1. © DigitalReadyMarketing.com All Rights Reserved. Confidential 1 Tony Hsieh SEO 101 for Startups Presented: June, 2014

2. © DigitalReadyMarketing.com All Rights Reserved. Confidential 2 Merkle Inc

3. © DigitalReadyMarketing.com All Rights Reserved. Confidential 3 Enterprises vs. Startups Cons Limited resources Pros Speed to market Creativity Freedom (tools, team)

4. © DigitalReadyMarketing.com All Rights Reserved. Confidential 4 Agenda What is SEO? Why should you care? Onsite SEO Offsite SEO SEO - What you should and should not do How are Thrill Mill teams doing?

5. © DigitalReadyMarketing.com All Rights Reserved. Confidential 5 Business 101 – Location, Location, Location Brick and mortar businesses –Store location is the main concern Online businesses –Online presence is the main concern

6. © DigitalReadyMarketing.com All Rights Reserved. Confidential 6 Online Businesses – Organic Search Traffic Organic search brought in the most traffic –Data based on 310 million visits Reference http://www.conductor.com/blog/2013/06/data-310-million-visits-nearly-half-of-all-web-site-traffic-comes-from-natural-search/

7. © DigitalReadyMarketing.com All Rights Reserved. Confidential 7 US Search Engine Market Share Google has the majority market share in the US Reference http://www.comscore.com/Insights/Market_Rankings/comScore_Releases_April_2014_US_Search_Engine_Rankings

8. © DigitalReadyMarketing.com All Rights Reserved. Confidential 8 What Is SEO? “Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of affecting the visibility of a website or a web page in a search engine's "natural" or un-paid ("organic") search results.” – wikipedia.org https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hF515-0Tduk

9. © DigitalReadyMarketing.com All Rights Reserved. Confidential 9 Organic vs. Paid Organic Paid

10. © DigitalReadyMarketing.com All Rights Reserved. Confidential 10 Agenda What is SEO? Why should you care? Onsite SEO Offsite SEO SEO - What you should and should not do How are Thrill Mill teams doing?

11. © DigitalReadyMarketing.com All Rights Reserved. Confidential 11 Onsite SEO vs. Offsite SEO Google has more than 200 ranking factors

12. © DigitalReadyMarketing.com All Rights Reserved. Confidential 12 Onsite SEO vs. Offsite SEO Onsite –Title tag –Meta tags –Heading –Content –Keywords –Internal links –Structured Data Markup (Schema Markup) Offsite –Inbound links Infographics Guest posting Blog commenting Forum posting Email out reach

13. © DigitalReadyMarketing.com All Rights Reserved. Confidential 13 Onsite SEO Factors Title tag – 55 characters –Title tag is the main text that explains the webpage. It is one of the important ranking factors. Meta description tag – 150 characters –Meta description tag is the description that appears under the title on SERP. Although it does not contribute to ranking, a well crafted description could affect the click through rate substantially.

14. © DigitalReadyMarketing.com All Rights Reserved. Confidential 14 Onsite SEO Factors Meta keywords –Google stopped considering meta keywords as one its ranking factors in 2009. However, robots from other search engines still utilize it for understanding the content of a webpage. Meta robots –Prevent search engines from indexing the page and following the links on the page

15. © DigitalReadyMarketing.com All Rights Reserved. Confidential 15 Onsite SEO Factors Heading tags –There are six types of heading tag (H1 to H6) and this is how a webpage can communicate with search engines how important each section of a page is. –It is recommended to have only one H1 tag per page and not using the other heading tags for styling purpose.

16. © DigitalReadyMarketing.com All Rights Reserved. Confidential 16 Onsite SEO Factors H1 tags – don’t over use them!

17. © DigitalReadyMarketing.com All Rights Reserved. Confidential 17 Onsite SEO Factors Image alt tag –Search engines cannot read images, thus an image alt tag is used to let search engines know what the image is about and also improve indexation and ranking on Google image search.

18. © DigitalReadyMarketing.com All Rights Reserved. Confidential 18 Google Webmaster Tools – Your Best Friend Use Google Webmaster Tools to monitor your site

19. © DigitalReadyMarketing.com All Rights Reserved. Confidential 19 Google Webmaster Tools – Your Best Friend Crawl errors Find out what Google is seeing about your site Search queries Find how people are finding your site with which keywords Sitemaps Create Sitemaps to help Google index your site

20. © DigitalReadyMarketing.com All Rights Reserved. Confidential 20 Google Analytics – Your Sidekick Where do your users land on your site? –Which page gets the most traffic? –Where are they coming from? –How do they react to the page?

21. © DigitalReadyMarketing.com All Rights Reserved. Confidential 21 Google Analytics – Your Sidekick Onsite search queries –What are your users looking for? –Are there potential keywords you can target? –What products / content you should have?

22. © DigitalReadyMarketing.com All Rights Reserved. Confidential 22 Agenda What is SEO? Why should you care? Onsite SEO Offsite SEO SEO - What you should and should not do How are Thrill Mill teams doing?

