<story><title>SEO for Startups: Top 7 Lessons + A Trip to Y Combinator</title><url>http://www.seomoz.org/blog/seo-for-startups-top-7-lessons</url><text></text></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>patio11</author><text>It was excellent of Rand both to give this presentation and for him and YC to post it publicly, because I think the startup community has a giant blind spot where SEO is concerned.  It isn&apos;t just black magic, goat entrails, and snake oil.&lt;p&gt;My one qualification, on advice #7 (&quot;you should have sources of traffic other than Google&quot;): while it is certainly dangerous to have 90% of your traffic coming from Google, in certain niches you have little other choice.  If you&apos;re pitching a product in a niche with lots of linkerati in it, you&apos;re going to have lots of non-Google traffic.  If you&apos;re pitching a product on Facebook, you&apos;re going to have lots of non-Google traffic.  If you&apos;re pitching a product to forty-something ladies, you&apos;re probably not going to have lots of non-Google traffic, because &lt;i&gt;Google is the Internet&apos;s navigation for these users&lt;/i&gt;.  They don&apos;t have a regular blog they trust, they don&apos;t spread links around themselves at nearly the velocities y&apos;all do, they don&apos;t tweet.  But they do Google.  The sites that they might click through to you from?  They got to those by Google, too.&lt;p&gt;Since I tend to pitch to non-technical users and need marketing that scales out of proportion to time invested, Plan A: Google.  Plan B: AdWords.  Plan C: I&apos;ve been looking for a good candidate for 3 years now.  (P.S. If your startup has an option I will pay you money for it.)</text></comment>
<story><title>SEO for Startups: Top 7 Lessons + A Trip to Y Combinator</title><url>http://www.seomoz.org/blog/seo-for-startups-top-7-lessons</url><text></text></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>leelin</author><text>&lt;p&gt;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;  Posterous (I learned the official way to pronounce it - &quot;pastarus&quot;)
&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;
Actually, the two founders of Posterous pronounce their startup differently, unless one of them caved recently.</text></comment>