TECHNOLOGY
A Beginner’s Guide To SEO For Startups
Search engine optimization or SEO is an essential part of brand-building in today’s competitive environment.
However, many startups don’t understand SEO well and are not sure where to begin. Ignoring SEO or implementing it incorrectly leads to missed opportunities and wasted resources.
SEO is not intuitive and a lot of information is out there — some of it seemingly contradictory — and much of what people know or think they know about SEO is greatly misunderstood. Doing your own research to better understand what a healthy SEO campaign looks like should be among your first tasks.
If you own or manage a startup business and you’re ready to undertake SEO or build on your fledgling SEO strategy, we can help! We put together this beginner’s guide to SEO to help you start or grow your SEO campaign.
Create a Mobile-Friendly Website
According to a 2022 report from Statista.com, the number of smartphone subscriptions globally currently surpasses six billion and is predicted to grow by several hundred million in the next few years. That’s why Google, inarguably the leading search engine worldwide, has implemented a mobile-first indexing process, meaning that it uses the mobile version of website content for indexing and ranking.
Mobile-friendly websites — those that provide a good mobile experience — not only offer a better user experience (UX), but they also benefit from a rankings boost. Optimize your website for mobile use by designing a responsive website that delivers the same content on desktop and mobile devices. Responsive websites — those that adjust the page size to the user’s device — are the standard today.
Here are some technical issues to think about when creating your website:
Website Structure. Simply put, the structure is the hierarchy of the site, or the way in which the pages connect to each other. Developing a sitemap that enhances the user experience is key. Easy-to-follow navigation with pages named simply and understandably (i.e., not with your branded terms) leads to a good user experience, and UX directly affects the ranking of mobile pages.
Page Load Speed. The speed at which actual users are able to download your individual web pages is a Google ranking signal with growing importance. The content management system (CMS) that you select along with its configuration play a critical role in page speed. Just as important, is your web developer’s abilities to properly code an error-free website with fast loading pages.
Hosting Provider. In addition to the page speed considerations listed above, you must carefully consider the choice of a website hosting service. Not all hosting companies are alike, and your choice may impact your SEO results. Google prefers secure websites with fast loading speeds, which requires a solid network infrastructure and optimized server configurations.
Optimize with Keywords
Perform thorough research to determine the words and phrases that your target customers use when searching for what you offer. Focus on a few important (even niche) keywords that best describe your offering(s). Utilizing relevant keywords correctly throughout your website — on the pages on which they make the most sense — helps make your website visible and boosts your search engine rankings. Keywords should be carefully selected and utilized in your URLs, title tags, meta descriptions, page titles, heading tags, body content, internal link anchor text as well as certain image filenames and image alt tags.
How do you select keywords? While you can begin by typing in words and terms that describe your products or services, tools are available to help marketers with keyword research tasks. These tools provide data that allows you to determine the number of people searching by each keyword, find related keywords and learn the likelihood of ranking for various keywords. A better ranking is more easily obtained using low-competition keywords, especially for startups with little brand recognition or website authority.
Produce High-Quality Content
Because search engines rank web pages and blog posts with useful information more highly than others, your content must reflect what the user seeks when searching for your product or service. Quality content — text, images, infographics, blog posts and videos — is topic-relevant, engaging, unique, well-researched and well-written. When driving traffic to your site is the goal, less is more — less high-quality content is better than more low-quality content.
Good content not only describes your product or service in simple terms, but it also lets users know how it solves their problems, educates them about its use, and answers what you know or sense they are asking. Be sure to provide downloadable resources that may be helpful to current and potential customers.
Quality content is also easy for users to read. Use images to break up large sections of text, create relevant headers that separate content into reader-friendly chunks, include internal links to other pages of your website, and use bullet points for quick scanning and to highlight important information. Make website pages actionable with good calls-to-action (CTAs) that help turn visitors into customers.
