WEEK 14 - Understanding Google Panda

Google Panda is a series of incremental changes to the algorithm used by googleto sort search results ranking. The panda was released because it meant to address allegations that Google SERPs often delivered lists of useless sites. When panda first came out, thousand of websites were affected because a 12% of websites had a loss of both rankings and traffic.

Google Panda is a program in charge of lowering the ranks of low quality and spam website, and to higher the ranks of high quality websites so they can be easily found on the top of the search engine.

WEEK 13 - Social Media Optimization

This week I learned that social media has become an important part of marketing, especially online marketing. Marketeers are now using social media to be connected with their existing customers,  but not only that, Marketeers are using social media to attract new customers. The way they use social media is by publishing ads and promotion on the social media news fee; this method helps them to attract customers that are interested on the product offered.

Social media marketing and optimization is similar to SEO because social networking sites are able to calculate the overall popularity and then provide each user with their most popular choices. SMO (Social Media Optimization) increases you linkability, makes tagging and bookmarking easy, rewards inbound links and helps your content travel.

Week 12 - Latest SEO Tactics & Strategies

One of the new SEO tactics & strategies, is the need for sitelinks in your website. Sitelinks are new addition to Google Search. When you have sitelinks in your website, people can use them to navigate through the website without wasting much time. If for any reason you want to turn off your site's sitelink, you simply have to use Google's Webmaster tools to block them.

Ad Sitelinks are normally used to attract more traffic to a website so more people can easily find it. Thanks to sitelinks, visitors can easily navigate  through your site with ease. Is always important to use segmentation when choosing Ad sitelinks because that will also help users to notice your website when they are using the search engine looking for the keywords you decided to use so your website can be found easily.

Week 10 - Advanced SEO Techniques

This week I learned that with globalization, businesses want to reach every corner of the world. However, there is a contrasting situation as well which is that most customers now want products produced locally therefore, is important to include your clients' website to local search engines because it will promote its relevancy. Some directories that you should always consider are:
-Google Local Business Center
-Yahoo! Local Merchant
-Ask Business Search

Also, is important to submit your client's website listings to popular directories and internet yellow pages because  there are many top directories, that offer detailed information about the local businesses dealing in different products and services. Another important think to do is t set your geographic location in Google's Webmaster tools, and to ad contact information to your site.

week 9 - Marketing Strategy

This week I learned that the use is search engines to search for local resources has been increasing over the years, and is not surprising because because many people especially adults use google, yahoo or bing to find and locate different places near or far from where they live. One of the main things to have predetermined in every search engine tool, are the keywords because as the focus is local, so also would be the keywords.

 Another important thing in Marketing Strategy, is link baiting. Link baiting is the process in which you use a bait or a hook to attract back links. It refers to something unique or interesting on a website; therefore, other would like to link to your website. Some "hooks" that can be used are:
1-Resource hook
2-News hook
3-Contrary hook
4-Attach hook
5-Humor hook

Week 8- SEO- Latest Concepts

This week I learned that there are some emerging trends in SEO. One of the emerging trends is Blog Optimization. Everyone knows what a blog is, but just as a quick review I will write what a blog is. A blog is a user generated website with journal style entries that are displayed in reverse chronological order. Now blog optimization can be done in many different ways and those ways are:

1-Simple Content

2-Search Engine Submission

3-Keywords

4-Optimize your Blog Template

5-Regular Updates

Also, another concept that is mentioned in this weeks chapter is the content duplication in SEO. With duplicate content there is no garantee as to which page will show in search results and which won't; It also means that some sites and some pages are not indexed by by search engines at all. 

Week 11- Recommended Marketing Resources

I highly recommend the following blogs because they have a great amount of information about Inbound Marketing and Search Engine Optimization.

• John Dodson - http://jdodsoniii.blogspot.com
• Francesca Guido - http://francescaseoblog.blogspot.com/
• Shannon Oconnell - http://shannonsmarketingblog.blogspot.com/  
• Carlos Salinas - http://carlosmarketingblog.blogspot.com/
• Ashfaaq Seedat - http://ashmarketingblog.blogspot.com/
• Maureen Lepke - http://maureenlepkemarketingblog.blogspot.com/
• Cory Evans - http://coryevansmarketing.blogspot.com/
• Caitlin Campbell - http://campbellmarketingblog.blogspot.com/  
• Kaitlyn Szaflarski - http://kaitlynmarketing.blogspot.com/  
• Bruno Gomes - http://brunogomesmarketing.blogspot.com/  
• Sumaira Quraishi - http://sumairasmarketingblog.blogspot.com/  
• Trevor Walzak - http://trevormarketing1.blogspot.com/
• Anthony Phipps - http://phippsmarketingblog.blogspot.com/
• Kevin Carroll - http://kc3marketing.blogspot.com/
• Tommy DiPonio - http://tommydmarketing.blogspot.com/
• Steve Kositzky - http://stevesmktgblog.blogspot.com/
• Drew Keil - http://drewkeil.blogspot.com

 

Week 7 - Monitoring

This week I learned that monitoring a search engine is important because it helps you to analyze and record all the traffic that runs through different websites. The idea behind monitoring the traffic from a website is to know what are the different website components that attract and convert different visitors into customers. A well done website can help you or your company to attract each month a huge number of targeted audience.

