Planet Relations

There's value in preparing regular announcements about company activities and feeding them on to the web via online newswire services like PRWeb to increase search engine ranking. As customers, prospects, potential hires, and reporters seek out 'background' information about your company, search engines can provide a virtual storehouse of information. Special emphasis is added because while your website may look great and have cool animation, search engine spiders/crawlers/bots may not fully capture your information if it's not structured in the best possible manner.

I recently discovered Hubspot's Website Grader, which is a free search engine optimization (SEO) tool that measures the marketing effectiveness of a website. By entering your website, the Grader analyzes data across several broad categories including: On-page SEO, Off-page SEO, Blogosphere, Social Mediasphere, Converting Qualified Visitors to Leads, and Competitive Intelligence. Hubspot's algorithm uses a proprietary blend of over 50 different variables, including search engine data, website structure, approximate traffic, site performance, and others.

Not surprisingly, my website scored a very mediocre 59/100 (full report here). For comparison purposes, Toronto communications professional and blogger Dave Fleet scored a 92/100. 

The value in Hubspot's Website Grader is that it pointed out some very easy fixes for me to help improve my ranking. Recommended areas included adding 'Meta Page Descriptions', an important SEO tactic, and setting up a permanent redirect between www.planetrelations.com and planetrelations.com to combine the incoming links. Another interesting area I never thought about was the time until renewal for my domain (planetrelations.com). It's set to expire in 4 months. Of course I'll renew it as it gets closer but Hubspot points out that some search engines like Google penalize sites set to expire soon (because spam sites are short lived). Good advice. 

While larger companies have full web teams focusing on search engine optimization, small- and medium-sized businesses do not. Services like Hubspot's Website Grader can help others find you quicker.