Campaign For National Tiger Sanctuary

Running a Google Adwords campaign for the National Tiger Sanctuary has proven to be effective and gives a good example of how to manage a campaign.  I have been able to really get some good hands-on experience with Adwords while doing this project.  The tiger I chose to create a campaign for is Tigger.  The landing page for my ad is the biography of Tigger the albino tiger.

When creating this ad I thought about what might grab people's attention when searching for tigers or tiger-related topics.  Using the word albino proved to be very successful as I have registered a fairly generous amount of clicks.  Also, with the help of Keyword Planner tool, I was able to find more related keywords that help create more traffic to the website.

9 SEO Tasks #4

Running a Crawler on Your Site:

These are tools that will read your site in the same mechanical way that Google does. Here are two good ones to use: Xenu or Screaming Frog. Xenu is more of a general purpose crawler and Screaming Frog is more targeted at SEO. Whichever you use, make sure to fix all the "Page Not Found" errors.

These are also known as 404 errors as this is the status code returned by a web page when someone tries to access a web page that does not exist. When Google sees a lot of these it can lead them to believe your site is of poor quality. You don't want that! If you use Screaming Frog you can spot other problems, such as the presence of missing or duplicate title tags, but more on that in points 6 and 7 below!

Google Grants

Google Grants is a fantastic opportunity for non-profit organizations to get money for advertising their company.  Acquiring grants from Google is extremely beneficial for these organizations because Google is one of the largest companies in the world and has a lot to offer.  By using the grant money to help promote their cause, these non-profit organizations can spread their word better than ever before.  This also bodes very well for Google as it enhances their brand image and helps them achieve a positive attitude from their affiliates.

We have been granted a sum of money to help promote the National Tiger Sanctuary via Google Adwords.  This campaign will help the Tiger Sanctuary get more noticed and help spread the word about their cause and it will also give us students solid experience working and managing an Adwords campaign with a relatively large budget rather than our previous one of $25.

9 SEO Tasks #3

Checking Your Indexing Status:

This is one of the basics, and it's easy to do, as it requires only two steps. The first step is to write down how many pages you think your site has. If you have a blog or an e-commerce site, you need to remember all the category pages or archive pages. You don't need an exact count for this, but you do need to have a sense as to whether or not its dozens, hundreds, or more.

For your second step, go to Google and type in the following search query: "site:yourdomain.com" (quotes not needed). The result you will get will look something like this:

This result shows how many pages has in their index for your site. Did the number Google returned surprise you? Did you think you had 5,000 pages and Google showed only 245? If so, you probably have a problem. Or, did the opposite happen? You thought you had a little number of pages but you actually have a whole lot more.  This could mean you have content duplication which is not a good thing.

Class Blogs

These are the blogs from my classmates for our Marketing 348 Class.

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/

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

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

Blogging and Content

When creating a blog for your business or for personal use, it is important to have remarkable content and things that would be of interest to your target audience.  Give the people what they want.  Also, it is important to remember that sometimes less is more.  Instead of compiling massive amounts of content, you should focus on creating simple and easy to understand content.  People are more likely to keep reading if they can follow along easily.  With that being said, be sure to not only post simple and concise content, but to also have a wide range of topics and keep posting new material.  People want to read about new things and ideas.  Just make sure that all your content is still focused on the main message that you are trying to convey.

In a rapidly moving world, it is important to stay up-to-date with your blog.  Posting a bunch of blog posts is great and all, but you need to make sure that your content is relevant with the times.  People will lose interest with you if your posts are out of date and then word will get around and more and more people will stop reading your blog.  Post often, and post relevant material.

SEO Content Duplication

Content duplication is exactly what it sounds like.  Content duplication is a growing problem in today's world of using the Internet for business activities.  If you have a lot of content duplication on your site, then you will not be running on all cylinders as a company.  It is key to get rid of any duplication that will hurt your ranking on search engine results pages.  This is where SEO comes into play.  When Google crawls your site and finds a bunch of duplicated content, it will factor that in to where you land on the results pages.

Effectively optimizing your website will help you climb up the ranks and become more visible to your prospective customers.  Think about it, how long do you usually scroll through results before you realize that you are not going to find what you're looking for? Three, four, maybe five pages of scrolling then you stop altogether.  Getting rid of duplication and optimizing your site will help you stand out from the imitators and fakes.

