Via Bill Slawski’s post, I came across a new blog called Startup Review that provides case studies about successful Internet Start-Ups. So far, the blog has profiled Home Gain, Rotten Tomatoes, Zappos, MySpace, Craigslist and many more successful online businesses.

The reviews are all very pedagogical and should make some good reading for people running an online business or those willing to start one.
Each case study seems to be divided in 7 parts:

– Why the start up has been profiled on Startup Review: the blog owner, Nisan Gabay, explains what were the factors that made him choose to review each startup;
– The Key Success Factors of the startup: in this part, the author outlines the key success factors that made the start-up business model unique;
– Its Launch Strategy: how the start-up was launched;
– An Exit Analysis: gives information on how the company was acquired;
– Food For Thought
– Reference Articles: links to useful articles about the start up;
– Questions for Startup Review Readers: StartUp Review incites people to leave comments and to contribute to the review.

One of the case studies talks about RottenTomatoes and is titled: Rotten Tomatoes Case Study: SEO drives traffic growth . The author explains that the owners of RottenTomatoes focused mainly on SEO to drive traffic to the site. They basically rely their SEO strategy on creativity and website architecture in order to obtain a search engine friendly website and gain lots of good links.

Thankfully, RottenTomatoes inhouse SEO team stopped by Startup Review and left several comments. Here’s a summary of the comments that I stole from Bill’s post 🙂 :

1. Movie and review sites were happy to link to them because their focus was upon linking out to other sites. A partnership, and hosting of, the Online Film Critics Society (and other offline critics groups) brought them visibility and positive relationships with related sites.

2. They’ve been active from the start in sending out links to directories like DMOZ and others, especially for new or upcoming movies and actors.

3. Page titles, alt tags, and good URL structures were thought about carefully, and set up so that that would get indexed well in search engines.

4. They shared information freely and built relationships with other sites like Netflix, and provided information about their ratings to others to publish via RSS feeds. Fans of their site, like Google engineers, integrated their site into prominent places, like Google’s Desktop Search v1, Gmail RSS Feeds v1.

According to one commenter, SEO traffic comprised up to 70% of RottenTomatoe’s traffic. Wow, that’s what I called a successful SEO strategy. Hard work , dedication, and creativity are the main factors that helped them build a strong SEO strategy. Nice job guys.