With Snapier.com, my early stage startup, we’re betting that a large fraction of our future customers will find us from organic searches. However, we know better than to bet the house on a single, high value keyword like API integration. So, we’re trying to think a little like Hacker News’ resident SEO expert Patrick McKenzie (patio11):

…go for long tailed keywords, and make sure you have a scalable system to create the content.

The solution is our directory of API integrations, the Zapbook. We’ve built a quick and dirty system of categorizing what we are calling “snaps”, little pieces of content that fall into categories that encompass popular web services. The hope is that we can build up a powerhouse of extremely useful (if narrow) solutions that will rank highly across very specific long tail searches.

Some things we spent some time thinking about:

Common sense URL structure:

We wanted to be sure that we wouldn’t be shooting ourselves in the foot if we decide to make changes later on down the road. So we kept URL structure really simple and obvious. Ideally, we should be able to restructure the way a user searches and navigates the Zapbook without altering the URLs Google has indexed.

Simplified content creatation:

Our Snapbook is no good without content, so we made it super simple to manually add small pieces of content as we go along the path of building our company. Convenience is key. Eventually, it should be trivial to let users augment content as they use the site, or have services like Textbroker automatically handle this.

Measurable value of content:

We can track every user that signs up after landing on a piece of deep content. From that, we can calculate the value of an average (or specific) piece of content, allowing us to justify spending more or less time or money on content creation.