Maintaining interest in your website and attracting repeat traffic require constant refreshing of your content. Product description pages don’t generally change much, but new blog posts and podcasts should be added regularly. For inspiration regarding new topics, check out Google Trends, Twitter Trends, Google Analytics, customers’ social media posts and customers’ emails to your sales team. Attend an industry conference, solicit guest blogs and more.
Build Authority with Backlinks
A backlink or inbound link is a hyperlink to your website from a website other than your own. Association with relevant, higher-authority websites via backlinks results in higher rankings. A number of good backlinks signifies that your site is a popular or authoritative destination, which leads to improved website rankings on search engine results pages (SERPs).
How do startups earn backlinks? Guest blog posts on large industry publications, listings in industry directories, new product announcements and adding your website URL to your social media may help you rank quickly and attract quality links back to your website. Be aware that your content must be high-quality and engaging to earn links from trusted sources.
In addition to attracting traffic from SERP rankings, popular bloggers, trusted journalists and social media influencers can be a good source of links. Their audiences may be small, but they tend to be loyal. You may develop ongoing relationships with influencers, generate content with specific influencers in mind or offer their audiences free products. Any mention of your company (along with your URL) provides an opportunity to increase website traffic and, ultimately, sales.
Track and Measure Results
Is your SEO strategy leading you in the right direction? That depends on where you want to go! Research keywords (popularity, competition, relevance, and intent) using Google AdWords and other free and paid tools. Track your organic traffic (number of visitors from search engines) by page URL via Google Analytics. Monitor keyword performance (rankings, impressions, clicks and clickthrough rate) in Google Search Console. View your backlinks with backlink analysis tools that are also widely available. Be sure to utilize these helpful SEO tracking tools to optimize your existing content.
Tracking your SEO results over time is vital. If your tracking metrics aren’t looking good after 3 – 6 months, then change your strategy. But before you do, be sure to set up a reliable analytics tool in advance so you can compare “before” and “after” results. You may want to select more relevant keywords or keywords that are easier to rank. You may find that your audience is not who you originally expected, and you should use this opportunity to optimize for the users who visit your site, not those that you thought would come.
Conduct Ongoing SEO
SEO is not a process to undertake only once. Optimizing for SEO requires a significant amount of effort, and you may find concentrating on just one or two aspects at a time easier. As discussed above, frequent reevaluation of your SEO may indicate the need for website and/or content adjustments to boost or maintain rankings and meet your users’ needs.
Additional reasons to continually revisit your SEO strategy include changes in the online marketplace, SEO trends and changes in your business. As your startup grows, you want to add pages for your new products and services. Your audience may grow and shift as your business evolves. And we all know how often Google’s ranking algorithms change over time!
Reap the Benefits of SEO
Most people think of SEO as a way to increase traffic to a website for the purpose of growing sales and increasing revenue. When done well, SEO does that — but it does so much more! The fringe benefits of SEO not only lead to a better written and designed website, but they also make your business more credible and your brand more valuable. Are you ready to achieve your business goals?
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TECHNOLOGY
Next-gen chips, Amazon Q, and speedy S3
AWS re:Invent, which has been taking place from November 27 and runs to December 1, has had its usual plethora of announcements: a total of 21 at time of print.
Perhaps not surprisingly, given the huge potential impact of generative AI – ChatGPT officially turns one year old today – a lot of focus has been on the AI side for AWS’ announcements, including a major partnership inked with NVIDIA across infrastructure, software, and services.
Yet there has been plenty more announced at the Las Vegas jamboree besides. Here, CloudTech rounds up the best of the rest:
Next-generation chips
This was the other major AI-focused announcement at re:Invent: the launch of two new chips, AWS Graviton4 and AWS Trainium2, for training and running AI and machine learning (ML) models, among other customer workloads. Graviton4 shapes up against its predecessor with 30% better compute performance, 50% more cores and 75% more memory bandwidth, while Trainium2 delivers up to four times faster training than before and will be able to be deployed in EC2 UltraClusters of up to 100,000 chips.
