When we launched Like Chapaa, one of our goals was to get onto the first page of Google search results when you search for “make money in Kenya”. This is because, well, Like Chapaa is about making money in Kenya. As you can imagine, that was quite a task – “make money” is one of the most competitive search terms in the whole world.

Sometime recently, we achieved our goal! Like Chapaa is now #5 when you search for “make money in Kenya” 😀 We also rank pretty well for other search terms that we had been targeting.

Why is this important?

Well, when you have a website, your visitors can come from two main ‘places’: you can have people visit you by typing in your url into their browsers, or you can have search engines like Google refer people to you.

By far, search engines send a well established site the bulk of its visitors. It is therefore important to optimise your site such that when people search for certain terms on search engines, they find your site. This is called search engine optimisation (SEO) and it is super important for any website. For example, if you search for “Like Chapaa” on Google, you will find this website.

So, how do you do SEO?

At the basic level, there are two interlinked factors to consider when you think of SEO. These are:
1. Relevance – this is simple to grasp. For instance, If you want people who search for “golf” to find your site, then your site must be about golf. If your site is about oranges then people who search for bananas cannot find you.
2. Authority – this a bit more complex and is interlinked to “relevance”. Let’s say that in the whole world, there exists 10 sites about bananas. Now, when someone searches for “bananas” on Google, she is going to find all ten sites. But, Google will rank the ten sites and list them sequentially. Why does Google do this ranking? No one really knows. However, we do know that Google uses, among other factors, links to rank websites. Look at it like this, if another site, say www.fruits.com writes about bananas and places a link to your website, Google takes this to mean that www.fruits.com has ‘voted’ for and vouched for you to be a website about “fruits”. Now, the more such votes that your website has, the better your rank according to Google and other search engines.

To get Like Chapaa to where it is, we first of all made sure that we talk regularly about making money in Kenya. Then, we used any and all means available to us (some of these are here) to get some authority for our voice, our website.

Guess what? Being on the first page of Google results for several nice keywords has really boosted the number of visitors to Like Chapaa. This Google thing really does work, hehe 🙂

We would be happy to answer any questions that you may have.