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.