SEO TIPS #5

Example of Keyword Search Volume

Pull Keyword Volume Data

It is important to find out what keywords related to your business are being searched by users. This helps to narrow down what keywords would work better for you business. There are several tools that can do this, Google Keyword Planner and Wordtracker are the most used by current online marketers.

This type of information is so valuable for a company for so many different reasons. One reason is because of the title tags and how both your keywords and title tags can work together to increase traffic. Another valuable aspect of understanding the keywords being searched is because they give you insight on the language that your target market is using. The target customer has their own way of speaking and can include vital information that can be used to help optimize their search queries. Data like this was not accessible years ago, and this information cost companies exponential amounts of money.
If you speak in the language of the customer it will inevitably lead to better conversions. You must use the same language your customer uses and use it on your company website as well as any advertisements used. Don't just throw theses words around you must use them in the correct context so that reading is smooth and easy to understand for your target customer.

SEO TIPS #4 Run Crawler On your site

When running a crawler on your site you can see how productive your site potentially could be. These crawlers are tools that will read your site in the same mechanical way that Google does. There are two crawler sites that are suggested on Businessperson. Xenu or Screaming Frog are the suggested crawler sites. Xenu is more of a general purpose crawler while Screaming Frog is more targeted as SEO. Whichever you use, make sure to fix the 404 (Page not found) errors.

Ben.edu SiteLiner Report

Another site crawler that we used in class was called SiteLiner.com. This site you normally have to pay but if your website is less than 250 pages it can give you a readout of what your site contains. It will give you a list of your duplicate content and your broken links. Here is an example of the report based on Benedictine Universities website. Ben.edu.

These 404 errors are the status code returned by a web page when someone tries to access a web page that does not exist. The site may have existed at one time but it currently doesn't work. When Google runs a crawler and sees allot of these 404 errors, they will assume that your site is no longer running or if it is running that it is poor quality so the site will not be ranked high on Google.

Steps in SEO #2

Setup Google Webmaster Tools

What is Google Webmaster Tools? It is essentially a way to report on what Google observes about your website. Why get Webmaster Tools? Because it is important to understand the direction you company is going. Some of the data that they supply includes: Backlink Data, Rankings Data, Most Common Keywords on your site, Crawl Data, and a bunch more.

Example of a Crawler Data Report

These reports help you to understand your website better so that you can make decisions to help optimize your website for the better. Each tool has its own agenda, and the more tools you use the better you will be prepared to make changes to your website. Be aware though, each one of these tools sends you a report that you must learn to understand and apply to your decisions. If get multiple tools and do not keep up with the reports then you are wasting time. Also people tend to sign up for a bunch of different tools and then feel overwhelmed by the amount of reports they receive.

(9 SEO Tasks) #3

Checking Indexing Status

The first step of this process is to write down on a sheet of paper how many pages your site has. It is important to know the category each page is under because you need to know the ins and outs of your website. You don't necessarily need an exact count of the pages but you do need to know if you have dozens of pages or hundreds of pages.

The next step is to go to Google and type "site:yourdomain.com" into the search bar. Your search should show something like this. Be sure Be sure not to type in "yourdomain.com" exactly, you should type in your websites domain name. You can see circled in the red is how many pages Google has in their index for your site. This should be close to the pages you have counted before. If it isn't then you may have ran into a problem. Maybe you counted only 200 pages and 2000 pages showed up. This could mean that you have duplicate content out on the web. This may not necessarily be a bad thing but it does make searches less efficient. Now if your pages are not exactly corresponding with the index pages then you may need to seek SEO help.

Class Blogs

These are the blogs from my classmates for our Marketing 349 Class.

Raphael Sicolin - http://sicolinmarketing.blogspot.com/ - feedback given

Johanna Ficner - http://jmfcreative.blogspot.com  - feedback given

Rachael  Hodison - http://rhodison.blogspot.com/  - feedback given

Rebecca Watson -http://rebeccajwatson.blogspot.com/  - feedback given

Sumaira Quraishi - http://sumairasmarketingblog.blogspot.com/ - feedback given

Steve Kositzky - http://stevesmktgblog.blogspot.com/ - feedback given

Tommy DiPonio - http://tommydmarketing.blogspot.com/  - feedback given

Bruno - http://brunogomesmarketing.blogspot.com/  - feedback given

Anthony Phipps - http://phippsmarketingblog.blogspot.com/  feedback given

Drew Keil - http://drewkeil.blogspot.com

Kevin Carroll - http://kc3marketing.blogspot.com/

Trevor Walzak - http://trevormarketing1.blogspot.com/

Tiger Sancturary

You're a Tiger Harry

I decided to choose Harry the tiger for my Ad words display ad for nationaltigersancturary.org. At first i tried to use Richard but I learned that Richard had actually passed in 2013. I had to change my entire ad and choose a different tiger.

