Living Entrepreneurship Blog / Babson Entrepreneurs

Do you want to improve your SEO? Synapse SEM Campus Visit

By | March 4, 2014

On Wednesday, February 19, Paul Benson M’09 of Synapse SEM visited campus. The Butler Venture Accelerator was privileged to be able to sit in on his talk. Benson’s presentation provided very useful information on how startups can leverage search engine optimization (SEO) to increase their websites’ visibilities. If you are an entrepreneur, marketer, or website owner, you need an optimized website that drive traffic and is visible within the first couple of pages of Google. There are many ways to achieve those objectives over time. However, this blog will focus on some of the SEO strategies that can help to improve your website’s ranking.  SEO can help your website to become highly scalable, save you money (ideal for start-ups), and generate good traffics to your site.

Paul Benson Visits Class
According to Benson, one of the best ways to improve your SEO is through quality links building. A website that has many quality links coming from other good websites tends to have a higher ranking on Google. The reason for that is because high quality and relevant contents add more value to the visitor. Once you created good contents on your website, you established yourself as a credible source and you now have authority on the web within your chosen arena.

You can first start with having a domain name that is relevant to your chosen field by adding keyword to the domain name. Once you created your website or outsourced someone to create your website, you can do the following steps to improve your SEO:

  1. Create high quality content like whitepapers, infographics, articles, tips, etc. and include keywords in them.
  2. Reach out to high authority sites like the sites of your partners and industry resources to ask them to include your website’s link on their sites.
  3. Generate organic link building campaigns through social media (Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Pinterest, etc.), blogs (on your website’s domain and others’ sites), and press releases.
  4. Publish your site to high quality directories like DMOZ.

In addition to the steps above, you can use paid search to create paid advertisements that target specific keywords on major search engines (Google, Yahoo, Bing, etc.). The benefits of this method include premium visibility, low risk cost structure, and fast results. The additional benefit is that you can measure and study the effectiveness of your ads and improve your ads’ performance overtime using conversion tracking (tracks what happen after someone clicked on your ads). With paid search, you can control how much you want to spend on ads daily or monthly, the price per click, the keywords and the message of the ads, and more. There are many tools you can use to track your website performance but one helpful and free service you can use is Google Analytics. You can use your Gmail account to register and track your website.

To summarize, if you would like to improve your website’s SEO, pay attention to create high quality content through blogging frequently, links building, and reaching out to more established authorities related to your niche or industry. Your relevant and high quality content can help you to establish yourself and your website as credible sources and increase the number of organic searches to your website.

If you would like to learn more about SEO, these resources can be useful (note: some are paid services): Moz, Moz Blog, Search Engine Watch, Search Engine Lane, Search Marketing Standard, Open Site Explorer, ScreamingFrog, Netpeak Checker.

 

 

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