SEO 101: Tips and Tools to Help you Gain Traction
The following post is from Brianna Stiklickas ’15, founder of Meet Eugene, a spring 2015 hatchery business.
Meet Eugene
As entrepreneurs we all know the importance of SEO, but how do you get the most out of your SEO? It is all about the keywords and the meta tags and descriptions!
Having strong descriptive keywords is extremely important. You should use your keywords throughout your website especially in your title and h1 tags. This will allow for the search engine to better match what the user is searching with the content you are providing.
Having media on your website is highly important. Not only is it appealing to your user but it also helps improve your SEO. Each image and video has “alt” and “title” tags – this is where the media is given its own description. This allows for the search engine to better rank your website using the keywords in the description.
Meta descriptions on websites are often overlooked. The meta description isn’t visible to the viewer, it is embedded within the code of your website. A meta description is a summary of the website, which includes approximately 150 characters. The meta description should attract the searcher’s attention and indicate results that are relevant to what the searcher is looking for – it is important to use your keywords in this description. It is important to stay away from keywords that do not pertain to your website. Using such words will cause your website to lose credibility as well as be pushed down in the ranking system.
What else should you pay attention to?
Pay attention to your domain name. Picking a domain name that relates to your company is also important. Using keywords in your domain will also improve your SEO. An interesting fact about domain names – the longer your website has been registered the higher your website’s ranking.
Pay attention to creating a mobile friendly website. Google has taken into consideration the importance of websites that are mobile friendly. Google has instituted a new ranking system which favors said websites. If your site is mobile friendly, your website will be viewed higher in the ranking system. Not only do you receive a higher ranking, but your users will be happier too.
So what tools are out there to help monitor and improve your SEO?
- Google AdWords
- Through AdWords you are able to advertise through Google to customers in order to grow your business. You can choose AdWords that apply to your company, set a budget on how much you are willing to spend on said words, and then measure the overall impact that your ad had.
- Google Analytics
- This is a free service through Google that provides you with analytics on you website. It tracks the SEO of your website. It allows you to view your sites impressions, exposure, etc.
- Website Grader https://marketing.grader.com/
- This is a very interesting and unique tool offered for free by Hubspot. Based off of your blogging, social media, SEO, Lead Generation, and Mobile interactions this service will grade the overall performance of your website. It will tell you where your site is lacking and explains how you can fix it. This site gives you the information you need to make sure your site is accessible and easily reachable by your customers.
SEO is an extremely important tool and it should never be abused. The keywords you use and the descriptions you write should accurately describe your website, it should not falsely advertise the content you provide your users with. The users your site attracts should be those who are interested in the content you are providing them with. SEO is a tool to help your market engage with you not to attract the wrong users to improve your website statistics. I leave you with this,
“Content is not king, but a president elected by the votes of those whom it aims to rule.”
― Raheel Farooq