Three Quick Tips To Get Started With SEO

1. Evaluate the SEO Strength of your site

There are many more factors that influence your SEO score, and learning all of them requires precious time which you probably don't have. You can use our company’s free online SEO evaluation tool to get a pretty good idea what the SEO health of your site is. With This information you get can easily spot common SEO issues like problems with your metatags or sitemap, and fix them yourself.

2. Fill in the Title Bar

Take a peek at your Title Bar (the blue space at the very top left of your screen, or found on the Window menu of Macs). If you see a generic default that says “Home” or “Company Name,” you can be sure that your site is definitely suffering from a lack of SEO. The Title Bar may mean nothing to you, but it is one of the most important pieces of information that search engines use to determine the relevance of your company’s website to the searcher’s query. In other words, it provides search engines with the key terms they use to determine what your site is all about.

3. Keyword Selection

Selecting the right keywords is easier than you think. If you sign up for Google Adwords, you will be able to see at no charge not only what people are searching for, but also exactly how many people do a particular search each month. This allows you to determine the big keywords everyone is looking for such as “green energy,” but also smaller more targeted ones that your direct audience will be looking for. These keywords are known as long-tail, and though often ignored, they can sometimes be the most vital.

Our firm, Expansion Media, specializes in cleantech PR and SEO, and I’d like to give you an example from the work we recently did with one of our clients, GreenRay Solar. After doing extensive keyword research for this firm, we decided that one of the primary keywords should be “home solar panels.” Simply by using this as a primary focus in the content, their firm started appearing in the top ten Google search results for this phrase, while it had previously appeared on page seven.

If you look at their homepage now, you will see the exact phrase a few times, and if you look at the title bar I spoke of earlier, you will see “solar panels for your home.” Though it is not the exact phrase, those words are close enough together for Google to still assume they are highly relevelent to people searching for “home solar panels.” Choosing the correct keywords or keyword phrases can be a painstaking process, but if successfully carries out and implemented, it can mean a dramatic increase in the number of visitors to your site.

4. Meta Descriptions Matter

Often when building their website, companies ignore the “meta description” area, seen only in the HTML but not by visitors to the site. Search engines often insert this text below a website’s name in the search results. By leaving this section blank, you let the search engine’s robot to decide what is important about your site, rather than providing that information yourself. To use GreenRay as an example again, their meta description is very concise and includes our selected keyword. As a result, when users look for “home solar panels,” they will see a blurb that speaks directly to them and motivates them to click on the link.