Brought to you by Reel Talk with Jason: Freelancing Made Easy
You might be the best at what you do, but if no one can find you online, who is going to care? In this edition of Reel Talk with Jason Tiller, Rocketsparks Head of Partnerships, we cover what Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is, why you should care about it, and how you can use it to help your business.
What is SEO?
SEO is how people find you. Google looks at certain phrases and keywords and the hierarchy of information on your website, it then works out what website knows about what information. So if your website knows about this, this and this, and someone types ‘this, this and this’ into the Google search engine, it'll increase the chance for your website appearing in the first couple of pages if you've given enough attention to the SEO basics.
Google works for the searcher, not for the website creator. There are thousands of search engines, but Google is the biggest and it’s the one you should care about.
Why should I care about SEO?
SEO is the most cost effective and organic way to be able to get visitors to your website without having to spend cash on ads. All it costs you is time and effort. Even if you do the basics you will see a return.
How can I use it in a way that will help my business?
If you do it effectively it is more likely that you will show up on the front page of Google for certain search results. If you are not on the front page of Google, most people won’t find you.
Rocketspark has an amazing tool that can help you with your SEO. It’s called Flint. Flint is a content generation tool which guides website creators through all the steps they need to tick off the basics of SEO setup.
Flint doesn’t replace the human eye, though, because no one knows better about your business than yourself and constantly working on your web content is key to keeping up your website’s SEO performance.
Key-word rich blogs are another really useful tool for SEO, they sit outside of the standard webpage. They can be more topical, abstract, and used to answer specific commonly asked questions. At Rocketspark the blog tool is already built into the platform.
Have a think about the top five or ten questions you get asked in your business, each one of them is most likely a blog post. When writing a blog, remember that you’re writing for a person, not for a computer.
One of the most basic things you can do to rank higher in Google is to make sure you are using keywords (a word that describes the content on your page or post best) in your text.
Five things you need to include at least one keyword in:
- Post titles - research says Google puts more value on words at the start of headline
- Page URL - it’s an extra boost to have the keyword phrase in your page address URL
- H1 tag - this tag generally displays the title of the page by default
- The first 100 words of a blog or webpage - reassure Google this is the topic of the blog/webpage
- Image file names and ALT tags (search engines see graphics on a page through their file names)
Read more on SEO here.
