Grow Your Club With Social Media: How to Show Up at the Top of Search Results

Last month I discussed the advantages of using social media tools effectively and encouraged your club to get online. Now that you are online, let’s talk about how to increase your website’s chances of getting found in search results.

April Tip:  Search Engine Optimization or SEO is the process of affecting the visibility of a website or a web page in a search engine’s (Google, Bing, etc.) search results. Everyone wants to show up on the top of the results page but beware! It takes work. The search engines have algorithms that pick up on the keywords, tags, categories and links you use on your sites page and ranks pages accordingly. Make it easy for the algorithms to pick your site up by frequently and strategically using keywords. I am not suggesting to stuff your site with tons of keywords (search engine’s don’t like that) but do make sure to use them anytime it’s applicable. Use words that people would enter when looking for a resource to build speaking skills but don’t know Toastmasters exist i.e “improve presentation skills” or “public speaking in Los Angeles” or “learn communication skills in orange county”, etc. You have to think like the person searching and what keywords they would use.

The easiest way to organically move up to the top of the search results is to have quality content, strategic and frequent keyword placement, and backlinks. A backlink is any link received by a web node (web page, directory, website, or top level domain) from another web node. For some search engines, the number of backlinks is an indication of the popularity and will rank it highly. An easy way to increase backlinks is with a club blog. Make sure to link your website to ALL of your social media accounts and post on them frequently. If you need additional guidance please email krystal@growyoursocial.com or go to www.growyoursocial.com