SEO and Web Content

Introduction

A site administrator is someone who takes care of the website on the client-side. This means the job is less technical than being a webmaster and more participative in website operations than a linkbuilder. It is the duty of a site admin to make sure the site is running as expected when users visit it and to promote the site to increase user traffic.

Learning Outcomes

By the end of this training, the trainee will know how to:

• understand the basic concepts of Search Engine Optimization, Search Engine Marketing, Social Media Marketing and Internet Marketing, Page Rank, and Alexa Rank, plus the terms spiders, crawlers, indexing, and spam
• familiarize himself or herself with how crawler-based search engines work
• understand the Google Webmaster Guidelines
• use CMS as Blogger.com or Wordpress for blogging
• do keyword research, use the right keywords for anchor text and link development
• resize, crop and edit images and photos for use in articles, headers, banners, and ads using Open Source image editing software or a free online image editing service
• optimize web pages for search engines by editing META tags, the page title tag
• off page search engine optimization through URL submissions to web directories and search engines, social bookmarking, and trading content and links with other webmasters
• communicate effectively when posting messages in forums, posting articles in blogs, posting comments and forum responses, and creating marketing copy for search marketing
• promote the site for increased traffic through social media marketing

Learning Outline

I. Introduction to SEO Concepts

This is the theory part of learning optimization concepts and techniques. Understanding them will help you in learning why we need to optimize, how to optimize and what the limits are in optimization.

1. Research on the following terms and discuss the similarities or differences of each with the rest:

a. Search Engine Marketing
b. Search Engine Optimization
c. Social Media Marketing
d. Internet Marketing

Explain which concept has a larger scope and which ones have a smaller scope.

2. Research on the following terms and discuss the similarities or differences of each with the other:

a. Page Rank
b. Alexa Rank

Explain what these terms measure and how were they measured.

3. Explain briefly how crawler-based search engines work.

Write your work in an OpenOffice Writer document. Save it as an ODT file and use your name as the filename. Please save it under your personal folder with your name as foldername.

Reading Assignment:

Read the following manual for understanding the Google Webmaster Guidelines: http://www.feedthebot.com/

II. Keyword Research: Choosing the Words to Target for Optimization

Keywords are the most important elements in any search engine optimization strategy. To make sure your website comes up high in the rankings of search engine results, select those keywords that are searched often by more people but are used and optimized for by the least number of webpages.

Unlike the training in Keyword Research for Link Builders and Writers, Site Admins and Webmasters need not concern themselves with doing keyword research on their own for the immediate present.  Eventually you will learn the process but for the purposes of this training, we must proceed to Blogging.

You must think about what interests you as a person and then try to create a blog discussing and exploring this subject area. To give you more flexibility and the ability to edit the code, we shall be using Blogger.com’s blog services.

III. Blogging: Introduction to Blogger.com

Blogger is owned by Google and has more flexible and user friendly features than Wordpress.com blogs. Blogger allows its users to edit their templates and insert 3rd party codes into their blogs. They also make use of widgets for easier placement of codes, text, images or videos into the blog page.

Step 1: Make sure you have a Gmail account before signing up at Blogger. Your Gmail username and password will serve as your Google Account login details. Sign up for Gmail at https://www.google.com/accounts/NewAccount

Step 2: Go to www.blogger.com and login using your Google account username and password.

Step 3: Follow the instructions for creating your blog. You can use any name you want in your blog’s URL and title. The blog title serves as an identifier of what kind of blog it will be so think creatively in naming your blog. Just imagine you are naming your own child. :)

Step 4: Write one article on the topic of interest you have selected in the previous task. The keywords should be ideally placed in the title of the post, inside the first paragraph and inside the last paragraph.

Next: How To Optimize Your Blog