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Search Engine Optimization (SEO) – Yikes!
Dec 4 2007

I have never done any active SEO work for Babble Soft or this blog, but now the time has come to do some.  With the pending release of two new features to Baby Insights and my plan to raise angel money in 2008, I need to make sure people (our potential customers) can actually find us. 

We have unique products that sometimes people don’t even know they need until they see them.  How does a couple in their 8th month of pregnancy with their first child even have a clue about all the things they will need/want to remember after their baby arrives?  They typically don’t!  Many people still don’t think applications like ours exist.  Right now we average less than 50 unique visitors to the Babble Soft website per day. I get more visits to my blog and from the cats in my neighborhood than to the company site!

Any links we have are because of luck, the kindness of friends & strangers, or links from our Partners.  We have had some press mentions but it seems like the online press has a moratorium on putting actual active hyperlinks in their articles for some reason.  I mean how insanely crazy is it to let your readers easily go to the sites of the companies/people you are writing about?  Ugh!  I guess they think it would be a bad thing to drive traffic away from their site?  I haven’t figured that one out yet.  Thank goodness for blog writers who don’t have those rules!

Based on an easy to understand post by The Karcher Group called Should You Hire an SEO Firm, or an SEO Consultant, it seems my options are:

  1. Do it ALL myself.  At the moment, I can’t do this physically because there aren’t enough hours in the day.  Plus I am not an expert in this area.  This is the cheapest option when it comes to dollars but the most expensive when it comes to my time allocation and sanity.
  2. Find a consultant who can tell me what to do.  See above comments for Option 1.  Unfortunately, I can’t clone myself and have my clone work for free also and implement what the consultant tells me to implement. 🙂
  3. Find a one man/woman shop.  This is a possibility, but how do I find that one person who can put a comprehensive SEO plan into place?
  4. Find a full service SEO firm.  This is also a possibility (with cost being a big factor).  The challenge is to find the right firm who is willing to work ‘flexibly and creatively’ with a small self-funded company.

This is a critical decision on many levels.  I can’t afford a mistake in this area especially since I’m leaning towards option 3 or 4.  This means I will have to take a calculated risk and place a bet on an individual or a firm that after a few months of hard work and payments, will start to pay off.  I have to part with precious cash up front for the hope of having it all come back to me and then some!

If any of you have gone through this process, I’d love to hear about the things you considered.  What questions did you ask?  What did you do on your own?  What did a firm do for you?

Author: | Filed under: entrepreneurship, fundraising | Tags: , , , | 5 Comments »

5 Comments on “Search Engine Optimization (SEO) – Yikes!”

  1. 1 tanya said at 2:11 PM on December 5th, 2007:

    I haven’t gone through the process myself but I must say that you can do it yourself while you consider hiring someone else to do it. There are quite a few resources on what you can do yourself. Good luck.

  2. 2 Miguel said at 4:21 PM on December 5th, 2007:

    I enjoyed your post. AdAge just published a story related to SEO and Social Meda optimization. Matt Creamer, one of their editors, writes about his experience being “optimized” by SEO and SMM. You might enjoy the article:

    http://adage.com/digital/article?article_id=122344

  3. 3 Aruni said at 7:32 PM on December 5th, 2007:

    Hi Tanya – I’ve been trying to do a little myself with this blog and setting up a facebook account but now I think I need to call in the experts.

    Hi Miguel – thanks for the link to the article. I did really enjoy reading it and it was helpful. It is crazy what good SEO can do and what bad name choices can do. I wish he had mentioned the name of the consumer products company who made that name mistake!

  4. 4 Susan said at 3:53 PM on December 9th, 2007:

    Hey Aruni 🙂

    Shane mentioned to me that you could use some SEO help and sent me your link. I’d be happy to help you if I can. Please feel free to drop me an email! I can also recommend a few people if you need things I can’t provide.

  5. 5 Aruni said at 9:31 PM on December 9th, 2007:

    Thanks Susan! I looked at your site. Very nice. I think I’ve found my SEO help and will be finalizing things this week. If anything changes or if I need additional help, I will certainly let you know. I’ll most definitely be blogging about my SEO experience. 🙂 Thanks for stopping by!