SEO ASAP!

Search engine optimization, or SEO, has become critical for publishers get their content visible for those who truly seek it. With the amount of content growing on the Web exponentially everyday, it has become hard for rich content to be visible at a greater rate and near the top of search engine results like Google’s.

What many experts in the field, such as David Meerman Scott, are saying now is is that it all comes down to content creation techniques, and content richness steered toward niche audiences. In addition, David elaborates on other key tips towards search engine success by having more developed content, better site structure, and influential public relations strategies.

After looking through the  tools provided by the New Media Drivers License I found the most beneficial piece of literature was the Search Engine Optimization Starter Guide. Before even reading the content of the pdf I felt the best idea would be to read SEO best practices from the market leader is search engine technology, Google. The best practices starter guide goes step by step through important code structures, if a developer, to writing the best for web viewing and search engine indexing as a PR consultant. The key points I took out of Google’s best practices was how to use headings tags appropriately, writting better anchor text, and optimizing the use of images on the site. I find that with blogging, tagging and linking has led to increased site hits.

Google Adwords

My Google AdWords experience is one that I would say was not one of my better ones within the realm of Web 2.o technologies. After investing 15 dollars into the campaign, which I was not that fond of, I did not see any return in investment. I was scared giving Google my credit card information, as they already have 3 years of my life trends by sifting through my Gmail emails on their server.

Outside of the financial issue I feel that Google does allow those interested in advertising a very easy route of doing so. It is really easy for a user to define the scope of their campaign, as well as define the markets that they want to reach. I did like the idea of being able to choose what location in the country I could target my marketing. For smaller, local business’ it probably would help a lot because they know they won’t have customers from the other side of the globe.

In terms of bidding for words, I did not have any success with my ad coming up with any of my search words. I even placed a bid of 33 cents for my name, just to be disappointedby it not showing up. I may not have the advanced strategies in place, but I am sure with increased financial support I would be able to have it come up on a search for my name.

Overall, I think Google AdWords is a great online application for advertising, but for my blog I do not really think it is worth the investment for what I would want to get out of my blog. If I had a business model for making profits off of my site then I would defintely use AdWords for advertsing.

Google Applications and Tools

Out of the numerous Google aplications available to download, I chose Google Calender as my application to test. I thought this would be a good choice because of the importance of keeping on schedule in college. I had already registered with Google in the past and did not have to do much to begin using the application. Another reason why I chose Google Calender was that I have been struggling to find a service that would allow for ease of access on a mobile platform.

Google Calender is full of features that allow for extensive planning of one’s schedule and tasks. I really like the sharing feature, as my mother likes to know when the best times to call me are during the week. This feature also allows me to make certain events private, which is nice when you want people to know you are busy, but not really with what. One feature that I do not feel is that pleasing is the lack of categorization of events. To make things appear in different colors one must make different calenders to do so. It would be more efficient if there was a drop down menu to select an importance or event type.

My favorite feature of Google Calender is an extension from it to sync the calender events to Blackberry devices. It makes life a lot easier not having to enter calender information in seperate devices. I highly believe that I will continue to use the Google Calender application.

Techno/Marketer

After doing an extensive search using Google Blog Search I was able to find a bog dedicated towards digital marketing and social media. The name of the blog is Techno/Marketer, and the author of the blog is Matt Dickman. He is the Vice President, Digital Marketing at Fleishman-Hillard in Cleveland, Ohio. This blog encompasses his ideas and opinions on topics concerning the marketing and social media  industries. In addition to his own posts on his blog, he invites others to become members of his Techno/Marketer team.

One of the posts that I found interesting on his blog focuses on how well people listen to social media. In the post, statistics were presented through a poll posted on the blog. The poll was able to present many characterisitcs about user behavior regarding how they listened to socia media. From that information Dickman was able to conclude that there are three keys to better listening. They are to find the customer and spend your time there, use technology to be more efficient, and create an ative listening plan. I found this to be a very interesting blog entry of Dickman’s, and one that brought some fresh statistics about what users of social media are looking for, and what they will listen to.