Week 11: SEO Images

March 30th, 2019

Besides content, images are also a great attention getter to attract people to your posts, advertisements or announcements. Proper image selection is essential for making your content the best quality and as most interesting as possible. What goes into proper image selection?

• Relevance
• Color schemes
• Fonts/Lettering
• Image quality
• Uniqueness
• Other design elements 

After looking at multiple CNN articles I am shocked of their layout for articles. It appears that they use one image or video near the top of the article, and spread out related articles with their images or videos intended to have readers go from post to post. In the entertainment section of CNN, they typically just post a clip of a new movie trailer and report on their findings and some additional info regarding the movies. Overall, it seems that they don't value their images highly as they are more concerned with content solely. 

https://www.cnn.com/2019/03/27/opinions/jussie-smollett-charges-we-are-the-problem-bailey/index.html

Week 9: Significance of Buyer Personas

March 17th, 2019

First of all, a buyer persona is a profile that a business compiles based on lots of research to further understand and relate to the intended audience. Businesses may have many different profiles for different audiences that they may be targeting. These are some of the reasons using a buyer persona is helpful...

• Gaining Trust
• Attracting new customers
• Conversation starting
• Directly meeting consumer needs

Creating a buyer persona is a lot of research and requires a lot of time to fully understand precisely what your specific target wants. There are tools that can be used to speed up the process which is an option for businesses. Innovation of products/service requires a time schedule typically to launch ASAP. Creating buyer personas allows businesses to focus their market marketing goals and make efforts to meet the exact needs through interactions online, face to face, surveys etc. Small businesses can take the advantage over other small businesses by implementing buyer personas, so why not take the initiative?

https://www.socialmediatoday.com/news/what-is-a-buyer-persona-and-why-is-it-important/507404/

Week 8: SEO Ranking Activity/Strategies

March 10th, 2019


Today I will be discussing some SEO strategies that are used to keep websites high on the list as well as some ways to monitor search results. Long-term strategies are aimed at the big picture, which means that content is the number one priority. Sharing content (via Facebook, LinkedIn etc.) and getting feedback allows consumer insight to help kickstart research on high demand topics that can be a potential attention getter for new viewers. Sharing it via multiple sources will create a larger network of viewers and can improve the activity, thus increasing the rank.

There are many ways to check your rank, one being www.seocentro.com which finds which place a website shows up given certain keywords or phrases. For example, I searched baseball bats to see what rank Rawlings would get (21st). The results show specific data such as speed or spell checks which is instant feedback just by conducting an SEO search. By adding keywords to your content, short-term SEO Ranking improvements may be seen where hopefully new viewers are turned into loyal consumers. Although, changing demands will eventually change the ranking.

Therefore, long-term strategies involve much more work while considering many factors that go into creating relevant and interesting content. Short-term strategies are a meant to be a "quick boost" to gain new consumers or viewers to become active on your site. Either strategy requires close monitoring of the SEO rank to see how your changes made an impact.

Keeping up with trends, algorithms, and posting unique content is one of the best ways to climb the ladder up to the #1 spot.

PPC vs. SEO

March 2nd, 2019

Welcome back once again!

Today I will be explaining some of the differences between pay per click advertising and search engine optimization. To start off, PPC see very quick and immediate results. For example, by clicking onto certain Youtube videos your are contributing to a creators PPC revenue via advertisements and via views. This strategy is aimed at creating high traffic on a businesses website as soon as possible. Businesses may use this during sales to not only promote the sale, but also in hopes that consumers navigate the site and find other products that appeal to them.

On the other hand, SEO strategies typically focus on content to grab consumers attention, but also keep in mind of the algorithms of Google that are constantly updated as mentioned a few weeks ago. These strategies are cost effective, but require lots of planning and detailed work to stay ahead of the curve. A major downfall is that the SEO strategy takes longer to see desired results, and desired results are more risky to achieve (this is because of error and demands of content).

Overall, both strategies require a developed plan to see intended results. With the changing internet environment, it makes SEO a little complicated and requires some exploration for opportunities for PPC advertising. Weighing the trade-offs and choosing the optimal strategy completely depends on the businesses general environment.