W11 Reflection

 This week we learned about landing page optimization and SEO. Landing page optimization refers to making sure the page an ad directs to is relevant, well designed, and easy to navigate. The biggest takeaways I had were that you should make sure that if an ad promotes something really specific, that the landing page has the same thing the ad promoted. Say your ad is about women's sneakers being 25% off, then it should direct to a page with women's sneakers that are 25% off. Another thing would be to make sure the landing page focuses on a single call to action, so that the user knows what it is you're promoting and what you want them to do.

SEO stands for search engine optimization, and it's pretty complicated. Basically, search engines like google have very complex algorithms that they use to analyze web pages and decide if they are relevant enough to show up at the top of the results page. The exact algorithms are unknown, but we know that keyword usage, site design, user experience, and your page authority/trust are all factors.  

the most important thing that improves SEO is the quantity and quality of in-bound links to your site. But that’s not something you can directly control, so as far as the top five things that you can do to improve your SEO, those are mostly going to do with content and keywords.
    So the five best things you can do to help your site’s SEO in my opinion are:

  • Provide unique value: try to find a way that your website can offer something useful or valuable to customers that they don’t get from any other website. If users come away from your site with something unique, they are more likely to come back to it or share it with other people, which will improve your SEO.
  • Rework or update your existing content: having quality content is important for SEO, but this doesn’t always mean adding brand new content. If you already have content on your site that isn’t performing well, you can try updating and improving it so you can maximize its potential. For instance, you can update any statistics and links, add new relevant information, update the publishing date, and add new images and videos.
  • Use primary keywords in titles: Make sure that not only your page has the keywords you’re focusing on in it, but that the title of the page has the keyword, preferably towards the beginning. This makes it more eye-catching and makes it clear that it’s matching the searcher’s intent. It also helps if the first headline on the page also includes the keyword, so the user knows they’re on a relevant page.
  • Use keywords in the URL: this is another place where keywords are important. It helps the search engines know that this link is relevant, but it also helps people when they see the link to know what it’s about so they will click on it.
  • Optimize for mobile-use and social media shares: since inter-site linking is so important for SEO’s now, the easier it is to view and share your site across different platforms, the better. If someone can easily view or share your site on social media or from their phone, then it will increase the number of times that your site is linked to and visited, which will increase your authority and trust with search engines.

 

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