SEO Artist in the Making

SEO and internet marketing seems to have taken over my life.  I work a 9-5, take masters internet marketing courses, and am still reading this 550 page book titled 'The Art of SEO' - which feels like its never ending.  Therefore, I wanted to take a little more time to talk about SEO and take a look at meta description tags because that is what I have been writing at work.

Whats a meta description tag you ask?  A meta description tag is the 160 characters Google allows you to describe a webpage in the Search Engine Results Page (SERP's) that is positioned just under the title tag.  According to 'The Art of SEO' meta description tags have three primary purposes:

• To describe the content of the page accurately 
• To serve as a short text "advertisement" to click on your pages in the SERP's
• To display targeted keywords to indicate content to searchers

When writing a meta description tag the single most important aspect of writing it is relevancy.  Your meta description tag must be relevant to the content thats in the page.  This might seem like a no brainer and almost seems brainless for me to point out, but I can't tell you how many times I've seen meta description tags that have no relevance to the webpage they're describing.  The more relevant the meta description tag is to a webpage, the less likely a site visitor will bounce and leave your webpage for someone else's.    

Update on me:  Tomorrow I have my 60 day review, I'll let you all know how it goes.  Wish me luck!

BH

    

Internet Marketing Rocks!!

Hey everybody,

I just finished up my first lecture for my masters certificate in internet marketing through the University of San Francisco.  The class is taught by Jim Kukral - who is one of the leading internet marketing entrepreneurs in the world and brings with him over 15 years of internet marketing and website building experience.  Did you know the first websites were built in 1994?  That means he has been doing this since the internets existence.  He also showed us some pretty funny websites he built back in the day that brought many laughs to the class.  

Today we learned that there are only two reasons why people use search engines.

1.  They need/want to solve a problem
2.  They're looking for entertainment

Every one of the billions of searches performed each day fall into these two categories.  From searching "how to's" to messing around and finding viral video clips on youtube; every search performed solves a problem, or provides us with some sort of entertainment.  Google, Youtube, Yahoo, and Bing are all extremely good at providing search results that help solve our problems as well as provide entertainment.  The problem many of us face though, is getting your information ranked high enough in those search engines.

How do we do this then?

We must provide our audience with compelling CONTENT!  Sure, performing fancy Search Engine Optimization (SEO) strategies helps but those strategies will do you and your company no good if your site doesn't have compelling content.  Search Engines are too smart now and have caught onto spammy websites that may have previously ranked very high on the search engine results page (SERP's).

So remember, if you want your website to rank high on the SERP's, writing compelling content should be your first step.  Then once the content is there, your site can be optimized to increase your results even more.

-BH

P.S.  Update on me: The CEO at ion wants me to get heavily involved in SEO and has me reading a book titled, "The Art of SEO" - which is like the SEO bible.  This is super exciting stuff for me and I can't wait to dig in and get more hands on experience.  Hope everybody's doing well back in Chicago!