Harry was brought to the sanctuary with Kora and was a victim of the Pay for Play industry as cubs. This industry allows people to handle the tiger as a child which leads to many tigers becoming sick and die. Tigers in the program are also more likely to have issues with people because of the overexposer at such a young age. Harry and Kora were fortunate enough to survive.

Harry loves to play hide and seek with the visitors. He is often seen trying to hide behind rock and "Get You". He has been compared to an otter because he loves to dive into pools and role around in the water. He is often found swimming not only when it is warm out but when there is ice.

I will be able to update how the ad is doing in a few week and hopefully I will be able to help increase traffic to the site.

SEO Chapter 3 Types of Links

One Way Link

There are many types of links for Google Toolbar. One like is the One Way Link. These links link to your site from sites which do not receive a link from your site. This may sound confusing but one way linking is the best way to improve the ranking in the search engines. You can also automatically be protected from bad back links

Reciprocal Linking

   

This is another type of like used. This means two web sites that agree to link to each other. Basically it is an agreement between two sites to host each others links and is beneficial for both parties. Few people have the time to consistently monitor their links to see if they link back to their site, this is why the trust between these two sites needs to be strong.. 

Triangular Linking

There is another form of linking called Triangular Linking. This is a great tool that helps to manipulate both one way linking and reciprocal linking. This is an attempt to fool the search engines into thinking that you have not really created a reciprocal link. The way you do this is by using two websites. For example, a conversation may go like this, "Ill put my link on  your website and in exchange for that, you will put your link on some other site but not mine". So once someone clicks on their link your link is exposed on their website.

Class Blogging

The following are of my fellow students in Marketing 348

BLOGS

John Dodson - http://jdodsoniii.blogspot.com

Francesca Guido - http://francescaseoblog.blogspot.com/

Shannon Oconnell - http://shannonsmarketingblog.blogspot.com/  

Carlos Salinas - http://carlosmarketingblog.blogspot.com/

Ashfaaq Seedat - http://ashmarketingblog.blogspot.com/

Maureen Lepke - http://maureenlepkemarketingblog.blogspot.com/

Cory Evans - http://coryevansmarketing.blogspot.com/

Caitlin Campbell - http://campbellmarketingblog.blogspot.com/  

Kaitlyn Szaflarski - http://kaitlynmarketing.blogspot.com/  

Bruno Gomes - http://brunogomesmarketing.blogspot.com/  

Sumaira Quraishi - http://sumairasmarketingblog.blogspot.com/  

Trevor Walzak - http://trevormarketing1.blogspot.com/

Anthony Phipps - http://phippsmarketingblog.blogspot.com/

Kevin Carroll - http://kc3marketing.blogspot.com/

Tommy DiPonio - http://tommydmarketing.blogspot.com/

Steve Kositzky - http://stevesmktgblog.blogspot.com/

CHAPTER 2

On Page Optimization Factors

• Keywords
• HTMLTags

Keywords

There is a keyword list that shows the words that are significant to your website and can be easily integrated into your website. Your keywords reflect your customers and show what they want or need. One must conduct research  on their customers to understand what keywords fit them the best.

The first step of an SEO campaign is Keyword Research. To generate maximum ROI one must conduct the research on customers to understand the products or services they need. Keywords are not solely based on the customer but also the theme of your website.  There are many tools to help study keywords.

Keywords Study Tools.

• Wordtracker
• Yahoo
• Google Suggest
• Digital Point Tool

HTML Tags

When spiders or crawlers look through your website they can only read text. So the actually look through your HTML code to find the keywords you have placed. There are many different type of HTML tags that these crawlers will be looking for. 

Title Tags are tags that show the words used at the top of a browser. These tags contain the theme of the website. These tags are the first impression of the website on the crawlers and most major search engines evaluate these tags to see if a website is substantial. 

Meta Description Tags are apart of the HTML code that allows you to give a summary of your webpage. This is often portrayed when searching the the website. In these Meta Description Tags it is important to use the keywords and summarize clearly because your website will be chosen based on these tags. 

SEO and SEM Landed me an Interview

I was looking for marketing jobs on LinkedIn.com and I came across a Marketing Assistant Job with Lesman. They were looking for an entry level marketer with a undergraduate degree in Marketing. After looking through the qualifications I felt confident that could compete for this position.

