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.