10 SEO Strategies for Startups and Businesses (In-depth)

SEO is perhaps, one of the most misinterpreted concepts in the world of marketing.

People often refer to SEO as archaic alchemy that needs to be forcibly shoved down a marketer’s throat while submitting themselves at the mercy of the search engine lords.

SEO gives better ROI and improves the credibility of websites. Once your digital presence becomes credible enough, people will start flocking to your site in large volumes.

Some of the strategies that we talk about over here range from basic to intermediate steps. We also list more tips and tricks for you to dive deep in the SEO world that will prove fodder for business and startup!

We all know that it takes months of painstaking SEO strategies to reach a decent Alexa Rank.

It is not just a routine, but a commitment to skyrocket your website or blog to reach the Alexa Prime level.

Before talking about strategies that you must adopt as an entrepreneur, let us brush up some basic concepts related to SEO.

The era of LONG-TAIL SEARCH

Gone are the days when marketers reckoned on short keywords. The Era of Long-Tail Keywords has ushered in.

Why?

Because shorter keywords are generic and too competitive. They do not offer localized results.

Wait, localized? What?

Yes, localization dramatically improves SEO scores and removes redundancy. It brings relevance and real-time importance to your brand. We need to understand that we must be active locally and present globally.

Examples of long-tail searches:

Best Bajaj bikes under 1 lakh
Grey color Adidas sport shoes
Asus Zenfone 2 in mobile phones
Best HP laptops under 50000

Not having an SEO strategy in place is a sin for Entrepreneurs. As mentioned above, it has become the perennial bridge in the digital dimension to notch your startup to the summit.

SEO tricks of the trade revolve around the whims and fancies of the godfather of all search engines: Google.

Whether it’s a sitcom review site or a blog post about your snorkeling adventures in Bucharest, it is mandatory to have an SEO strategy in place.

1) Uptime :

99% uptime is what you should be looking at if you don’t want to be pearl-harbored by than obnoxious Jap who is searching for an Ichigawa-styled Sushi on your Japanese Gourmet site.

What is the solution milord? Server-end SEO!

2) The holy secure socket layer :

Refraining to switch to the secure socket layer has proven to be a daunting task for novices and already startled startups.

A secure HTTP goes a great way in establishing your brand.

3) Malware Mania :

Whether you accept it or not, your recently launched site could already be under malware attack.

Feel free to use free or paid resources to check and weed out malware.

4) DNS Issues, Your Honour

Talk to your eerie hosting reseller or buy services from Pingdom to check for DNS issues that will throttle your flourishing online business.

5) SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM :

Ok, we’ve already reached a saturation point. No Spam, alright?

Spam isn’t good for anything: SEO, Sodamakers or Solicitations.

Install a network neighbor tool. Otherwise, you will suffer despite the good content.

6) Server Discrepancies and Redirections :

Launch that Screaming Frog (Tool) and check for 404, 301 and 302 errors. Fix em up. Period! Destroy 403 (forbidden) error with robotx.txt

7) No-Index and No-Follow Tags :

During times when every click costs you, every cent in the RPM matters, why shouldn’t hidden SEO traitors like no-follow and no-indexing tags be punished?

These tags are primarily the ones that ask Godfather Google, not to index or rank your content.

8) 404 Zombies

Why do we refer to Error 404 as Zombies? Because they emanate from nonexistent URLs. Ensure that you do not have 404 pages.

9) Sitemaps :

Listen, folks, SEO is not just about stuffing keywords ten thousand times in a blog post.

There could be simpler things that are affecting your site. One such factor is the non-existence of a sitemap.

Create your sitemap and upload them to Bing Webmaster Tools and Google Search Console.

10) Caches and CDNs :

Forget a premium content delivery network service from Akamai, at least do a basic google cache search of your website. using

http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:[your URL here].

It will reveal whether the search engines are missing out on essential elements from your web pages.

Let us take a look at some underlooked factors that affect your SEO scores.

1) RSS Feeds :

RSS feeds were used in the good old days when search engines used to index web content, based on feeds. IT still works that way. Ensure that you include RSS Feed at least in the source code.

2) Social Media Sharing Plugins :

As far as you have an updated Social Media Plugin that updates content in real-time, it is good for SEO.

Unless it’s a cheap plugin laden with glitches and no recent updates and patch fixes, a social media sharing plugin will do wonders when it comes to indexing large volumes of web content.

3) Snippety-Snipper-Snip :

All that glitters might not be gold. But people do click on clickbait, thumbnails, and good excerpts.

A useful snippet is one of the primary reasons why a reader will choose to read or move away from the post.

Ensure they are succinct, smooth, and succulent (like tender chicken lmao)

4) Content Basics, Sire!:

Nobody can help you if you fidget with titles, use over complicated title lengths, entertain non-catchy titles deprived of primary keywords, and the holy grail of all SEO data: metadata.

Your meta description should exceed 160 characters or search engines ll brutally slaughter them.

5) H1 headers :

Use the header 1 (H1) section for CTA or a greeting. As an entrepreneur, you must double check whether you have duplicate H1 tags.

6) H2 tags and parsing :

There will be parsing errors if your pages are devoid of H2 tags as search engines will be dealing with large chunks of data.

