As you begin to launch and optimize your startup website for Search Engine Optimization (SEO), it’s easy to fall into the trap of spending too much focus on offsite SEO strategy (like link building, and citations.) While these offsite strategies are invaluable in their own right – they shouldn’t overshadow the essential onsite tactics you need to cover before you move to offsite SEO strategy.

As you begin to launch and optimize your startup website for Search Engine Optimization (SEO), it’s easy to fall into the trap of spending too much focus on offsite SEO strategy (like link building, and citations.) While these offsite strategies are invaluable in their own right – they shouldn’t overshadow the essential onsite tactics you need to cover before you move to offsite SEO strategy. Having a well optimized website is essential for SEO rankings, and without that – your offsite efforts may be wasted entirely. It’s common to think “hey, I’ve got product keywords on my WebPages… I have a sitemap – I’m covered.” Well, it’s not quite that simple… However, creating a website that’s properly optimized for SEO isn’t rocket science either – take a look!

Keyword Balance – all in the mix

Let’s go ahead and first say that you need high traffic industry keywords across your website, to gain SEO Traffic. If you aren’t already practicing this strategy – do some research. Use the Google Adwords Keyword Tool to get quick search volume and competition stats for all of your top products. You might just find that there’s a much more popular term for what you’re selling than what you’ve been calling it on your site.

Conversely, if you’ve been very “gung-ho” on targeting ripe keywords again, and again, and again – you could be over optimizing these phrases for your site. Google is getting much smarter, and their newest algorithm updates will actually penalize you for including too many mentions of a target keyword across the page content. A great rule of thumb for over optimization of keywords is to write some copy – then leave for 24 hours – come back and read the copy again. If you get the feeling it doesn’t read normally, or sounds too robot driven, that’s a good sign you’re over optimizing your keywords. For example, if you have a printing website, you would want to use a sentence like “Printing business cards on quality paper is the best way of printing business cards, any time you are considering business card printing.” Even though you’ve included more keyword mentions – it might actually hurt you.

Internal Link Structure

If you’ve been thinking about offsite links, you need to be thinking about onsite links as well! Internal linking is your key indicator to google that you are your own primary reference. This means as you go across your website, and you mention products in passing, other than the landing page products themselves – these need to be linked to. Google will crawl your site, and create a profile for your internal link architecture. This should build like a pyramid, with the most links going back to your top products and content, and the least amount of links pointing toward new or exploratory pages. If you currently simply have all of your pages listed in a single sitemap or product list – this is a huge waste of opportunity. Consider any relevant internal linking you can create: it will pay off big SEO wise.

Anchor Text

On the topic of internal links, it’s important to have your link anchor text represent your targeted keywords. This is essential and basic advice for anyone creating any link anywhere – but it’s especially essential for your own internal linking efforts. If your electronics store Digital Mega Mart is sending someone from your HDTV landing page to your DVD page, you might consider saying “we also have a wide selection of DVD’s for sale, click here for details.” This is an awful waste of SEO opportunity – as they link value is dramatically diminished without relevant anchor text, and you don’t even mention your brand in the copy for citation value. A much better use of the link anchor text would be “Digital Mega Mart has thousands of DVD’s for Sale too – look for new releases today!” You can see that you’ll get increased SEO value from the voluminous anchor text of “DVD’s for sale” and build your brand’s rankings by closely associating it with the popular keyword term.

Outbound Links

Just as creating inbound links to your website is essential – so is the practice of outbound linking to relevant industry websites. Outbound linking is valuable for sever reasons: first, it shows google that you understand your industry, and have cited the existing top and growing industry sources. While you are passing even more value to these sites – it also helps you by putting you on google’s radar as a likeness to these websites. Second - and this is particularly relevant with other growing, non-first position sites – is the increased likeliness outbound linking has of attracting inbound links to your site. As SEO’s and webmasters continuously analyze their SEO tools such as Open Site Explorer and Google Webmaster Tools, they’re constantly analyzing who’s linking to them. As they see non-competitive industry peers linking to them, they’re likely to link back – or even reach out to establish an actual relationship. These are the SEO gateways that represent true investments in your site’s future.