I had a phone interview with a marketing representative of Lesman. During the interview I mentioned I was getting my certification in SEO and the interviewer was surprised. She told me that they were planning on hiring within the next month but because I had experience in SEO and SEM that they were willing to put off the hiring if I wanted the job. This was because they were planning to spend money on training the new hire and If they were to hire me, they wouldn't need to spend the money training. The last ten minutes of the interview was spent debating the importance of SEO to the importance of SEM. I feel confident that the experience I gained in Todd Kelsey's Search Engine Optimization and Search Engine Marketing classes have put me a step ahead of my competition when searching for jobs in marketing. 

DELIGHT!

Delight is the last phase of the inbound methodology. Most companies don't spend time or money to keep their customers they are usually more focused on attracting new customers. Even though, attracting new customers is more expensive then keeping current customers. Customer delight is a competitive advantage that can help the business or even help you keep your job. You must get your customers to trust you. This will allow them to be promoters. These people will help to promote your business and create new leads for customers.

How do you delight your customers?

Serve your customers because your customers experience is formed by every interaction. Each time you make contact with the customer you are either building trust or hurting the customers trust. The way we build this trust with the customers is through the three pillars.

Innovation

Change is better than the status quo, innovate to serve people with the right products. 

Communication

Personal is better than impersonal. Communicate to help people.

Education

Empowering is better than ignoring. Educate people to grow their knowledge. 

Chapter 1

The top search engines of today are: Google, Yahoo!, Bing, and Ask. These sights are the most used to search information online. These search engines rank webpages so they can appear in their search directory. Search engines rank pages in two way, Crawler Based Search Engines and Human Based Powered Directories.

Crawler based search engines use a crawler to search a webpage for information that people would search. The crawler can detect when you change things in your website, and will list them accordingly. Each crawler based search engine is made up of 3 things.

1. Crawler or Spider
2. Index
3. Search Engine Software

As I said earlier, these crawlers or spiders search the webpage for information and upload them to an index to be accepted by the Search engine software. There are so many factors that go into ranking a webpage that I will not be able to explain them all, rather I will list them below.

ON PAGE FACTORS

1. Location of Keywords
2. Frequency

OFF PAGE FACTORS

1. Link Analysis
2. Link Popularity
3. Date of Article Published
4. Length
5. Proximity of Query Terms
6. Proper Nouns

Search Engine Spam is an unethical tactic of optimizing the a website to rank it high in a search. These tactics are used to trick a search engines into giving higher ranking to websites that don't necessarily belong there. Many search engines penalize websites that use spam. There many different ways that someone can use spam to get higher rankings.

1. Search Engine Spam Examples
   
2. Keywords unrelated to site
3. Redirects
4. Keyword Stuffing
5. Mirror/Duplicate content
6. Tiny Text
7. Doorway Pages
8. Link Farms
9. Cloaking
10. Keyword Stacking
11. Gibberish
12. Hidden Text
13. Domain Spam
14. Hidden Links
15. Mini/ Micro-Sites
16. Page Swapping (Bait & Switch)
17. Typo Spam  and Cyber Squatting

CREATING REMARKABLE CONTENT

What is Content? Content is the message that you are trying to express to your visitors. These messages are better obtained by delivering through Space and Attention. Internet has made space almost unlimited, which makes attention the hardest part of attracting customers. It is a large battle for attention in inbound marketing and online marketing all together. The power recently has switched over to the customer, rather then the sales person. A sales person was where everyone would get their specific information on any content, but now each consumer can do the research by themselves. It has become hard to influence these consumers to purchase products, but now we must learn to focus on content.



It is important to note that we are in the converting stage, in which we convert our visitors into leads. We need remarkable content, which is a product that is there to solve the problem rather than just a products sales. You must think of way to help the buyers rather than pushing a product on those buyers. We must first know the problem that our buyers are having in order to help. There are two Keys in creating remarkable content which are Buyer Persona, and where they are in the Buyer's Journey.

Campaigns for DAYS!

When creating a campaign on Google you should be careful. Sometimes people create campaigns but do not realize how much money they are spending. Google won't tell you if you are spending too much money, Why would they? They tend to not tell you when your Ad words are not working, or if your Adwords are working too well. All of this information you must find out by yourself.



Also another big issue is the end date to a campaign. Google makes it increasingly hard to get to the settings to set an end date to your campaign. If you don't check your campaigns frequently they can become ineffective or even costly. Setting an end date may be one of the most financially important aspects of a campaign because Google will let you run a campaign as long as you have an account.