Social Media is Key

We live in a time period where everything we do or say is obtainable and we document our lives on the Internet via a multitude of social media platforms.  Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, Snapchat, Blogspot and countless more social media apps and websites are all excellent pathways for online marketing.  All of the most successful companies nowadays utilize social media to help promote their brand.  But, it is not just using these platforms, it's using them effectively.

Optimizing your social media presence is a key factor in becoming successful.  You need to keep up with the content on your social media sites and make sure it is tailored to fit the needs of your desired customers.  Posting fresh, relevant content on social media will make your company look like it is more in the know of things and customers will have a more positive attitude about your company.

Hubspot Smarketing

Smarketing is the combination of sales and marketing.  Sales and marketing need to be on the same page because they are both closely related.  Marketing gets your company the sales.  If your marketing strategy and sales strategy are different, then you risk your whole business plan not working.  When changing to an inbound marketing strategy, it is important that your sales team takes on an inbound strategy as well.

Inbound Marketing is all about attracting customers towards your company, rather than the traditional method of pushing your product onto your customers.  These traditional ways are getting outdated and people do not respond positively to "in-your-face" marketing anymore as a whole.  They want to feel as if they are making the decision themselves and not being forced to buy something.  Inbound marketing helps with that and it is important that your sales team switches over, too, to avoid any confusion.

SEO Chapter 3 Dynamic Page Optimization

Dynamic page optimization:

Unlike a normal HTML website, where the content of static pages doesn't change unless you code the changes into your HTML file: open the file, edit the content, save the file, and upload back the server. A dynamic web page is a template that displays specific information in response to queries. The database is connected to the web site and the response is generated through the connected database. These sites are easy to update for webmaster since they’re directly connected to a database where one change reflects all pages. The problem with dynamic sites started when content rich sites failed to rank higher in search engines. The problem lies in its advantage itself. As studied earlier, dynamic pages execute on query.

Users send queries through search engines or they are already coded into a link on the page. But a search engine spider doesn't know how to use your search function - or what questions to ask. Dynamic scripts often need certain information before they can return the page content: cookie data, session id, or a query string being some of the common requirements. Spiders usually stop indexing a dynamic site because they can't answer the question.

Update on Adwords Account

As I mentioned in an earlier blog post, I created an Adwords account in order to help advertise the CASA Curriculum marketing website.  The budget for the account was set at $25 so I needed to optimize my ads accordingly in order to get the most clicks I could.  The campaign started off slow but then once I looked into keywords and how to optimize them, I started seeing results almost immediately.

Coordinating your display ads with your keywords is a very important step when running an Adwords campaign.  If your ads and keywords don't match up or are to broad or specific, you won't see as much success as you should.  Google Adwords has a Keyword Planner tool to help you out when deciding what keywords to use for each ad group that you have.  After playing around the the planner tool, I was able to optimize my campaign and managed to acquire a decent amount of clicks in a short period of time considering my budget was only $25.  Adwords is a great method of advertising and I believe that if your company has a website, then you should 100% be using Google Adwords.

SEO Chapter 2

HTML Tags:

As we know, spiders or crawlers can only read text. When spiders scan a website it actually scans the HTML code of that particular website. There are several HTML tags such as Title tag, Meta tags, Alt tags etc. which should be integrates with the keywords, in terms of greater optimization of the website.

Title Tags:

The Title tag plays a very crucial role in optimizing any web site. Title tag is an HTML code that shows the words that appear in the title bar at the top of the browser. The Title tag is generally the first element of the web site. After that come the Meta tags and Header tags. Title tags contain the theme of the website and hence search engines give substantial importance to this tag. Title tags are the first impression of the web site for crawlers and all the major search engines evaluate the relevance of the website on the basis of the keywords present in the Title tag. This tag is also displayed on the SERP and results contain the text included in Title tag.

Customer Delight(Hubspot)

Delight is the last phase in the Inbound Marketing methodology.  Some companies don't pay too much attention to customer delight, or customer satisfaction, and they are missing out on a lot when they do not think of the customer.  Just because someone used you service or product once, doesn't mean they will continue to do so.  In order to maintain healthy and lasting relationships with customers you need to consider customer delight.  When your customers are delighted about your company, they will spread the word and that could potentially land your business even more customers.

