W13-Ranking, Link Building and Google Analytics

 This week we learned a lot more about SEO and how link building can be beneficial.  Links are an important way that Google ranks its websites.  Having other sites, backlink to your site will tremendously help with your ranking.  Although you have to be careful because if the links are not good, and people are not using them, it can actually hurt your websites ranking.   

I also learned a lot about Google Analytics this week.  It is amazing everything you can learn from this tool.  You can learn what demographics are using your site the most, which landing page they are using, how many customers abandon their cart, etc.  This information can be extremely useful because you can improve your site and tailor it to the customers that are using it the most.  You can also see where your audience is from which can help you to know if you should add different languages or cultural aspects to your site.  Overall, Google Analytics is a great tool to optimize your web business.

W12-Social Media for SEO and Social Networking

 This week focused on using social media to promote your business.  This is something I am a little more familiar with since my husband is required to do this for his job.  In the case of my website, since I am selling cookies, I feel like the best options for me would be Pinterest and maybe TikTok, although I have never used TikTok before.  I feel like those two are easy, user friendly, and do not require a lot of investment.  If I were to use YouTube, then I would feel the need to invest in fancy cameras and lighting, etc.  TikTok is more for amateurs.  Social Media can really lengthen your reach.  For instance, I could just post my website on my own Facebook page.  I only have about 200 "friends" on Facebook.  But if I were to post my recipe link to a page on Facebook called "Best Cookie Recipes Ever," there are over 784k members of that page, and my one link could drive a LOT of traffic to my website.  Similarly, Instagram promotes your posts for you if you hit their algorithm right.  So does TikTok.  So other than just creating the content to post, you don't have to do anything to promote your site. Although I do not especially like social media, it is a very useful tool for promoting websites.

W11- Landing Page Optimization and Basic SEO

 This week we learned how to make our site optimized for search engine rankings.  The landing page is a huge part of whether someone chooses to stay and engage with your site or not.  We can increase our chances of them staying by making a few changes to it.  One of the best things that you can do is to make sure your keywords match what is seen on your landing page.  There was an example given of a tennis shoe ad, but the landing page didn't have any tennis shoes on it.  That would not be ideal because if anyone visited your page due to an ad and didn't immediately see what they were promised, they would click off of it really quickly, thus costing you from the ad but you would not be making anything.  

We also learned basic SEO. This is what search engines look for when ranking your ad.  There are several things you can do to "encourage" the browser to place your ad at a higher rank.  One thing you can do is to make sure that your keywords actually match the title of the page.  You can also make sure the picture names match the keywords.  Lastly, you can make sure that your page is user friendly for both mobile and desktop users.  I found that nearly 25% of my page views were from a cell phone.  Making sure that the page looks just as good for those users as for desktop users will help to optimize my results.

ROI & Optimizing Ad Performance

 This week we learned how to track conversions.  I added a conversion tracker to my Weebly website by going to "settings" and then on the left "SEO" and then adding it there.  It seems to be working since I now can see how many impressions and conversions I have.  For my blog a conversion would be anyone who actually clicks on my blog after seeing the ad on google.  I was shocked to see that I actually have had quite a few people click on and view my blog.  I learned that having keywords that actually indicate what my blog is about is better, so I don't have a lot of people seeing my ad and not actually clicking it. In order to optimize my blog more, I took down some of the keywords that didn't pertain to it, such as chocolate cookies, because I don't have a chocolate cookie recipe on my blog.  I also changed a line on my ad to include the tagline of my blog "Warm your kitchen and your heart."  It will be interesting to see how that will affect my conversions.

W9-Google Analytics

 This week I learned all about Google Analytics.  Google Analytics is a useful tool that can help to track traffic to your website.  This can be useful to know who is coming to your website and from where.  This way you can tailor your website to certain demographics.  It also can indicate how long customers are spending on your website and whether they are visiting more than one page. This information can help to know whether your customers are actually interested in your content.  You may need to update your website to be more appealing to customers or possibly rework your google ad keywords to better describe your website so that the right customers are seeing them.  I learned how to link both my Google Analytics and my Google Ads so that they can work together to optimize my website.  There is also a way to find out what websites your customers are coming from.  Are they coming from Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram?  This can also help you to understand which platforms you should set your budget for.

W8-Google Ads

 This week I learned a lot about google ads.  This service is amazing.  You type in headlines and descriptions that support your business and google automatically puts them together in different orders to appeal to different customers.  Google even gives suggestions for the keywords and descriptions.  I learned that you can pin different headlines so they only appear in the first spot, etc.  This can help to cut down on ads that would be redundant with the same information repeated.  Google ads also has a function called keyword insertion that allows you to target more customers.  The example given is the word "chocolate."  When you use this code buy {keyword:chocolate} the ads will automatically show when the word chocolate is search.  For example, if someone searched "buy milk chocolate", since the words buy and chocolate are searched, you ad will pop up as "buy milk chocolate."  But if the term "buy dark chocolate" was searched, then the ad will show as "buy dark chocolate."  This can target your add directly to a customer because if you have the headline "buy dark chocolate" and that is what your ad shows when you are searching to buy milk chocolate, you may overlook the ad.  

Week 7-Google Ads and Keywords

 Google ads is a great way to bring revenue to your web business.  I was surprised at how easy it is to use. I am not great with computers and felt that google ads was very user friendly.  When it comes to keywords, you should choose words that are broad enough to reach a wide customer base, but also specific enough to make sure the ads are targeting the correct audience.  In the case of my cookie website, I would want words such as "holiday cookie" or "Christmas sugar cookie."  "Sugar cookie" may be too broad because my website is targeting holiday baking.  Someone may be searching to buy sugar cookies for their child's birthday or looking to buy supplies to make sugar cookies.  Using the keyword "Christmas sugar cookie" should help narrow down those who are looking for things other than Christmas sugar cookie recipes.  I also learned that I can add negative keywords such as "cake" to my keywords.  I want to target holiday cookie bakers, and so those looking for holiday cakes wouldn't want to view my website.