What is S.E.O?

In light of our event with HubSpot, we are taking the time to teach anyone who could not attend the event about SEO. As a small business that’s expanding you may hear the word SEO thrown around a lot and you may be asking yourself “what is SEO?” In this blog post, we will teach you about SEO and how it can help your business, as well as how to optimize it and what contributes to a strong SEO.

SEO stands for search engine optimization – it means “the process of improving your site to increase its visibility when people search for products or services related to your business… in search engines” [1]. SEO is a very important step to growing your business as it helps you stand out from the competition in your field and make a name for yourself in the market. When you have a bad SEO, it tends to make it hard for them to stand out and get traction with your company, websites social, media and more. To avoid this, we are going to teach you how to optimize your SEO as well as teach you what contributes to SEO as a whole.

Optimize Your Website’s Metadata

The first thing you should know is that optimizing your website is very important and does contribute quite a significant amount to SEO. So, what does optimization even mean? Optimization of title tags is extremely important because every website has a title. If your title is not compelling, interesting, accurate or worth clicking, people will not engage with it. To change this, try to make your title stand out to users searching out the information your page contains. Make it contain what is included on your page, short and clear to the point as well as included keywords that are embedded in your document. Furthermore, optimization of meta tags is nearly as important as the title tag. A “meta tag” or “meta description” to some is the little bit of text that is below your page title and gives a brief read/description of what the page is about (See image for example). Optimizing this is important as it’s a tiny tidbit of the website and if the user who’s searching you up can’t read anything there that’s worthwhile, they may pass you over for someone who has a better title and “meta tag” as it includes more information pertaining to their needs.

This is what a “meta tag” or “meta description” looks like

Images & Links

Other things that factor into a good SEO include adding images and links to your webpage(s). Images are important to include because you can add alt text to them. Alt text on images allows google to detect that there are images on the webpage as you can not see an image based on a URL. Furthermore, including images in your webpage just helps with the flow of reading and allows people with visual impartments to have ease of accessibility. Likewise, including links is important to your SEO as Google “favours websites whose pages are internally linked because this creates a coherent network that it can crawl more easily. Google also likes internal linking because it creates a better experience for its users” [2]. As a result, adding links will improve your ranking among other websites as well as guide the user to other internal or external pages.

URL’s & Slugs

In addition to adding images and links, another tip that can help you with your SEO is clearing up any small issues with your website. Some examples include cleaning up your website and URLs. Cleaning up your website makes it easier to navigate and will increase traffic as they won’t be turned away from any confusion that may arise. Cleaning up your URLs is also essential as there is a possibility that another company has the same name as you so making sure that people can distinguish between each of you is crucial for website traffic. Furthermore, when purchasing a domain name for the first time, choose a URL that is as clean and concise as possible.

Choose Keywords Wisely

Finally, the last thing you can do to improve your SEO is focus on keywords. There is quite a bit to do with keywords that helps with SEO. The first thing you should try to avoid is constantly repeating the same keyword or “keyword stuffing”. This does nothing to the algorithm and just makes you come off as a robot repeating the same word. However, you should try to include keywords in the content of your webpage as this shows Google the content and relevancy of each page. The next thing you should do is identify keywords that are relevant to you and will drive traffic to your website. To learn more about keywords, check out this post from HubSpot and download their free SEO starter pack.

Just take the time to Google search your keywords before you choose which ones to go with. This allows you to see what other websites are doing as well as see how well it may go. The best way to see how successful your keyword may be is just to type it out on Google and look for the number of results. A lower number of results indicates fewer competing keywords which means less competition for you.

When you search something on Google it will show you the number of results here.

Well, now you should have a brief understanding of what SEO is and what to do to improve yours. Just a friendly reminder when you join Haltech start-up’s who have raised <$2M in funding can get 90% off their first year. While start-ups that have raised >$2M in funding in the last 12 months can get up to 50% off their first year. HubSpot is great for SEO as all HubSpot accounts have access to SEO recommendations in the page editor. They also have access to SEO topics and the recommendations in the SEO tool.

SEO recommendations for a specific page or blog post on HubSpot

SEO recommendations for a specific page or blog post on HubSpot

References

HubSpot Support. (2022, July 21). View SEO recommendations in Hubspot. HubSpot Knowledge Base. Retrieved June 27, 2022, from https://knowledge.hubspot.com/seo/view-seo-recommendations-in-hubspot#:~:text=All%20HubSpot%20accounts%20have%20access,Professional%20and%20Enterprise%20accounts%20only.

McCormick, K. (2022, January 26). How to improve SEO for your local business: 24 tips. LOCALiQ. Retrieved June 27, 2022, from https://localiq.com/blog/how-to-improve-seo-for-your-local-business/

Third Door Media, Inc. (2022, April 18). What is SEO / search engine optimization? Search Engine Land. Retrieved June 27, 2022, from https://searchengineland.com/guide/what-is-seo

[1] https://searchengineland.com/guide/what-is-seo

[2] https://localiq.com/blog/how-to-improve-seo-for-your-local-business/

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