Week #10- Introduction to SEO- Ch. 9

This week I read the last chapter of Introduction to Search Engine Optimization, and it is titled Exploring SEO Certification. This is something that we had to do for this class. We had to get a Hubspot certification. You might have seen this on my previous blogs, one of them was about my certification on Hubspot. We had to take the class or course called inbound marketing. The whole thing was free, so if you have some free time and it would be helpful for your career you should go through the course and then at the end of it, you have to take a test that is about 60 questions long and you have to pass that to be certified. He thinks that the material and the things that you can learn on Hubspot are amazing. The videos that you have to watch aren't even that boring. I am not going to lie, this is not the field that I want to go into, I just need credits to graduate and I have taken other marketing classes before, so that's why I am in this class, but it is super important information that you learn for people who are going into the marketing field, I would strongly recommend taking this course, and its free so it doesn't get much better than that!

Week #9- Introduction to SEO- Ch. 8

This week I am doing two blogs about Introduction to Search Engine Optimization to just finish out the book. It is about how to keep up with the changes. He says to keep up with the changes you have to keep looking at resources, even some that are out of date. He says that pretty much nothing with SEO is eternal or going to stay the same. The only thing that is eternal is quality content. He says that its very important to keep reading blog posts or attending webinars to keep up with the resources and the changes that are happening. He gives examples of a few that would be good to check out. Not keeping up with the changes can definitely hurt you in the long run. It will ultimately help you do your job better, by keeping up with the times. And that is the end of his chapter. It was super short, but straight to the point. Just keep up with the changes and keep reading materials and looking at videos and such.

Week #9- Introduction to SEO- Ch. 7

This week I came back to the Introduction to Search Engine Optimization book and I read chapter 7. I took a couple week off of it because I wanted to blog about a couple other things, but I am back to reading this book. This chapter is about exploring Google webmaster Tools and Search console. Many businesses and companies who are smaller use a service to help manage their sites. Some examples of companies that do that are GoDaddy or Google Sites or wordpress.com. In a lot of cases these companies will manage about 95% of the technical part so that the owner of the small business does not have to. And a lot of the time it is automated through a system called Content Management System. What they do is they help people, who are not very tech-savy, create a good website that will help out their business. But he goes on to say that it does not matter how a website is set up, they still sometimes need a doctor and that is where Webmaster Tools/ Search Console comes in. He gives a couple links to check out if you want to learn more about it. They are YouTube videos you can watch. He explains that there are a lot of articles and videos out there about Webmaster Tools/ Search Console, so if you would like more information about it, I would suggest trying to check some things out. And in the rest of the chapter he shows you how you can manage some of your websites through Google.

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 #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- 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. 

Week #3- Intro to SEO- Ch. 3

This week I read Chapter 3 of Introduction to Search Engine Optimization. He starts off by saying that 90% of Search Engine Optimization is about content. If you put relevant content on your website, that would be about 90% of the battle. The other 10% of SEO is technical tweaks. It is also called "classic SEO". Search Engine Optimization is up there with Search Engine Marketing, and its one of the top skill that gets people hired. This is based off a LinkedIn report. He goes on to say that as long as you remember that content is more important, you're good.

Kelsey also talks about an SEO audit. This is kind of a good way to understand how SEO works. There are 3 factors that go into an SEO audit and they are:
See: Can Google can "see" your site properly
Here: On-page factors
There: Off-page factors
See, is talking about Google. When someone posts a website to the Internet, Google will find it and scan it.
Here means how you set up your website and what it looks like. He likes to think of it as "on-site" SEO.
There has to do with traffic and how other people get to your website. And he refers to this as "off-site" SEO.

The next thing he discusses is keywords. Keywords are words that if you type into Google your website would pop up. Some keywords might be: the name of your company or organization, the name of a product, or the generic category of your product. As you can see below I typed in the word 'baseballs' and so many different types of baseballs popped up. And links for Dicks Sporting Goods popped up and another website at the bottom of the screen. So if you were selling baseballs as a product, a keyword that might be good for you to use, would be baseballs.

Week #2- Intro to SEO- Ch. 2

This week I read Introduction to Search Engine Optimization, chapter 2. It started off by talking about Curation vs. Creation vs. Collaboration. Curation is when you go find content and share it and then review it and then comment on it. Creation is a lot of things. It could be writing a blog or creating a video or writing an article. Collaboration is when you find someone to work with on something.

He says that starting a blog is a perfect way to start to develop content and really get to show yourself. I started a blog for the last marketing class that I took and you can customize it so it kind of fits your personality. In blogs you just write like you talk pretty much. So it really shows off your personality most of the time. And creating a free website is good for search engine optimization. In this book he goes through ways to create a blog and how to create a website in case anyone wants to do that. Creating a vlog or videos is a good way to create content as well, and of course he goes step by step and tells you how to create videos on YouTube and how to edit videos. Basically this book is super useful if you want to create content on the Internet and you don't know how to.

Week 1- Intro to SEO- Ch. 1

This week I read, Introduction to Search Engine Optimization, the first chapter. It was about Google and other search engines such as, YouTube and Bing. Just about everyone who uses a computer or a phone uses Google to search things. If not Google, than Bing. He says that a way to think of Google is like a library, except they make a lot of money at their library. But it really is like a library because you find whatever you are looking for on Google.

When you search for something on Google, they first couple that come up are ads that people or company's pay for to get people to see it and then under the ads are organic search results. There are also a bunch of ads that are on the right hand side of the page depending on what you search. In the picture below I searched 'Benedictine University'. The top link is an ad that Benedictine paid for. And under it, it shows the organic search results. On the side this time there are no ads, I think it might be because I searched for an actual place instead of just searching for something random.

The need for search engines probably won't go away for a while. Google is such a huge platform that so many people use around the world. In the book he says that Google probably will not slow down any time soon, and he wouldn't be surprised if Google bought Facebook or if Google bought Twitter, which wouldn't really be surprising to me either!