How does one delight their customers you ask?

Every time you are in contact with a customer, you are adding to their experience they are having with your company.  This could mean you are either gaining trust from them, or losing trust based on how they are being treated or how they think they are being treated.  The three pillars that are used to build and keep trust with customers are Innovation, Communication, and Education.  Innovate to serve your clients with the best possible product, communicate to learn about the customer and get a feel for what they desire, and lastly, educate them to grow their knowledge because empowering is better than ignoring.

Google Adwords Account

This week we created a Google Adwords account to help advertise a website of our choice.  Google Adwords is an advertising medium used by just about every business that has a website.  Adwords is the results page of the search engine Google.  All the listings and results are the ads made by all the various companies.  You can either have organic search results or you can pay using Adwords in order to optimize your company's search results.  Using Adwords is a great way to get traffic to your website and acquire more customers.

I chose to create an Adwords account for the CASA marketing website.  CASA Curriculum is a website that has a ton of information on digital marketing that is free to access.  What better way to help educate people on digital marketing than to use digital marketing tactics though the use of Adwords.  With an increasingly digitalizing world, it is important to get to know how things work because more and more companies are becoming heavily reliant on the Internet and other new, tech-savvy methods of marketing.

Creating Content with a Purpose

Content. A lot of people will tell you that content is one of, if not the, most important aspect of a successful website or company.  Nobody wants to be on a website that is plain and boring, or too complex and difficult to navigate through.  Creating remarkable content can be a tricky process.  The internet has become a battleground for competing websites and it's all about survival of the fittest.  The power has switched from the salesperson to the hands of the consumer.  Nowadays, people can research anything they want on the internet and get millions of results.  In order to stand out against other companies, you need to make sure your website is attractive, easy to use, and helpful in answering any questions that your prospective customers might have.

When dealing with inbound marketing, content is a key player in the game of converting people into customers for your company.  Since inbound marketing is all about attracting the customer to your company rather than pushing your company onto them, it is important to have content that will stand out to them versus your competitors.  In order to stand out to your customers, you need to keep in mind your buyer persona and what they are looking for.  Just having remarkable content alone will help boost your SEO performance because if people like your website and continue to go on it, Google will notice this and rank you above others. 

SEO Google Analytics

There is so much more to search engine optimization than just trying to get to the top of a Google search.  The things going on behind the scenes in SEO are a vital part in a successful campaign.  Google Analytics is an important tool for any company that is looking for success with their campaigns.  It allows you to look in-depth at how many people are going to your website and how often.  Google Analytics also gives you information on how to adjust your keywords and descriptions in order to get more traffic on your website.

One of the most valuable things businesses have is time.  The quicker they can receive and interpret data the better.  Google Webmaster Tools helps with just that.  Instead of waiting fir an analyst to break everything down for you, Google Webmaster gives you feedback right on the spot.  It will tell you what your most effective keywords are, how you rank in searches, give you crawl reports, and much more.  All this information will help a business cater to what the consumers are interested in and help the website become more attractive to customers and prospective customers.  The more they know about what triggers customers' responses, the better they can adjust their website to meet the customer's needs and wants.  

Blog Tips

The Internet is becoming a "blog eat blog" world and companies are beginning to realize that blogging can very much help them succeed.  The internet is littered with blogs nowadays, so it is important to stand out from competitors as much as possible.  Creating remarkable content is the driving force when creating blogs because people want to be visually and cognitively stimulated.  Keep your buyer persona in mind above the rest when deciding what to blog about and then worry about search engine optimization.  SEO is important because it allows your blog to show up in favorable positions when people search for it.

To take full advantage of SEO while blogging, there are multiple things to consider and do.  For example, use keywords in the title and throughout the blog.  Also, a meta description is needed which is just a short synthesis about the blog in general.  Another major thing to take into consideration when creating blogs is mobile optimization.  People are on smartphones now more than ever before and they have become the main way of using the internet for a lot of people.  Mobile optimization allows for a clean, simplified look and structure of the website and blog that users will be able to swiftly navigate through while on their phones.  

