BUS 572 - 3

Concept 1 - Search engine optimization (SEO)

Illustration of SEO (Source: SEO)

The process of making a site "search engine-friendly" - also known as "SEO" -- is probably the most important aspect of website design. Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of affecting the visibility of a website or a web page in a search engine's ‘natural’ or un-paid (‘organic’) search results. In general, the earlier (or higher ranked on the search results page), and more frequently a site appears in the search results list, the more visitors it will receive from the search engine's users. It needs to help users find what they’re looking for. To make sure they list the best results first, they look for signals of the following:
• Relevance - for instance, every title, sentence, phrase, header, link, filename, graphic name, video name, data element name, you put into your web page, make sure it is somehow relevant to your subject.
• Importance – how important is the content of the website for search result?
• Popularity – how many times the website has been viewed?
• Trust – is the website/link trust worthy?
• Authority - Is your site an authority? Is it a widely recognized leader in its field, area, business or in some other way?

Concept 2 – Link Popularity 

Illustration of SEO Link Building (Source:  Link Building)

The purpose of a link is to allow a user to go from one Web page to another. Generally, the more votes a Web site receive, the more trusted it becomes, the more important it is deemed, and the better it will rank on search engines. Through links, search engines can not only analyze the popularity of a website & page based on the number and popularity of pages linking to them, but also metrics like trust, spam, and authority. Trustworthy sites tend to link to other trusted sites, while spam sites receive very few links from trusted sources. In our group project we realized that our client’s website doesn't have many external links, which means very few external sites were linking to our client’s website. Having a high link popularity is an excellent way not only to build a website but to also show others how good the website it. When other web pages link to a particular website it draws additional traffic for that website, as well as giving it what constitutes as votes in the search engine rankings. When two websites with very close levels of search engine optimization and information are being ranked by a search engine, more often the search engine will choose to rank the particular website with the higher link popularity first on search engine results pages.
 My question is how can we build the link popularity for our client’s website? Her present external links are Facebook and Twitter only.

Skill Set – Keywords


The most important concept we learned is developing list of potential keywords. Ranking for the "right" keywords can make or break your website. Using keywords correctly throughout a page and a website can be critical when you are trying to improve search engine ranking as part of your Internet marketing strategy.  Because of this, it is crucial that Web sites contain content with keywords that are likely to be used by their target audience. Web sites need to appear when their potential customers are searching for them. For our project we would recommend our client to add more relevant text in her website and using the right keywords.

Reflection

This week’s reading didn’t involve too much new content, but a more detailed version of what we have previously learned. We have already studied about SEO and keyword research in the past weeks so this was like a revision. For the next week I hope to learn more about the campaigns and maybe see some examples or more information about how the competition works. I am also looking forward to this week’s class presentations as well as get ready for our group to present in the following week.