The visitor traffic analysis can be done by following these 5 parameters:
1-Traffic on keywords
2-Keywords and landing page
3-Whether the call to action was followed for conversion
4-Qualified Traffic
5- Converted traffic

 

Finally, keywords is the most important parameter to follow to accomplish a well done website analysis because by knowing with what words people look for certain stuff, it will be easy for the companies or private websites to know what keywords they should use for their website description for the searchers.  

WEEK 8 - Hubspot - Cultivating Happy Customers.

This week in Hubspot, I learned that cultivating happy customers is important because that will help the company as a whole to have a better relationship with its customers. Most of the companies spend a lot of money on trying to acquire new customers as well as trying to come up with new products ideas. Since trying to acquire new customers means spending a lot of money for a company, a company needs to understand that is better for them to keep existing customers by satisfying their needs rather than just forgetting about them.

Another reason of why keeping in mind existing customers is because only 7% of customers said that they have gotten an outstanding customer service experience, meaning that companies have more priorities in obtaining new customers rather than to improve their customer services to keep their existing customers happy. Finally, to help the company achieve its goal of keeping their customers happy, is to keep their employees happy as well because if the company's employees are happy, the services that they will provide to the customers will be better, and therefore, the three pillars of customers delight which are Innovation, Communication, and Education will be putted in practice.

WEEK 7- Hubspot- Taking Your Sales Process Inbound

This week in Hubspot I learned that sales processes have been changing because buying habits have changed. To start with the right foot, for the sales process you have to target the right people because if you don't, your sales might not be as expected. Also you have to keep in mind that social media have an important role in sales because according to Hubspot, 72.6% of salespeople using social media outperformed other salespeople that were not using social media.

 

Finally, to have success in the sales process you might want to know who you are talking to, or to whom you are directing your sales to, and that is why is important to know your audience. Also is important to understand that the best way of doing sales is with professionalism and as a trusted sales person; therefore, the best way of doing sales is by doing them directly person to person.    

WEEK 6 - SEO - Pay Per Click (PPC)

This week in SEO, I learned that you can pay per click that you get when people click to go to your website when using a search engine. Pay per click campaigns are advertisement campaigns that run on search engines result pages. The way this campaign works is easy to understand because is solely based on paying a certain quantity of money according to the number of clicks you got from people that go into your website. This campaign is very important for marketing because the website that bid more money per click, is the company that will most likely be in the top of the search engine results page.

 

Finally according to the SEO study guide, pay per click  is a quick and cost effective advertising method only if you know how to use it to your advantage. Also, with a small investment you can get targeted traffic to your website right away; setting up this only takes 5 minutes. Also, is important to have in mind and don't forget that bidding is a very important part for this campaign.    

  

WEEK 6 - Hubspot: Sending the right email to the right lead and the power of smarketing

This week in hubspot, I learned that email marketing is still very important because although many people believe that email marketing is considered spam, email still growing meaning that it has a longer life spam than social media. One of the reasons of why email is important for marketing, is that approximately 91% of the people that own an email account check their emails at least once a day. Another good reason of why email marketing is important, is that it tend to help people to get highly personal.

According to hubspot, email marketing works for every stage of the inbound methodology:
1- Attract new visitors.
2- Convert visitors into leads.
3- Nurture leads into customers.
4- Delight customers into promoters.

 

This week I also learned a new term called Smarketing. Smarketing is a combination of two words which are sales and marketing, and therefore is a combination of definitions as well. According to hubspot, businesses with strong sales and marketing tend to get 20% annual revenue growth. Finally, there are 5 ways to integrate smarketing:

1- Speak the same language.

2- Set up closed-loop reporting.

3- Implement a service level agreement. 

4- Maintained open communication. 

5- Rely on data.

 

WEEK 5-SEO - Cloaking and Doorway Pages

This week I learned in SEO the definition of the word cloaking. Cloaking  is a SEO technique in which the search engine content is different from the content shown in the user's browser. This technique helped the webmasters to come up with many techniques to rank their sites higher on search engines. SEO is evolving and cloaking is only one thing that came from that evolution; now the use of flash instead of HTML is important because many sites are built using Flash. Google is currently the only search engine indexing flash pages.

  

Just like cloaking, there are pages that are created specially for search engines, and these pages are called Doorway Pages. These pages are built for the only purpose of sending visitors to your website. Although doorway pages sound like something good, it is actually something bad because it tends to be used for spamming, in other words, this will make you go to another website even when you don't want to. Finally, Doorway pages are an unethical SEO practice.

WEEK 5 - Hubspot: Content

This week in Hubspot I learned that content is the message that your inbound marketing strategy delivers. One might think that content is very effective while doing business to business marketing, but it is not true because although a 93% of business to business marketers use content marketing, only a 42 % of them say that they're effective at it. 

