Common Sence Search Engine Optimization for Web2.0 startups - SEO is neither good or evil!

In my contact with many companies there is a lot of talk about SEO, search engine optimization. Everyone knows that Search engines as Google are incredibly important to your sites success, but many seems to focus solely on SEO.

So here is my thoughts on Search engine optimization:

Follow standards
Be aware of how SEO works and follow optimize titles, keywords and styles when developing your site. Google should have index every dynamically created page of your site, and they all must have effective page titles.

Get external links to your site
Optimize your PageRank by getting links from sites with high PageRank. When submitting news, do it blogstyle and ping bloggindexes such as Technorati and others. Use Digg and digg-clones to get coverage of your blognews. Convince other blogs to write about you.

Focus on your users
Design your site for your visitors, not for Google. Don't focus too much on the SEO, a great site will get a high PR anyway, and happy users are more likely to link to you than unhappy ones.

Use the Long tail
Take advantage of the Long tail effect - when writing news, avoid general titles and try to be unique. It's probably easier to show up on the first Google result page for "Alchemists in Lithuania" than it is for "USA".

Urbanshortcut.com - new cool web2.0 startup

I haven't written much for a while now, since I've been working hard on a few very interesting projects. The first to go live in private beta is a really cool web2.0 site: www.urbanshortcut.com. The site aims to help people to find great places in major European cities. Matching your interests and taste with other users, you will find great places for shopping, nightlife, staying and dining. This is helpful in the home city, but really meritorious when you travel to new cities.

I call it a personalized travel guide!

Start your own social network

As a followup to a comment that I just wrote I want to say something about my view on creating a social network (or a site in general).

Since it's pretty easy to create a social network or user generated content site nowadays, I find lots of new sites in these areas. Many are pretty good, and some are less impressive. Since I am a very generous person I will share my views on creating a website.

1. Business or pleasure
Are your site meant to be for business usage or for pleasure? Focus on one of these fields - When I'm working, it's not likely that I (or my employer) want me to be distracted by to much fun, and when I'm not working I might want to be able to relax a bit and even show pictures of myself at a party - That I wouldn't do if business contacts where using the site.

2. Choose your target audience
You must have a legible target audience when you plan your site. Will your site appeal to the taste of everyone? Should it be a general site or are you targeting people with a special hobby or profession?

When you choose your target audience, try and choose one that includes you. If you're into comics, do something with comics. If you want your site to be successful you'll have to marry it for a few years, so try to select an area that you like or are interested in yourself.

3. Check the competition
I guess that you must have some ideas that is value adding to your audience. Unless you have a huge marketing budget or are very good at guerrilla marketing, it will be hard for you to reach your audience if you aren't doing something new and fresh.

4. Get something out there quick, and get feedback
Since you went to step four your site have a clear target audience, and it has enough new and interesting functionality to appeal to the audience.
Now communicate with your visitors and let them co-drive the development of the site.

Or ignore the steps and follow your intuition from start to end! Either you will have a good intuition, and then the site have a chance of becoming a success, or your intuition sucks and the "soccer and knitting site" isn't a big hit. If it's a hit, write me an email and thank me, if it's not, the site is a great showcase for future employers!

Any steps or thoughts you think I missed? ;-)

Pownce.com - Is it really necessary?

Today I found Pownce which I for some reason haven't seen before. It's a web2.0 app for sharing photos, invitations, files or text with your friends and contacts. It's still in invitation only testing mode, so I haven't tested the service. It looks good but I'm not sure that this alone will be interesting enough to be a really successful startup. What is interesting is that they have a clientside application as well, that take use of the Adobe Air system, so you can download a client for both Mac and Windows. Since I haven't seen Air that much in action yet, I'm looking forward to Pownce just to give Air a try.

As I see it to much of the functionality can be found in competing, a bit similar webapps, as in a MSN, Yahoo or facebook group, and I don't think people will bother signing up for just some smaller extra features. If they make a facebook / yahoo / google widget out of it, I'd say it would be more of an interesting bet. A mobile solution for sharing would also make this a much more interesting startup to me.