The EC2 UltraClusters are designed to ‘deliver the highest performance, most energy efficient AI model training infrastructure in the cloud’, as AWS puts it. With it, customers will be able to train large language models in ‘a fraction of the time’, as well as double energy efficiency.
As ever, AWS offers customers who are already utilising these tools. Databricks, Epic and SAP are among the companies cited as using the new AWS-designed chips.
Zero-ETL integrations
AWS announced new Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL, Amazon DynamoDB, and Amazon Relational Database Services (Amazon RDS) for MySQL integrations with Amazon Redshift, AWS’ cloud data warehouse. The zero-ETL integrations – eliminating the need to build ETL (extract, transform, load) data pipelines – make it easier to connect and analyse transactional data across various relational and non-relational databases in Amazon Redshift.
A simple example of how zero-ETL functions can be seen is in a hypothetical company which stores transactional data – time of transaction, items bought, where the transaction occurred – in a relational database, but use another analytics tool to analyse data in a non-relational database. To connect it all up, companies would previously have to construct ETL data pipelines which are a time and money sink.
The latest integrations “build on AWS’s zero-ETL foundation… so customers can quickly and easily connect all of their data, no matter where it lives,” the company said.
Amazon S3 Express One Zone
AWS announced the general availability of Amazon S3 Express One Zone, a new storage class purpose-built for customers’ most frequently-accessed data. Data access speed is up to 10 times faster and request costs up to 50% lower than standard S3. Companies can also opt to collocate their Amazon S3 Express One Zone data in the same availability zone as their compute resources.
Companies and partners who are using Amazon S3 Express One Zone include ChaosSearch, Cloudera, and Pinterest.
Amazon Q
A new product, and an interesting pivot, again with generative AI at its core. Amazon Q was announced as a ‘new type of generative AI-powered assistant’ which can be tailored to a customer’s business. “Customers can get fast, relevant answers to pressing questions, generate content, and take actions – all informed by a customer’s information repositories, code, and enterprise systems,” AWS added. The service also can assist companies building on AWS, as well as companies using AWS applications for business intelligence, contact centres, and supply chain management.
Customers cited as early adopters include Accenture, BMW and Wunderkind.
Want to learn more about cybersecurity and the cloud from industry leaders? Check out Cyber Security & Cloud Expo taking place in Amsterdam, California, and London. Explore other upcoming enterprise technology events and webinars powered by TechForge here.
TECHNOLOGY
HCLTech and Cisco create collaborative hybrid workplaces
Digital comms specialist Cisco and global tech firm HCLTech have teamed up to launch Meeting-Rooms-as-a-Service (MRaaS).
Available on a subscription model, this solution modernises legacy meeting rooms and enables users to join meetings from any meeting solution provider using Webex devices.
The MRaaS solution helps enterprises simplify the design, implementation and maintenance of integrated meeting rooms, enabling seamless collaboration for their globally distributed hybrid workforces.
Rakshit Ghura, senior VP and Global head of digital workplace services, HCLTech, said: “MRaaS combines our consulting and managed services expertise with Cisco’s proficiency in Webex devices to change the way employees conceptualise, organise and interact in a collaborative environment for a modern hybrid work model.
“The common vision of our partnership is to elevate the collaboration experience at work and drive productivity through modern meeting rooms.”
Alexandra Zagury, VP of partner managed and as-a-Service Sales at Cisco, said: “Our partnership with HCLTech helps our clients transform their offices through cost-effective managed services that support the ongoing evolution of workspaces.
“As we reimagine the modern office, we are making it easier to support collaboration and productivity among workers, whether they are in the office or elsewhere.”
Cisco’s Webex collaboration devices harness the power of artificial intelligence to offer intuitive, seamless collaboration experiences, enabling meeting rooms with smart features such as meeting zones, intelligent people framing, optimised attendee audio and background noise removal, among others.
