Hubspot Blog Post "Website and Search Engine Optimization"

This week in class, we watched a HubSpot video about website optimization and search engine optimization.

Website Optimization is the act or process or methodology of making something as fully functional and effective as possible.

Search Engine Optimization is only part of optimization. It is ranking at the top of the list of search results.

We talked about who the searcher was in comparison to the search engine.
The searchers are the real people, the ones who buy your products and services.

Image source: Google images

There are three things that searchers are trying to do: 
1) They are looking for something to accomplish or do
2) They are trying to learn something
3) They are trying to go somewhere or do something

Google is the leader in search engines. They have over 30 trillion pages and are constantly growing.
If you create content that satisfies your searchers, it will satisfy the search engine too. The goal is to attract searchers, who are the buyer personas that I talked about in my blog post in week 1. They are the ideal customers you are trying to target.

Three Ways to Make Our Website Easy to Understand and Crawl

In the video, we also learned that there are three ways to make our website easy to understand and crawl:
1) Design
2) Content
3) Formatting the Content

Design- focusing on the cognitive fluency (ease of which something is processed) of the website. The user needs a great website experience with ease of access and understanding. The color scheme should be inviting. The right colors could help bring the website to life. As users, we make snapshot judgments about websites. Within a couple seconds of viewing a website, we can tell if it's beautiful or visually complex.

Content- one of the elements that make up the inbound strategy. Keywords are topics. The content uses the same language as your buyer personas. The page title is part of the page that displays at the top. The URL is the link to your website. It should be named something similar to the title, this helps Google sort information. The page header is in a larger font, usually in a different color so that it stands out and attracts the searcher's eyes. The content is the paragraphs and images on the page. Finally, meta descriptions about the page show up in the search engine results page.

Formatting the Content- You could have the best content in the world, but if that content is difficult to read, it is all for nothing. To make the content more appealing, include pictures and images that reinforce the topic and content. Use different fonts and sizes of text. This will help break up the paragraphs. Subheadings are also helpful if the content is long. Keep paragraphs and sentences short. Use bullet points to make it easy to read. Hyperlinks can also be included to make a reference to something like an article that refers to what you are talking about.

Hubspot Blog Post "Different Types of Marketing: Traditional and Inbound Marketing"

Different Types of Marketing

Traditional Marketing: 
There is the traditional marketing approach, where the ads are interruptive, cold-calling, and cold emails (SPAM). This type of marketing may be seen as annoying and doesn't relate to every customer.

Inbound Marketing: 
Inbound marketing is the extra content on the webpage and the helpful tools that make customers come back to the webpage. Consumers don't always want to be sold to, they also want to be educated about products and services. Inbound marketing is targeted towards ideal customers. The inbound mythology is to attract, convert, close, and delight. As a company, you want to attract the right people who would be most interested in your product, and then convert them to leads and close them as customer. Then once they are customers, the company will want to delight and satisfy them so that they go out and tell people about the great experience they had with the company. This would be positive word of mouth marketing that businesses love, because it is free marketing. Businesses constantly have to be analyzing to see what they are doing right and what they can improve upon.

The Inbound Mythology

Image source: Google images

Four Fundamentals of Inbound Success
We also learned that there are four fundamentals of inbound success:

• The first fundamental is to use buyer personas. This means to use a semi-fictional character that the company will create based on real data to represent their ideal customers. This first fundamental is really trying to find the target market. To create the personas, the company will need to do some research on the role, company/organization, goals, challenges, where they spend the most time, personal background, and their shopping preferences. It takes as much research as you need to create the persona.

• The second fundamental is to use the buyer's journey. This is the active research process that someone goes through leading up to the purchase. There are three stages: The awareness stage- discovering a problem or opportunity, or people. The consideration stage- finding solutions, investing in specific solutions to get more information. Finally the decision stage- choosing the best solution for them.

• The third fundamental is to create remarkable content. Inbound marketing is content and context. The content is the toolkit, the blog post, free content, photos, videos, and anything that can be educational. The context is who we are creating this content for, the content is tailored toward people. 

• The fourth fundamental is to leverage your content. It's not enough to only have great content, you have to find a way to get that content out into the world. Distribution of the content makes it relative to people. There are different ways of distributing the content. It can be distributed through webpages, business blogs, social media, landing pages, calls to action, and marketing emails.