When looking for ways of driving people to your site SEO is hands downs one of the best long term approaches possible.
Despite popular belief, it doesn’t take as much work as you may think. I’m a big believer in the 80/20 principle, where 20% of the effort drive 80% of the results.

This is mainly because you could drive yourself insane trying to following all the advice and algorithm changes that Google throws at you. That’s why I like to focus on the fundamentals.

There are 3 major components to SEO:

• Compliance
• Content
• Back links

Compliance means that you’ve integrated the major components of good SEO practices.

Sitemaps

• HTML
•  XML

Proper tagging

•  title
•  description
•  canonical
•  alt text

Avoiding duplicate content

• making sure that content does duplicate inset on multiple pages of your site

Friendly links

•  /articles/friendly-links-are-easy over articles/2013/05/23/friendly%20links

Content means that you’ve done your research and determined the keywords you’d have a chance to rank for. Now that you have your list of keywords you should be able to come up with at least 20 topics of the top of your head to write about.

One of the most important components of good SEO is getting people to link back to You.

This indicates to google that you have a trusted site with relevant content.

It would be good to focus on getting back links from services that have a high page rank & their content corresponds in some way to the keywords you choose to focus on.

You can do this my writing guest posts on some else’s website, throw contests or exchange banners on relevant sites.

I hope this high level overview gave you a better sense of basic SEO.

This is a intro, to series of detailed posts on SEO:

Part 1 – Researching your Market ( next week )

Main takeaways from the short presentation.

• If possible try to setup in multiple Availability Zones and a Load balancers for them.
• Identify Single Points of Failure early on.
• Amazon S3 for storing Static files for the site.
• Amazon Glacier for large data to be retrieved in the future.
• Routinely go over the motions of backing up your app/db & restoring it, in order to verify the backups aren’t corrupted.
• If deciding between SQL or No-SQL always go for SQL (unless you`re a “big data” startup)

Two reasons:
1. The technology is well documented & maintained.
“It’s good to have friends in high places…” which translates to: Whole dev teams are using it at Facebook, LinkedIn & the contribute, publish articles on how they improved those technologies for their own use.
2. Early on, while building your company you probably won’t exceed what SQL is capable of.

Security Measures:

• Separate access for different teams, people and contractors.
• Implement multi factor authentication (google authenticator)
• Never share main credentials with anyone (truecrypt)
• Restrict the pool of IP addresses that are able to SSH into the infrastructure
• Serve everything over SSL, unless you have plenty of redirects, can’t handle the increased load time.

Useful tools to look into:

• Fail2Ban – prevent brute attacks
• Amazon RDS for Database
• Amazon Beanstalk/OpsWorks for App Hosting/Deployment

Log analytics:

• Hive > Hadoop (lots of overhead but more elastic)
• LogStash > ElasticSearch > Kibana (fast to implement)

I’ve been meaning to start a blog for the past 3 years, I don’t doubt that there plenty people out there like me.

Main reason is that I really have bad memory & use multiple notepads, moleskins, to-do apps and google docs to manage the various aspects of my life. Through out the past couple of years I’ve managed to work/meet plenty of great people while living around NYC (Brooklyn, Queens, LES).

This will be my attempt to share my notes, lessons learned and various stories on past & present projects.