Having a good content in your website is important because that will help you to capure your prospect's attention. Another thing to have in mind about having good content specially when is a product-base content is that it might be good, but it is never going to be remarkable. 

To create good content the following process is important:

1-Plan

2-Produce

3-Distribute

4-Analyze

5-Repeat

Finally, a good content consists on talking about benefits and no features because benefits tie into emotional desires, and features mostly have a rational appeal.

 

WEEK 4- SEO - Google suggest

This week I learned that for search engine optimization keywords are an essential part of it, but it is not a coincidence because i have been writing about keywords in almost each one of my posts. This time keywords are important because they will help the website that you are promoting to get more easily to find while using a search engine like Google.
Since I am writing about Google, I will just highlight that Google has an amazing tool called "Google suggests" which works thanks to the keywords. If you go to Google and start typing something, you will see that Google immediately suggests some topics according to the words that you are typing. This tool helps the companies to use keywords that will immediately pop up if you start typing a letter.

Finally, there are three keyword finalizing strategies which are: Keyword Phrase Popularity, Keyword Competition Analysis and Marketing Relevance, and although the three of them are important, in my opinion only keyword phrase popularity is the most relevant because for the SEO is necessary to select the most popular words among users, and that is why is indispensable to really think the words through because that will help to get more visits into your website.

WEEK 4- Hubspot- Amplifying your Content with Social Media.

For this week I learned that the best way to attract people to see your website is by using social media because according to hubspot, 74% of marketers saw an increase in traffic after spending just 6 hours per week on social media. The use of social media is important because it can help you to convert simple visitors into leads.

Social media has 5 practices that are important to have in mind, and they are:
1-Optimize your profile
2-Personas: who are they?
3-Build reach
4-Customize your content to reach platform
5- Analyze to refine

Finally, is indispensable to include keywords on your profiles because that will help potential customers to find your profile faster through a search engine.Also, remember always to posts things that will not have any negative effects on the searchers because that will help you to establish a long term relationship with them.

Week 3 - SEO - Search Engine Optimization

I have learned that search engines are a very important part of the internet now because more than an 80% of websites visits come from them. Search engines such as Yahoo! and Google help to find what you are looking for on the web easily. If you ask someone if they have used a search engine their answer will be more likely to be yes because an estimate of 84% of people have use a search engine.

Each search engine help websites to promote themselves through them so they will be easily seen by the web searchers. But the question is: how a search engine work? The answer to this question is essentially easy because a search engine works thanks to providers. Providers help the search engine to show the content that they have on display, and eventually search engines become providers for other search engines. Finally, keywords are important for a search engine because this will help to find what people are looking for even more easily.

Week 3- The Fundamentals of Blogging

This week in the marketing class I learned that having a blog is important because it will help any company and even yourself to have more visits to your websites, and eventually new customers. Blogging periodically will help to attract more qualified website traffic. Also, when writing a blog, is important to write everything as long as it needs to be.

As mentioned in Hubspot, there are four easy steps that will help to promote blog content: 

1- Leverage your website

2-Use your social media presence

3-Include in e-mail marketing

4-comment with your net work

When creating a blog, is important to understand that all the material that will be displayed will be seen by many different people, so is vital for your blog to contain information that will be easy to understand and very informative for the website visitors. Also, is beneficial for your blog to have high quality images. Finally, is important to have all of your blogs updated all the time, and this means to reuse and recycle old posts to keep the content fresh. 

REMEMBER: DO NOT EXPECT OVERNIGHT SUCCESS

WEEK 2- Website optimization

This week I have learned that website optimization is an important step for every single company because is a way of interacting with the future customers through the internet. Website optimization will help the company to attract more customers depending on the content of their websites. While developing the website optimization, is also important to understand that one of the main things to have is a META description available for the website.

A META description is a little description that will appear under the website link on the different search engine tools such as google, yahoo, and bing. This description will help searchers to understand what is the website and company about. For the website optimization the idea of having in mind what you want to do with your website is important as well as the content which should be easy to understand. 

For website optimization the website should match or at least be related towards content in it so people don't get confused while searching. 

WEEK 1- Inbound Marketing

   This last week in the marketing class, we watched a video about inbound marketing which demonstrated the differences between traditional and inbound marketing. The video  basically stated that it is better to concentrate on inbound marketing because you do not need to "interrupt what people want to consume, you need to be what they want to consume".

   Inbound Marketing concentrates on it's own methodology which consists on attracting new customers that would be called strangers at the moment, after they have been attracted they will become visitors. once they are visitors the main thing to do is to convert them into leads, next step will be to make them customers and finally promoters.

   Finally, inbound marketing best practices are: Use buyer's persona, use the buyer's journey, create remarkable content,and leverage your content. in my opinion, and according about what i am learning, the best practice is to create remarkable content because inbound marketing= content + context, and this means that this practice is important because is the one that will help you to interact directly with strangers until convert them into customers up to promoters. Also it is very important because it should contain valuable information and not just anything you can think about because not everything is important to all the customers