Red Harbour Safe Haven for Startups

Growth accelerator for startups & scaleups

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Without SEO your customers will (almost) not find you on the internet!

With SEO you ensure that customers find you when they enter a search query in their search engine (Google etc). Many companies therefore spend a lot of time optimizing their website with the aim of being high in the Google search results list. This is often a real competitive battle. The lower you rank on the search results list, the more likely your potential customer will approach the higher ranked competitor. Within the profession of web design, optimizing the findability of the website is a separate specialism.

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How does a search engine work?

The most used search engine is Google. Google keeps it secret how the search engine works, but still a lot is known. If you know more about the operation of the search engine, you can take this into account if you want others to find your website. Google's search algorithm is not just one search algorithm, but is a composite of some 250 selection and page ordering algorithms. 150 of these algorithms are known, but Google keeps the others secret. Google determines how relevant a site is based on a number of derived criteria.

 

Google will rate a website as a more relevant website if:

- people visit a website more often

- people stay longer on a website

- people view more pages on a website

- refer other websites to a website

- the website is more secure

- the website has a good sitemap

- the website has sufficient content

- the keywords of the site have been chosen correctly

- and many more

 

Google will also place your site high in the ranking of search results if you use the paid Google service Google service Google Ads.

 

 

These search results are recognizable by the text 'Adv' in front of the search result.

The role of the position on the keyword on the page

A word that occurs in a title is more relevant to Google than a word that occurs in the middle of a paragraph. Google distinguishes 6 levels of relevance:

1. Page Title

2. Page Subtitle

3. Header1

4. Header2

5. Header3

6. Text

 

Words in the Page Title are the most relevant and in the Text the least. Therefore, make sure that the words you want people to find your site on are in the right place.

 

The levels are recognizable in the HTML text of the page by tags, namely <title>, <subtitle>, <h1>, <h2>, <h3> and <p>. It is worthwhile to find out how your webdesign environment uses these tags. In Chrome you can view the page source (ctrl u) and see which tags have been used for your page.

 

Tip: if you write text in the same color as the background of ther page, then this text is relevant for the search engine, but not readable for the visitor. This allows you to create attention on the page for the search engine without disturbing the visitor.

To measure is to know!

'To measure is to know' is part of the core business of a startup. One of the most important things to measure is website traffic and usage. You want to know which keywords people used to land on your site, which pages they visited and how long they stayed. How did they go through the funnel? Where did they enter (landing) and where did they leave (exit). You do this in a very short cycle to validate or falsify the learning hypotheses quickly. In other words: you want to strengthen your Growth Engine.

 

 

 

Google Analytics is the most commonly used tool for analyzing the use of a website. You can find more about the use of Google Analytics here.

Search Keywords

On the web page you can include words on which you want people to find your web page. These keywords are included on the web page as meta information. Google uses the information contained in the keywords. If you install the Yoost plugin in your web design tool, you can easily enter the keywords per page.

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