Week #7- Introduction to SEO- Ch. 6

Last week I didn't write a blog post on this chapter because I found that writing a blog post about a movie I watched would be better. But this week I read chapter 6 of Introduction to Search Engine Optimization, and it was about analyzing how things are going and how you can measure the performance of your SEO efforts. He gives you a website about how to check your SEO. You do it by typing in a keyword and seeing if your website pops up, and you can see what number it is at.

He also says that you should hunt for duplicate content. You never want to have multiple pages on your site with the same content. It is a pretty common thing. Pages may be forgotten, duplicated, or material might have been paraphrased. Sitliner.com is a good website to use to see if you have duplicate content. It shows if you have duplicate content on your website and it gives you a way to look back at your content and see if any of it is necessary or redundant.

Week #6- Surfing the Tsunami- Ch. 6

This week I read Chapter 6 of Surfing the Tsunami, and it was about the last way that we should respond to AI and the last way is to adept. This means that can get directly involved with developing AI, by learning coding and how to work with related data. Although this sounds nice to be able to do, its not something that I would have interest in at all. I don't really want to know how to code things at all. I understand that this is an important part, but if I wanted to know how to code I would be a computer science major, but no thanks. I think the first two steps are super important and, in my own opinion, I think those two are really important, but we don't need to code. I mean maybe in the future we will have to know how to do those things to be able to use a computer, which is fine, but up until then I don't think I want to learn that stuff. There are a bunch of videos of this kind of stuff on YouTube that you can watch if you are interested in this stuff.

Week #6- Ex Machina- AI

This week for a different class, I had to watch Ex Machina and it was all about AI. It was actually a really good movie. I didn't think I would like it very much, but it gave me a better idea of what AI actually is. In this movie, it shows a guy that builds a robot, actually many robots, that are very human like. When they don't have clothes on they definitely look like robots and not human, but when they had clothes on, you wouldn't even have been able to tell that they were robots. The robot, Ava, had human level intelligence and human level emotions, which was honestly kind of scary because she is clearly not human.

*SPOILER ALERT*

She and the student, Caleb, who is working with the guy who created Ava, have some real romantic emotions for one another. Caleb eventually finds out that the creator of robots, Nathan, has a bunch of other ones in his bedroom and its actually super creepy to see them, but he tries to take control of this guys house. Nathan's house was so technologically advanced that you can't go anywhere without a key card and so Caleb's plan was to take over the system and make it so that Ava and himself could leave the house. So in the Ava ends up killing Nathan and one of the other robots and she left the house because she got Nathans key card. So I'm not too sure how this movie makes me feel about AI because on one hand, they can help out humans a lot and help do good things for humans and on the other hand, they can be harmful and want to kill you, haha. But of course, it is just a movie, so I do think that AI is helpful for humans and it could really help us in the long run.

Week #5- Surfing the Tsunami- Ch. 5

This week I also read chapter 5 of Surfing the Tsunami. This is about the second level of the response to AI and this level is to adopt AI. Level 1, adapt, needs to be mastered or at least started before going to level 2. Level 1 was about starting to research AI and reading books and articles about it and just being able to realize that yes this is a thing and it might be happening really soon.

Adopting AI means that you have to accept that yes changes are coming. The changes may effect you and they may not. Some jobs will be lost and some won't. But sometimes, AI is cool and the changes are awesome. Just think about if we didn't have Siri. She is a product of AI. I use her for everything. If I don't know how to spell something, I ask her. If I'm driving and I don't know how to get home, I ask her to take me home. We can use her with the touch of a button or even just saying "Hey Siri". AI is a big part of our lives already, we just don't think of it that way because many people think AI is a bad thing and they don't want to accept it. But in reality AI isn't always a bad thing. It can be really good for us and help us out, just like Siri does. That's why you need to move to the adopt stage of it all and take it on and use it.

Week #5- Introduction to SEO- Ch. 5

This week I read chapter 5 of Introduction to Search Engine Optimization. It was about trying out search engine optimization. This book gives so many helpful tips on how to create a great website while allowing people to easily find you or your product.

He firsts starts to talk about how you can create an overall description for your blog and it will show up on Google. After a while the description that you put in will appear in the Google search results. It gives the viewer a little insight into what the blog is about.

In the image above I went into blogger and the search preferences like he said to do and I changed my meta tag description to "A blog about marketing from Lauren Bosman". When I first got to the page it was disabled so you have to make sure you enable it and write a description that is 150 characters or less.

He then goes on to discuss how to make a post-level description. It is about the same as the meta description, but just for the individual post. And he gives step by step instructions on how to do all of these things that I'm talking about.

The next SEO option he talks about is Site-level SEO on Google Sites. This is a entire website description. He literally created a website and is now using it to sell dogs. He goes into detail about coding and HTML for the website, but all that really confuses me.

Week #4- Surfing the Tsunami- Ch. 4

This week I also read Chapter 4 of Surfing the Tsunami and it was about the first part of responding to AI. The first way to respond to it is, Adapt. Adapt means learn more and pay attention; keep aware of where things are headed. He says that this stage is good, its good to realize and learn more about what is going to happen in our future. But he also says you can't just stop here. You have to become pro-active in this phase. He says we need to dig deep in researching about AI. Step 1 is to read articles. There are a bunch of articles he gives the url to in chapter 3 and he thinks its a good idea to read through all of them just to get some more background information about AI. Step 2 is to read books. He thinks its very helpful to actually have a physical book and go through it. Flipping the pages and putting your phone down and getting off of the computer helps to not be distracted and to really learn about everything. He also gives good suggestions of books to read in this book. At the end of the day it is important to keep up to date on these things and to figure out whats going on with AI and to see how soon it will be here.

Week #4- Intro to SEO- Ch. 4

This week I read chapter 4 of Introduction to Search Engine Optimization and this week it was about Keywords. I touched on it briefly last week in chapter 3, but this time we get more in depth with it. A keyword is a word that someone would use on a search engine, they would type it in and then a bunch of different results would pop up, and if the keyword has something to do with a certain type of product, that product should come up in the search results. To get a good keyword or keywords, you have to do a little research to see what most people are searching for. If you're too specific, a lot of people probably aren't looking for that, so you can use the website Wordtracker. You can use this website to see if people are searching for the keywords that you want to use. You can see the traffic of the keywords and it gives you other suggestions of words to use. AdWords keyword planner is also a good tool to use to help you figure out keywords that you should use for different products.

In the picture above, I went to Wordtracker.com and searched the word red dress and it shows up with other words that would be helpful to use as keywords. The first column shows the number of times the word has been searched for. So the term red dress was searched 135,000 times. It gives you so much useful information that can really help you in the long run.