It is always safer from an SEO perspective to have your content segregated into H1, H2, H3, and H4 categorizations.

7) Stating the Obvious: Keyword

Yes, it is indeed stating the obvious, but you must target your audience with primary and secondary long tail keywords that you come up with after all those grinding brainstorming sessions.

8) The secret cat: Alt Text

Identification of the content of an image is essential. Never forget to put an alt-text to describe an image that you invariably use from your favorite royalty free stock gallery.

Additional Reasons why you could be lagging in SEO?

1) Broken Logo Links :

Neither the number of downloads on the flat vector that uploaded at freepik.com nor the number of likes on your skeuomorphic Behance image, SEO matters when your Site logo has broken links.

2) External Link Issues :

Remember that if your web pages happen to redirect to low-quality classifieds listing or if you create outward links to bookmark sites, they might be treated and penalized as spam by Google algorithms.

3) Orphan Pages Vs. 404 Error :

An orphan page which isn’t reachable is as bad as a non-existent 404 error, both of them are partners in crime when it comes to reducing your perfect SEO score.

4) Hierarchy of Subfolders :

Creation of web content might look easy, but proper canonicalization and segregation into categories and then attributing each of them into relevant URLs is a daunting task in itself.

5) The depth of your Links :

Considering your primary keywords in mind, do not complicate the depth of web crawls and minimize the optimum number of clicks required to reach the primary keyword. It is often ignored by several established SEO marketers, just because it looks too silly a point worth consideration.

6) Hierarchy: Moderation is the King. Mediocrity is the Mantra

When it comes to hierarchy, neither complicate your categorization nor make it insipidly flat. Mediocrity is her to stay for aeons.

7) No JS(Javascript) Pagination :

Not a single web page should be devoid of a valid URL. Forget difficulties; it is virtually impossible for search engines to index your pages without a valid link.

8) URL variables :

URL variables including “?sort=ascending” are considered a sin in the world of SEO.

Canonicalize them to master pages that do not have such variables or duplicate content.

9) Contextual Linking :

Your internal links will add more value to your posts than outbound links.

Contextual linking is used across all major e-commerce sites where they recommend similar products using their links, contextually.

10) Mobile-friendliness:

Now that we know every website should be responsive and adopt a device’s screen

11) Credit Worthiness of your Mobile-friendliness

Run some checks against your mobile-friendliness, and you will be able to decipher how end users across platforms experience your website.

12) Responsive Design:

Take care of unwanted sidebars and overpopulated landing pages using responsive designs.

These designs decide how your reader views your website on his or her device

13) Javascript and Flash Compatability :

Your web pages must work just fine even without JAvaSCript enabling or Adobe Flash restrictions. ASk your developer/ designer to emphasize on CSS.

14) Navigation:

The navigation on your web pages must be equally comfortable on all devices and stop creating hindrances to a rich and holistic user experience.

15) Responsive Images, Videos and Embeds :

Responsive images, videos, and embeds are as crucial as responsive design or a template. Videos and pictures need to be sized down automatically.

Additionally, the following codes can manually fix and automate the sizes

For Image :

img {

width: 100%;

height: auto;

}

For Video :

video {

max-width: 100%;

height: auto;

}

Another point worth consideration is that the pop-up plugins must be compatible universally and comfortable for touch interfaces.

Update yourself with the latest developments of the SEO world and deploy your strategies from time to time.

We have come up with an exciting list of Enterprise SEO platforms that can be used by Entrepreneurs.

Authoritas™ (Formerly AnalyticsSEO)

Authoritas is an all-inclusive SEO software to improve your web traffic and revenues massively.

Botify

Botify enables its users with all the necessary online tools to create digital SEO roadmaps into the heart of all search engines.

BrightEdge

BrightEdge provides a competitive edge over others when it comes to content prioritization and optimization.

Conductor

Conductor SEO helps users take quick decisions and create their SEO strategies.

DemandMetrics (GinzaMetrics)

GinzaMetrics call themselves the king of all SEO enterprise software and have come up with a concept called as “pioneering findability.”

Dragon Metrics

Link Management, Rank tracking, and onsite optimization are some of the salient features of Dragon Metrics.

gShift

The beauty of this program rests on its simple, robust web ranking process and formulae.

iQuanti

Analytics, SMO or CRO; iQuanti is here to serve all your organic and inorganic needs. They are just a call/ quick consultation away.

Linkdex

Linkdex stands out with the invaluable consumer insights and data-driven SEO strategies.

Pi Datametrics

Pi Datametrics revolves around search data to evolve constantly

RankAbove

RankAbove provides White-labelled proprietary which offers all-inclusive and end-to-end SEO solutions

Rio SEO

Customized plans to improve local search results is a specialty at Rio SEO

Searchmetrics

Searchmetrics Suite is one of the leading brands in content marketing, SEO and SEM marketing.

seoClarity

Scale your SEO and content with seoClarity’s AI-driven search insights and content optimization platform to connect with your customers after every stage of their …

SEMrush

The success behind SEMrush lies in its powerful competitive intelligence suite that can be used for everything from PPC to SEO to social media campaigns.