Effective Blogging

Today's internet is becoming an increasingly important factor in business decisions being made by companies all over the globe.  Almost everyone uses the internet and a big use of the internet for people today is researching companies and comparing them to others.  Blogging is growing more and more every year and it is an important aspect that a company needs to consider having.  Having a blog can help customers get a feel for what your business is about and can help answer questions that they have. Also, instead of blogging just to improve search engine optimization, companies need to blog about things that will be relevant to their prospective customers.  People will be more likely to click on something that they can relate to and that can help them solve whatever problem they are facing.

Blogging is a great way to build brand awareness for your company and can help get people to notice your company.  An effective blog can help attract people to your website and turn them into customers. As long as you stick to your buyer persona and stay relevant to your target audience, you can have a successful blog that will drive traffic to your website without having to worry solely about SEO.  

Account Management

Google AdWords is a key player in search engine marketing that can very effectively help your business thrive, but it can also hurt your business if you do not manage your account correctly.  When creating an AdWords account, you are presented with Ad Groups and campaigns that you can easily manage and tailor to you target audience.  An AdWords campaign might not be the most complex type of campaign, but organization and maintenance is very important.  You need to make sure that your keywords are relevant to what your business is about so that every click you get matters.  You do not want to be paying for unwanted clicks.  Keeping up with your campaigns will help minimize errors.

AdWords is key in getting your company name out there and is also one of the cheaper methods of advertising because you pay what you want to pay.  Granted, the more you pay for clicks could end up increasing your Ad Rank, but increasing the quality of your website also plays a factor.  The more people that visit and stay on your website will factor in with your search engine ranking.  The biggest aspect of AdWords that I took from this class session is that maintenance is key.  Keep your campaigns relevant and reap the rewards.

Website Optimization

There is far more that needs to e done to a business's website than just search engine optimization in order to make it perform at its peak.  Website optimization is a key factor in creating a fully functional and effective website.  Website optimization deals with a number of things such as search engine rankings, lead conversions, customer acquisitions, customer delight, and customer experience.  It is extremely important to focus on the content of your website as better content will drive more traffic through to your website.  Here are some key takeaways from Hubspot about optimizing your website:

Sure, having a good search engine ranking will boost traffic, but quality content will keep people on your website and keep them coming back for more.  If people think your site is too complicated or cluttered, they won't bother with it.  It's all about simplicity and ease of use nowadays.  Make your website easy on the eyes and easy on the brain.  Efficiency is key.  Also, make sure your website fits in with the audience you are trying to gain business from.  The internet is a powerful tool and it can either make or break your business.

Inbound Marketing

The video we watched in class about Hubspot and their inbound marketing strategy was very relevant and useful to our class.  Inbound marketing is a new technique of marketing that can be very useful for businesses today and the way people use the internet and choose which companies to conduct business with.  Classic marketing techniques are becoming more and more outdated as technology continues to rapidly advance.  Businesses are moving away from cold-calling, spam email, and interruptive ads as consumers are less likely to respond to these methods of marketing.  People are tired of getting ads shoved in their faces.

Inbound marketing is more about attracting the consumer instead of pushing ads onto them.  For example, people hate when they click on something thinking that it will take them to what they want to see but then are bombarded with unrelated ads that ultimately make them turn away from the original thing they wanted to see.  Inbound marketing gets rid of this and directs people right to what they want to be directed towards.  This instills trust between the consumer and the company which ultimately turns into more business for that particular company.

Introduction to AdWords

This week of class we learned about Google AdWords and how it works.  AdWords is a very effective method to advertise your business as people are online and using Google now more than ever.  Everyone uses Google to search for things and AdWords helps your company stand out from the crowd.  The way AdWords works is you set certain key words that you think people will type when searching for a business like the one you have and then Google displays your business in the search results based off of certain criteria, such as Ad Rank and CTR, or click through rate.

Based on your scores in Ad Rank and CTR, Google places your business higher or lower in the search results.  Also, you can pay for better positioning in the results instead of having just organic results, meaning the normal results that every website gets when they are searched for on Google.  You can pay per click to achieve higher positioning on Google.  You can also track how well your ads are doing and see how many times people visit your website and you can adjust your ad based off your results.  AdWords is a great way to build awareness of your brand and create traffic on your website.