Dear Startup CEOs, CPOs (Chief Product Officers) & Founders,

I know your time is valuable, so I'll be brief. If you currently have or are in the process of developing a business/marketing plan that includes the phrase "traffic from search engines," please peruse the following diagram:

The percentages are rough guesses, but they represent the collective wisdom of many experts in modern SEO. You certainly need to get the on-page factors right, but these are easy. Information from alternative signals (like click-through rate, toolbar usage, analytics, etc.) is still relatively insignificant. Rankings, particularly for competitive queries, are largely governed by links. The ability to rank for large amounts of less competitive keywords (long tail queries) with your content (by getting those pages crawled and kept in the main search engine indices) is also reliant on links.

Have a look at just one more visual:

That Pacman size chunk of the pie chart has been broken down into three important sections (again, the percentages are a rough guess). Taken together, these illustrations and the logic behind them should give you a solid foundation for understanding SEO. Get the on-page stuff right - that's easy. Target the right keywords - again, easy. Earn large numbers of links from diverse, high quality sources with descriptive anchor text - that's crazy hard.

Great SEO - the kind of SEO that can actually build a business by exposing a new company to thousands of targeted customers every day - isn't done after the product launches. It's not even done during the website design & architecture phase. Great SEO happens during product design. I know product is hard - maybe even the hardest part of building a great startup - but you have to add this step if you want to win.

Incentivize large numbers of diverse website operators to link to you. 

Think about it right now - what is it that your product/service/website/company does that's going to make people link? How are you going to convert a higher percentage of the visitors to your site into productive, value-adding links than your competitors? What emotions do you leverage that inspire a visitor to link to you (not just Tweet about you)?

We work with a lot of startups, and I can count on one hand the number of companies who thought about this during the product design phase. In the future, more companies are going to think about this and execute on it. They're going to get the top rankings. Those who don't will have to compete in spite of the fact that their competition has thousands of targeted, interested visitors showing up on their website every day. Be a part of that first group - think SEO when you're designing your business, not after.

Sincerely,
Rand Fishkin, Startup CEO & SEO Addict