Keywords King

Google Analytics is important in Search Engine Optimization. With this tool, you can track the words you have used in order to see if the words are specific enough to your content. For example, if i wanted to start a campaign on selling footballs I would you words like "Football" or "Cheap Footballs". These words would have a high traffic content but that might not be the best thing. If a words has too high of a traffic content then you have to realize if they are searching for what you are selling.

For example, "Football" is a vague search word because it is also the sport. People may be generally searching football but not want to purchase a football. This will  make the traffic on this word high but it won't be optimized to your search. The traffic ranges from High to Low and can give you some insight on whether your words you chose are helping to sell your products.

Inbound Blogging

A business blog is a collection of articles that provide helpful content for your target audience. Blogging has become a major part of a companies online presence. 79% of marketers with a company blog reported inbound ROI for 2013. Blogging is a fundamental way to attract qualified website traffic. Every time you write a blog post, it is seen as an index on your website, and each one of those pages leads to better search engine optimization. 43% of companies have acquired a company through their blog.

The content that is worth being talked about is called Remarkable Content. Inbound links are like votes to your site, the more you have the better off you are. The best practices to create this content can be defined below.

 Keep your buyer persona in mind. You must know your audience and what stage they are in in the buyer line. You should also keep it one topic per blog post. This will help so that you can keep the theme simple. You must have these blogs able to optimize your search engine hits. Blogging is the most effective inbound marketing strategy.

One should be more concerned with the content in the blog, rather than the word count. Make sure your formatting is welcoming and able to draw in readers. Embrace the white space in your blog, it makes the blog look clean and easy to look at. Quality content is the most important aspect of blogging,

Google Campaign

Google. is one of the biggest search engines in the world. When creating a campaign you can select where you want your ad to be viewed. When making an ad you must create a title and description of what you want the consumer to see. It is important to keep the ad short and simple, in order to keep the consumer interested. You then say how much you want to pay per click. 

You then need to type in the words that people would search that would fit your companies persona. For example, for a boat marina, the words you would use are Boat Slips, Boating, Marinas. If you are targeting more family fun boaters then you may want to search: Family Boating, Children Friendly Marina. These words are important because the more vague the words are, the more unneeded clicks you will get. This will cause you to pay a significant amount of money when you don't need to be. 

It is important to study your AdWords and keep up with them. If you do not study the words and the clicks you can potentially lose customers and money. You may learn your campaign is not working and may need to adapt it to better fit your target consumer. 

Traditional Vs Inbound

In class we watched the videos from HubSpot.com. We learned that their are two types of marketing. There is Traditional marketing as well as inbound marketing.

Traditional marketing is marketing that interrupts the consumer. the consumer is well aware they are being marketed to and often is met with negativity. This type of marketing is like cold calling clients for telemarketing. Consumer would prefer not to be interrupted but as marketers this has been the way to reach consumers for years.

There is also Inbound marketing. This type of marketing makes the consumer unaware that they are being marketed to. Consumers only see content when they are searching for that specific content. Consumers tend to like Inbound marketing better because they are not interrupted and this type of marketing seems to be more successful in obtaining consumers.

Website Optimization

Website optimization is when you make your website able to be seen easier by your target consumer. Marketers try to make the website more accessible through search engines. There are many ways to optimize your website.

You can add videos to your website that are connected to YouTube. You also can add a link of your website to all of your social media accounts. You should also update your website frequently, maybe around 2 or 3 times a week. The longer your website goes without being updated the less optimized your website will be.

I learned most of these during my internship, but we will be learning more and more over the next 3 months in this class. it is important to know because many companies are looking for people to optimize their websites.

AdWords

I have had experience with Google AdWords in the past. I worked with a small marketing firm in Northwest Indiana, that helped local small business market their products. I was in charge of helping to market and existing Marina as well as a newly opening restaurant in that Marina, called Latitudes.

We used the AdWords to help with selling boat slips at the marina. I was in charge of coming up with the words that would be searched on Google to find the marina. I was unaware that if i were to pick words that were to generic that i would be wasting the money of the company. I ended up wasting about $200 because the words i chose were so generic that the people clicking on the website were not necessarily looking for boat slips.

After this blunder I learned that the more specific the search words were the better return on the money used. For the next campaign i was able to increase the turnover per click as well as helped to increase the overall traffic that hit the companies website. It was exciting to feel as though i was helping the company grow.