding. They are short on funds.

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