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.