On-Site SEO

Since I will be missing class on Friday, the 23th of January, I am writing this blog post on the third chapter of the Internet Marketing Essentials online book, "On-Site Search Engine Optimization". The number one thing I learned was that one should optimize all keyword phrases according to the website they have, and how big their website is. Also, all keywords should point to specific webpages, instead of just the homepage, from where the visitor would have to click onwards, as the map illustrates.

Source: Internet Marketing Essentials

Other important aspects of on-site SEO are relevance of the webpage content and its quality. Relevance is measured by how well the keyword is related to the page. For example, if the keyword appears in the webpage's URL, it gets a lot of relevance points. Quality, on the other hand is measured by the click-through rate from SERP (Search Engine Results Page), low bounce rate from landing page or overall good quality of the content of the webpage.

What I learned from this chapter is the basis of on-site SEO. As of right now, I feel that I could assist my group's client for the Google Online Marketing Challenge a little bit better, when it comes to attracting more visitors through SEO. I also learned more about relevance and why it is so important to be very descriptive about the website's content and link appropriate keywords to each webpage.

I still have little knowledge when it comes to the internet, but I feel I'm getting a better understanding of it every class. However, as I was reading the chapter, I could not understand a header tag. What is it and what exactly does it do? I also thought about how the chapter describes the usage of long tail keyword phrases, and how small websites benefit more from that than bigger ones. What if not that many people search for longer than one- or two-word phrases? Wouldn't that make it harder for a small website to gain a higher ranking on search results? I certainly try to keep my search words to a minimum, but I guess I can't know what other people are doing, at least not until I learn more about Google and how it works.