Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a lengthy process, but once you excel at it, the benefits are really worthy of the time and efforts you put in. If you type ‘venture capital 101’ in the Google! search box, you will find that the pdf ebook posted on our website MyCapital.com has ranked top #2 in Google!.

How do we achieve this? We went through painful learning processes and trial and error as most other businesses. Below are some of our findings that we hope you can find them useful.

1. Select right keywords: At first we made a mistake of selecting keywords that have highest search volumes. We thought that this will bring more traffic to our website. We were wrong about this. The best keyword is actually the least competitive keyword.

For example, we did a search on keyword ‘venture capital’ in Google! and found that it has 26,200,000 competitions (as of today – June 26, 2009). In addition, the top #1 is wikipedia, which is a website we won’t be able to beat. Then we did a search on keyword ‘raising venture capital’. We found that it has only 816,000 competitions, and the top #1 web is a blog that has only a PR rank of 3. This means that ‘raising venture capital’ is actually the better keyword candidate than ‘venture capital’. With the same method, we have found that keyword ‘Venture Capital 101’.

When you type ‘venture capital 101’, you will see that this keyword has only 731,000 competitions and the top #1 page only has a PR rank 1.

2. Content is king: If you download the ‘Venture Capital 101’ pdf ebook from our website, you will find that this ebook has 19 pages! We have tried to give a very comprehensive guidelines on what is venture capital, how does venture capital firms work, and how to raise venture capital effectively, including dos and don’ts in raising venture capital. One thing to note is that, when we wrote this ‘Venture Capital 101’ ebook, we really meant to provide useful information for entrepreneurs and startups that are looking for venture capital investment, and did not mean to use it only for SEO purpose. Therefore, our writer had not ‘stuffed’ keywords into this ebook and the content is very natural.

3. URL name does matter: As you can see, our ebook is posted on our root directory, with a url named www.mycapital.com/VentureCapital101_MyCapital.pdf. You should always put the keyword in your url, and try not put it after two many subcategories. For example, a simple url such as www.mycapital.com/venturecapital101.htm is definitely better than www.mycapital.com/resources/articles/venturecapital101.htm

4. Make sure your web page is indexed in search engines: The simplest way of doing this is to give the page a link yourself. In our case, we give this article a link on our homepage www.mycapital.com. By giving yourself a link from a page that is already indexed by search engines, you ensure this page can be found by search engines.

Advice for others:

The best SEO practices are being discussed in many books today and are no more a black box like how it was five years ago. As the pay-per-click (PPC) advertising programs such as Google! AdWords and Yahoo! Search Marketing are getting more and more expensive, you really has to excel at SEO in order to survive. Since a SEO campaign generally takes at least six months to see results, you should start doing SEO for your business as soon as possible.