23. © DigitalReadyMarketing.com All Rights Reserved. Confidential 23 Offsite SEO – It’s All About Back Links It’s all about back links

24. © DigitalReadyMarketing.com All Rights Reserved. Confidential 24 Offsite SEO – Link From High Authority Sites Back links from high authority sites provide more link juice to your site

25. © DigitalReadyMarketing.com All Rights Reserved. Confidential 25 Offsite SEO – How To Build Back Links Link building takes a lot of efforts

26. © DigitalReadyMarketing.com All Rights Reserved. Confidential 26 Offsite SEO – Link Building Example Competitor analysis 1.Analyze where your competitors get their back links from 2.Reach out to those sites that provide back links to your competitors http://www.openlinkprofiler.org/

27. © DigitalReadyMarketing.com All Rights Reserved. Confidential 27 Offsite SEO – Should You Do It? Focus on onsite SEO Focus on your business – build content and relationship

28. © DigitalReadyMarketing.com All Rights Reserved. Confidential 28 Agenda What is SEO? Why should you care? Onsite SEO Offsite SEO SEO - What you should and should not do How are Thrill Mill teams doing?

29. © DigitalReadyMarketing.com All Rights Reserved. Confidential 29 Black Hat, Gray Hat, White Hat – What’s Your Color? Black hat SEO –Disapproved SEO practice that increases a page's ranking in a search engine result page (SERP) Offsite. These practices are against the search engine's terms of service Gray hat SEO –A SEO practice that are riskier than white hat SEO, but one that may or may not result in your site being banned from search engines and their affiliate sites White hat SEO –A SEO practice used to improve search performance that is in line with terms and conditions of search engines

30. © DigitalReadyMarketing.com All Rights Reserved. Confidential 30 What SEO Practice To Avoid? Tiny text, hidden text, hidden links –Put illegible text at the bottom of the page, make the text the same color as the background, or format text or images that are visually undetectable as links. Cloaking –Present search engines with one set of content and site visitors with another, tricking visitors from search engines into experiencing a page of substantially different content. Buying links –Utilize or create services that provide back links in exchange for a payment

31. © DigitalReadyMarketing.com All Rights Reserved. Confidential 31 What SEO Practice To Avoid? – BMW “Philipp over at Google Blogoscoped points out in BMW's Doorway Pages that the automaker is employing hidden content on its web site in Germany. Search engines see one thing; humans another. It's cloaking, but not IP based, more of the "poor man's" variety that uses JavaScript.”BMW's Doorway Pages Cloaking the content Banned from Google for several months Reference http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2059675/Google-Bans-BMW-Germany-Ricoh-Germany

32. © DigitalReadyMarketing.com All Rights Reserved. Confidential 32 What SEO Practice To Avoid? – Overstock.com “In Overstock's case, the retailer offered discounts of 10% on some merchandise to students and faculty. In exchange, it asked college and university websites to embed links for certain keywords like "bunk beds" or "gift baskets" to Overstock product pages.” Paying for back links Penalized by Google – ranking dropped Reference http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2049969/Overstock.com-Lands-in-Googles-Penalty-Box-Over-Links-for-Discounts-Deal

33. © DigitalReadyMarketing.com All Rights Reserved. Confidential 33 What SEO Practice To Avoid? – JCPenny “JCP ranking number one in the Google search results for terms like "dresses", "bedding", and "area rugs" and for "months, it was consistently at or near the top in searches for "skinny jeans," "home decor," "comforter sets," "furniture" and dozens of other words and phrases, from the blandly generic ("tablecloths") to the strangely specific ("grommet top curtains").” Content Farming Penalized by Google – ranking dropped Reference http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2050023/NY-Times-Outs-JC-Penney-Shady-Link-Building

34. © DigitalReadyMarketing.com All Rights Reserved. Confidential 34 What SEO Practice To Avoid? – Expedia “Expedia’s main problem is and was WordPress themes created for footer links from Travel sites.” Unnatural back link scheme Penalized by Google – ranking dropped Reference http://www.linkresearchtools.com/case-studies/expedia-google-unnatural-link-penalty/

35. © DigitalReadyMarketing.com All Rights Reserved. Confidential 35 Follow Google’s Guideline Follow Google’s guideline to avoid getting penalized or banned by Google Reference https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/35769?hl=en

36. © DigitalReadyMarketing.com All Rights Reserved. Confidential 36 Agenda What is SEO? Why should you care? Onsite SEO Offsite SEO SEO - What you should and should not do How are Thrill Mill teams doing?

37. © DigitalReadyMarketing.com All Rights Reserved. Confidential 37 How Are Thrill Mill Teams Doing? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debbie_Downer

38. © DigitalReadyMarketing.com All Rights Reserved. Confidential 38 Thrill Mill Team: http://tameraonline.com/makeup/cheeks.html?dir=desc&limit=10&mode=list&order=bes tmatch http://tameraonline.com/makeup/cheeks.html?dir=desc&limit=15&mode=list&order=bes tmatch Duplicate Content – use canonical tag and/or robots tag to resolve the issue

39. © DigitalReadyMarketing.com All Rights Reserved. Confidential 39 Thrill Mill Team: 404 errors – testing pages?

40. © DigitalReadyMarketing.com All Rights Reserved. Confidential 40 Thrill Mill Team: The entire site is based on JavaScript Google started to render JavaScript recently but…… “Sometimes things don't go perfectly during rendering, which may negatively impact search results for your site.” Blank Reference http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2014/05/understanding-web-pages-better.html

41. © DigitalReadyMarketing.com All Rights Reserved. Confidential 41 The Takeaway Message If you own a website, you should care about SEO!

42. © DigitalReadyMarketing.com All Rights Reserved. Confidential 42 Ex- Scientist Turned Digital Marketer With Startup Experience Get In Touch With Tony Hsieh https://www.linkedin.com/in/iamtonyhsieh ask@tonyhsieh.me Thank You!