I chose to read a book about search engine optimization. The title of the book is The Small Business Owner's Handbook to Search Engine Optimization. It's a book for people, mostly business owners, interested in increasing traffic to their website. Business owners would be interested in the book because they would be able to increase their Google rankings which would attract more people to their website, which means more revenue. Anybody trying to draw people to their website would be interested in this book. If I made a website, I would want everyone to see how great it was. One of the best ways to increase website traffic is to properly advertise on search engines. Some may think it's easy to get on Google, but the keywords you create are important because you want to make sure your website shows up on the results if someone puts in a keyword that would apply to your website.
A keyword can be defined as a word or phrase people enter into a search box on Google. The book covers a few good ways to select your keywords. For a minute, think of yourself as a customer instead of a business owner. What keywords would you type in if you were looking for a specific service? It is so critical to select good keywords or else nobody will find your website. The book explains a Google service called Adwords. Adwords can provide key statistics about your website visitors and the keywords they use. Adwords can also help you select keywords and advertise using a cost per click method. This process helps you select good keywords with high cost per click numbers. An example of this is if I typed a keyword, jiu-jitsu, for example, into Adwords, Adwords will suggest a better keyword that is proven. For example, it may suggest jiu-jitsu self defense because 1000 more people searched for that than just jiu-jitsu.In addition to keywords, the book also suggested creating content pages and using them as keywords. If I had a website about jiu-jitsu and I wanted people to find my techniques, I would create pages on my website displaying techniques so that Google could crawl my website and find these pages. The book also explained how to use META keywords and page titles in the HTML code of the page. Using efficient keywords will increase the chance of your site being viewed.
I found this book extremely helpful because I learned a lot about marketing your own business. In my opinion, the internet is the most powerful marketing tool available. Not too many people pick up a phone book to search for a business anymore. Most will search for phone numbers on their computer, or even their cell phones. This book taught me so much that I didn't know so I would highly recommend it to anyone out there that may own their own business. My father owns his own business and he always asks me for help marketing it, but until now, I could never help him. By far, the strongest part of this book was the keyword section. However, the book had a lot of weak parts in it but I only considered some things weak because I had no use for them. The book had a whole section encouraging the use of bullet points on your web pages, but I failed to see how that related to search engine optimization. The book also used some small business owner terms that I wasn't familiar with. Overall, it was a very good read and I got what I wanted out of the book.
Woessner, Stephen. The Small Business Owner's Handbook to Search Engine Optimization. Florida: Atlantic Publishing Company, 2009.
Can you apply what you learned to a blog or does it only apply to a web site?
ReplyDelete@JudyNV There's almost no way to give the blog actual keywords, but by tagging posts, categorizing them, or labeling them, depending on the blog platform, you can add keywords to the posts. Normal websites are usually the easiest to add keywords.
ReplyDeleteThat sounds like an interesting book. I make use of keywords, through meta tags, in my own website design. Unfortunately, when I moved to creating webpages by PHP generated HTML, I could not figure out how to give each page its own keywords, but it made things easier in a few areas.
Judy, I can only apply what I learned to websites, which is exactly what I was looking to do.
ReplyDeleteI found your report easy to read and well put together. The topic of the book is also of interest to me; so I'll probably keep it in mind and get some helpful tips from it later. The keyword section sound especially helpful.
ReplyDeleteI do agree with what you said on the bulletin list; that seems kind off the topic of search optimization, but I guess it could be helpful to some people.