Want to learn more about cybersecurity and the cloud from industry leaders? Check out Cyber Security & Cloud Expo taking place in Amsterdam, California, and London. Explore other upcoming enterprise technology events and webinars powered by TechForge here.
TECHNOLOGY
Canonical releases low-touch private cloud MicroCloud
Canonical has announced the general availability of MicroCloud, a low-touch, open source cloud solution. MicroCloud is part of Canonical’s growing cloud infrastructure portfolio.
It is purpose-built for scalable clusters and edge deployments for all types of enterprises. It is designed with simplicity, security and automation in mind, minimising the time and effort to both deploy and maintain it. Conveniently, enterprise support for MicroCloud is offered as part of Canonical’s Ubuntu Pro subscription, with several support tiers available, and priced per node.
MicroClouds are optimised for repeatable and reliable remote deployments. A single command initiates the orchestration and clustering of various components with minimal involvement by the user, resulting in a fully functional cloud within minutes. This simplified deployment process significantly reduces the barrier to entry, putting a production-grade cloud at everyone’s fingertips.
Juan Manuel Ventura, head of architectures & technologies at Spindox, said: “Cloud computing is not only about technology, it’s the beating heart of any modern industrial transformation, driving agility and innovation. Our mission is to provide our customers with the most effective ways to innovate and bring value; having a complexity-free cloud infrastructure is one important piece of that puzzle. With MicroCloud, the focus shifts away from struggling with cloud operations to solving real business challenges” says
In addition to seamless deployment, MicroCloud prioritises security and ease of maintenance. All MicroCloud components are built with strict confinement for increased security, with over-the-air transactional updates that preserve data and roll back on errors automatically. Upgrades to newer versions are handled automatically and without downtime, with the mechanisms to hold or schedule them as needed.
With this approach, MicroCloud caters to both on-premise clouds but also edge deployments at remote locations, allowing organisations to use the same infrastructure primitives and services wherever they are needed. It is suitable for business-in-branch office locations or industrial use inside a factory, as well as distributed locations where the focus is on replicability and unattended operations.
Cedric Gegout, VP of product at Canonical, said: “As data becomes more distributed, the infrastructure has to follow. Cloud computing is now distributed, spanning across data centres, far and near edge computing appliances. MicroCloud is our answer to that.
“By packaging known infrastructure primitives in a portable and unattended way, we are delivering a simpler, more prescriptive cloud experience that makes zero-ops a reality for many Industries.“
MicroCloud’s lightweight architecture makes it usable on both commodity and high-end hardware, with several ways to further reduce its footprint depending on your workload needs. In addition to the standard Ubuntu Server or Desktop, MicroClouds can be run on Ubuntu Core – a lightweight OS optimised for the edge. With Ubuntu Core, MicroClouds are a perfect solution for far-edge locations with limited computing capabilities. Users can choose to run their workloads using Kubernetes or via system containers. System containers based on LXD behave similarly to traditional VMs but consume fewer resources while providing bare-metal performance.
Coupled with Canonical’s Ubuntu Pro + Support subscription, MicroCloud users can benefit from an enterprise-grade open source cloud solution that is fully supported and with better economics. An Ubuntu Pro subscription offers security maintenance for the broadest collection of open-source software available from a single vendor today. It covers over 30k packages with a consistent security maintenance commitment, and additional features such as kernel livepatch, systems management at scale, certified compliance and hardening profiles enabling easy adoption for enterprises. With per-node pricing and no hidden fees, customers can rest assured that their environment is secure and supported without the expensive price tag typically associated with cloud solutions.
Want to learn more about cybersecurity and the cloud from industry leaders? Check out Cyber Security & Cloud Expo taking place in Amsterdam, California, and London. Explore other upcoming enterprise technology events and webinars powered by TechForge here.
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