Sebastian Deutsch – The Accidental SEO

HackFwd Build 0.9 – Berlin March 2012

There are three options for your growth. The first is ‘blitzkrieg’ style where you push your product out into the market with heavy machinery. The second is having the Facebook-gene that naturally translates into a hockey stick. First option takes lots of money. The second path is pretty rare.

The third option is natural growth, and SEO is the key. There is a three-step strategy for natural growth, Sebastian says: imagine, implement, validate. Figure out where you could get traffic. Who is interested, what the keywords could be, and what converts. Implement these on your pages, and follow the analytics to see what makes a difference.

Sebastian heads into a ruthless but entirely deserved treatment of some key problems in startups’ websites. A quick analysis of on-page SEO reveals lots of improvement opportunities. Title, H1 and H2 tags are crucial for on-page SEO, and you must make these relevant to your search audience.

Site structure and link masking are also simple techniques that any startup can add to their SEO toolbox immediately. Shallow pagination and link depth make a difference to search engines too – do not bury your content deep within a link structure.

There are easy ways to avoid simple search engine penalties. Keep your user-facing page and robot-facing page the same or very similar. Avoid duplicate content by smart use of 301 redirects – also for your www-subdomain, which is not the same as your bare domain. You must also respect domain authority. A .tv domain may not have the same domain authority as a .com domain in Sebastian’s experience. Sebastian shows more internal examples from Watchlater and what they learned from various changes to their site and their product and also tells you why the talk is called ‘accidental SEO’.

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