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TODAY'S COCKTAIL OF TECH STARTUP STORIES:

Tech Cocktail

The latest cocktail of emerging technology news, people, startups, products, and innovations for the true tech enthusiast.

5 Ways to Optimize for SEO
Natalie Baumgartner: Cultivating Company Culture

5 Ways to Optimize for SEO

12:00:45 PM

Katya Constantine

If you are a startup, SEO is one of your cost-effective channels for increasing traffic. Chances are, with all the recent changes (Penguin, Google+) you haven't had a chance to optimize for the latest development. The following five tips can help you get your SEO strategy up-to-date quickly:

1. Utilize Your Keyword Placements

When it comes to optimization, it's all about placing the right keywords in the key places throughout your site. These are the: headlines, sub-headlines, body content, image tags, and links. The key tactic is to place your terms, but not to go overboard with keyword stuffing. With the recent changes, keyword stuffing will hurt your ranking.

2. Focus on the Primary Keywords

The key to successful SEO is picking a primary keyword for each page and optimizing for that term. If you oversaturate a page with too many keywords, the page will lose its importance and authority because search engines won't have a clear idea of what the page is about. Use the headline and the sub-headline to place your primary keywords. These two slots have greater weight to search engines.

Make sure to utilize these terms in the contents of the page. Include the keywords in the image titles and alt tags.

3. Don't' Forget About the Title Tags and Meta Tags

A meta tag is the code that the user does not see on the page, but the search engines look at to see what the page is about. Two key factors here you should optimize for: title and meta tags:

Title: The title of the page seen at the top of a web browser, also the main headline displayed in search engine results.

Meta tags: A concise description of the page.

Make sure that your page includes this information.

4. Understand that G+ is important

Don't forget about your Google+ profile. Google has integrated social activity into search results. Linking your profile to your site will provide you with better search engine visibility.

5. Utilize New SEO Evaluation Tools

Using an SEO assessment tool will allow you to quickly identify opportunities for optimization. A new platform like RavenTool allows you to identify SEO improvements on your site, compare performance to your competitors, and analyze how well your site optimizes for the key terms that you want.

Over the last few years, Raven has placed a great deal of improvements into the platform. Today, it will also integrate with your Google Analytics, social media accounts, and paid search efforts. Best of all, it comes with a 30 day trial.

This tool will allow you to see how well you are utilizing your primary keywords and show you if you have any missing title or meta tags.

SEO is a continuous process of improvement. Optimizing and seeing results takes time. Google is constantly updating its algorism. Leveraging these tips will help you with improving your overall performance.

The post 5 Ways to Optimize for SEO appeared first on Tech Cocktail

Natalie Baumgartner: Cultivating Company Culture

10:00:16 AM

Ronald Barba

I never fit in with the other people in my marathon training group. They cultivated this high-pressure culture that was dependent on immediate results, something that inevitably led to my not training as hard and eventually quitting. Of course, this is merely a tale (since, I mean, LOL what is “running?” Food marathon, maybe…). Nonetheless, fitting into the culture of any organization is important both for the success of the individual as well as the group itself; no one knows this better than Natalie Baumgartner.

Baumgartner is the cofounder of and chief psychologist at RoundPegg. RoundPegg is a software platform that quantifies the culture of individual organizations and provides tools to align employee hiring, development, and engagement. Prior to RoundPegg, she worked as a business psychologist, consulting companies on choosing the right leaders that fit their respective companies. RoundPegg provides this similar functionality to smaller-scale companies, without the need for expensive consulting.

Baumgartner knows how important it is to fit into the culture of an organization, and shares an anecdote about her own experience during her TEDxMileHigh talk. When considering PhD programs, she was choosing between UCLA and the University of Colorado-Denver (DU). While UCLA had the top program in clinical psychology, she knew that DU seemed a better fit for her. So, what does she do? Well, what any other smart, skilled person would: she chose UCLA. That was short-lived, however, due to her truly not fitting in with the culture at UCLA; she spent the remainder of her five years at DU.

It wasn’t because Baumgartner lacked the intelligence or the skills for UCLA; rather, it came down to a matter of fitting in with the culture. Forty-nine percent of new hires fail within the first 18 months of being on the job; however, 89 percent of those failures are not attributed to a lack of skills, but rather due to an employee’s poor fit into the company culture.

Strong organizational culture is of paramount importance to corporate performance. This culture, however, necessarily involves the people within an organization. For Baumgartner, there is no company culture if the people of that company themselves do not fit in with the values of the greater body. Person-environment fit is essential to the success of a company; the better an individual fits in with the work environment or culture, the more satisfied and more productive he or she will be.

Watch Natalie talk about creating a successful company culture here.

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