Hey there and welcome back to SEO on the Go! My name is Ryan Kelly and I am your host. Today you may recognize a fixture from the past we’ve had her as our guest a couple times, Cynthia Mordecai! Hello!

Today we have a very special episode. Today we’re doing a virtual 5K walk for an amazing organization out of Petaluma, California called Heartfelt Help Foundation. It was started by a woman named Denise Rediker who needed a heart transplant. Through her journey she found that one of the biggest hang-ups for people that needed a heart transplant was actually housing. They had great insurance, really good insurance. They had a heart lined up that they could get if they needed it. But did you know that if you don’t live close enough to the transplanting hospital for a long enough time, you don’t get the heart? So if you don’t have the money or the means to stay near that hospital away from your home for a long time you don’t get it.

So Denise started Heartfelt Help Foundation to raise money for housing for heart transplant recipients! I think it’s really neat, and today Cynthia is going to answer an actual question, which is “What are hashtags? How do they work and why should we care about them?”

So hashtags are a great feature to add to your social media posts. It does help increase your reach and awareness. So for example, if Heartfelt Help were to add a hashtag onto their post, something like #heartfelthelpfoundation or #hearttransplantrecipient, and someone is in Instagram and they’re searching those keywords, they will find that post because it’s been tagged. So it’s really great for increasing again your reach and your followers as well.

So we talk about search engine up optimization, where it’s like keywords and key phrases I want to type into Google. You know, lawyers near me, or in this case, heart transplant housing and non-profits and we want our our businesses, our companies, our associations to come up on the first page of Google. But hashtags are a little bit different. It’s mostly more for social media and and trying to have your your posts get found more often in categories. Talk a little bit about that.

Yeah so with these kind of keywords, you want to keep them pretty broad. If you get too specific it’s likely that a lot of people aren’t searching that and in Instagram people are searching pretty broadly. So I would also just keep that in mind and it’s great to add at least anywhere from five to ten hashtags on each post.

All right, if you want more, Google it, search it, go to our website, check us out. Like and subscribe to this channel or this video if you enjoy it, but by all means, please at least go to Heartfelt Help Foundation.