EasyHostingASP.NET | As an entrepreneur, you need to put your feet in several shoes. From looking into product development to marketing activity to customer support, you have to see every aspect of the business.

Quite tight, isn’t it? Yes, but as an entrepreneur, this is something you must be prepared for.

Now, with the era of digitization, SEO has become one of the most important aspects of marketing. For your new startup, you must be sure that you are using relevant techniques and at the same time staying away from illegal ones.

The effort you put in search engine optimization helps in deciding the ranking of your website and the traffic that you bring to your site.

“SEO is a long-term process that needs patience, persistence and an eye for a continuous update in search engine policy, ” says Rahul Agarwal, founder of Designhill.

Here are essential things he feels every entrepreneur should know about it. You should also check out SEMrush, all-in-one marketing toolkit.

1. On-site optimization

Now part of website optimization. The first is on-site, and the other is off-site optimization. In on-site optimization, the quality of page and content plays a great role on how the page is ranked on a search engine.

Here are few tips on how to check for the on-site optimization.

  • Always include keywords in the heading of the content. This will help the search engine to know what the content is all about.
  • Your title should have a keyword density of 1-2 words while the content on your page should have a keyword density of less than 3% of the total content.
  • Instead of using a single keyword use keyword phrases. It’s always better to take help of Google Keyword Planner.
  • Make sure that your content is equally suitable for your audience as it is for search engines.
  • Last but not least try to stuff keywords as Google is strictly against keyword stuffing and would penalize your site when stuffing is detected.

white-hat

2. Off-site optimization

While on-site optimization is done on one’s site, off-site optimization is the process of link building where other high domain authority sites refer to your site.

Off-site optimization came into play when sites where stuffing too many keywords on their page to rank high on search engine. Thus, Google started off-site optimization where if high domain authority sites were referring your site then your site was ranked higher in Google search.

Here are some quick tips on how to have off-site optimization for your site-

  • Do guest blogging, feedback on relevant blog and forums. The only thing to remember is that you should always post on high authority sites and mostly to site that are relevant to your business.
  • Be on social media. Know which social media sites your users are and then create an account on these sites to target your users.
  • You can submit your latest blog and pages to bookmarking sites like StumbleUpon, Digg, Reddit, etc.
  • The business review can be another important way through which one can increase their ranking.

3. White-Hat SEO

White-hat is the legitimate SEO technique that SEO experts use to rank their page high on a search engine ranking page (SERP). White hat involves following the rules and guidelines issued by a search engine to help the page in getting better rank.

Here are few white-hat techniques for you.

  • Always focus on quality content. Make sure that you do not have content that has been copied from anywhere on the net, has excessive use of keywords and content made by content spinning tools.
  • Use relevant title and meta description.
  • Use keywords only after doing an extensive keyword research.
  • Make sure that you have relevant inbound links to your site.
  • Your site should be easy to navigate.

Now, white-hat techniques do take time, but they are the only way to help your site to reach on top in search ranking and remain there for a long time.

4. Black-Hat SEO

The illegal techniques that are used to get your site to rank high on search engine within a short time are called black-hat SEO. In the black-hat technique, the person has little or no consideration of search engine guidelines and uses techniques such as keywords stuffing, irrelevant link creation, etc. to gain traffic.

Some of the black-hat techniques used are-

  • Hidden content has been one of the most used black-hat technique. In this people usually, hide the content within the code of their site or by making text color same as that of the background.
  • Stuffing meta keywords has been another frequently used black-hat technique.  People try to use the keyword too many times in a sentence which makes the sentence irrelevant.
  • Creating Doorway or Gateway passages that are only for search engine and not for users. The users never see these pages as they always get redirected to some another page.

In every case, one must avoid using a black-hat technique. It might get you a good rank within few days but when detected, your site might be flagged as spam and would not rank in the ranking page.

5. Page Speed

Kissmetric says that 40% people leave a site if it does not load in 3 seconds. Now, Google algorithm also ranks site higher that loads fast. Therefore, one must check the speed of the page to improve the user experience.

Following are few tips on how to improve your page load speed.

  • Do not use many plugins on your site
  • Make sure that you are using compressed image on your site.
  • Enable browser caching
  • Try reducing the number of redirects on your website.
  • Improve the server response time.

Loading site faster is an important aspect that one must consider if they want to increase their user base and user retention.

These were five important things in SEO that one must know as an entrepreneur. What was your experience on using SEO for your startup?

Alexia Pamelov
Latest posts by Alexia Pamelov (see all)