My Google Analytics has shown me that my audience has yet to take off and that people are more interested in my homework post than my content posts. Google Analytics has shown me that no one is interested in my lucid dream blog content and that my main traffic is from my short essay. I was pleasantly surprised that I had eight recurring visitors but my Google Analytics shows that they didn’t hang around long. According to my Google Analytics, I need to up my marketing plan to get more of an audience. The marketing plan I talked about in my last Process Post for week 9 would fix most of the problems with my audience retention and my redesign plans would also help people be less confused with my site.
After reading the required readings for this week I found a solution to many of the problems I have can be solved using SEO. In the article 15 Reasons Why Your Business Needs SEO the author Sam Hollingsworth, says “SEO Builds Trust & Credibility,… is the Best Way to Understand the Voice of the Consumer,… Means a Better User Experience,… [and] Local SEO Means Increased Engagement, Traffic & Conversions.” All of these things are the things my website needs help with. If all of this is true my updated marketing plan will include learning SEO. I will probably not update my website any time soon as I now need to learn some new software and will make a big update later. By the time I update my website, there will be no more confusion about what my website content is and the right audience will be directed to my website because of this. Look forward to the update and I’ll see you later.
This process post marks the final one in my journey with Publishing 101 and it’s safe to say it has been a story of ups and downs. Blogging and content creation is not an easy task especially when other events in life cloud the mind and stifle creativity. So in an effort to not make this piece completely tear-inspiring, I have decided to leave with a few notes on monetizing your website through various opportunities like SEO and some ways that you can plan to make money on the side by honing in on your passion, in other words, the next steps for your blog.
Making money from a website can be a rewarding and redeeming practice for those that blog as a “passion project” but know that “passion alone does not pay the rent” and with a growing movement in online monetization, there is a multitude of digital supports for such website incorporations (Shwake 2022). One of the primary examples of such support is cost-effective Search Engine Optimization aka SEO. TakeLesson’s by Microsoft defines SEO as, “a digital marketing strategy that targets a website’s presence in search results on search engines” contributing to more clicks and visits to the site and therefore more traffic toward affiliate links or other on-site revenue materials (2021). SEO also offers a competitive edge to your blog as majority of site landings are from organic search engines like Google. This is espescially critical as “Google owns a significantly larger portion of the search market than competitors like Yahoo, Bing, … DuckDuckGo, and many, many others (Hollingsworth 2021). SEO also serves as a primary standpoint on keeping up to date with “major changes” and the “environment” of the cyberverse, understanding what exactly consumers are looking for, and if you wish, how you can tailor your content to those search patterns (Hollingsworth 2021). In application, there are many sites and services that exist to assist with developing SEO in a cost-effective way, from Google’s own Starter Guide to gig-based professionals on Fiverr, there are plenty of options for a range of blog sizes.
Reflecting on my own blog and my personal next steps I can resonate with the quote, “monetization is math, not magic” because as much as I am not a mathematically inclined individual it takes some easy addition to understand that sometimes a growth mindset is all you need to get on top of creating ideas that can lead to making money from your content (Jackson 2022). My blog focuses on my own writing and exploration of poetry that could translate into a physical sale of my own poetry book. I can see a demand for such items with the growth in the wellness sector and the rising popularity of poetry books like ‘milk and honey’ by Rupi Kaur and ‘helium’ by Rudy Francisco, both extensively influential and profitable authors. This ability to “sell the skills you already have directly to people by working on specific projects or by teaching them how to do something” can translate into a range of personal talents that aren’t limited to things like poetry or prose but the whole range of services that people would be interested in purchasing (Georgiou 2023). These sorts of integrations of services can be done in a variety of ways including using sites like Wix and Weebly‘s e-commerce integration subscriptions to easily manage purchases or setting up WordPress e-commerce platforms. One of the most popular avenue’s is Shopify which allows for specialized ‘Shopify Apps’ and social media integration to streamline connectivity for consumers on all platforms.
From SEO to specialized content sales, creating a blog and discovering how you can achieve a monetary edge in the online world can be beneficial in fueling one’s journey with self-publishing. It is important to understand that money is not everything though and if your content, like some sites that I have reviewed in this class, is specifically for non-profit benefits it is important to stay true to your unwritten blog charter and take chart your steps from there.
Stay updated on site with my continuing ‘ink’ content and for any announcements related to a potential print publishing in the future, thank you for all your support so far.
Works Cited
Ajao, Adedayo. “What Is SEO? and How to Use It in Your Writing.” TakeLessons Blog, TakeLessons, 5 Mar. 2021, https://takelessons.com/blog/2021/03/what-is-seo-and-how-to-use-it-in-your-writing?utm_source=bing&utm_medium=richqna_answer&utm_campaign=richqna&utm_trigger=richqna&utm_query=define+seo&utm_content=blogsqna%2Btitle&muid=3DC663CFCA596F442B4C7151CB266E98&utm_region=CA&utm_position=Default.
Georgiou, Katrina. “How to Sell Your Skills: 10+ Great Ways to Put Yourself out There.” WikiHow, WikiHow, 6 Mar. 2023, https://www.wikihow.com/Sell-Your-Skills.
Hollingsworth, Sam. “15 Reasons Why Your Business Absolutely Needs Seo.” Search Engine Journal, Search Engine Journal, 9 Aug. 2021, https://www.searchenginejournal.com/why-seo-is-important-for-business/248101/#close.
Jackson, Brian. “How to Monetize a Blog in 2023 (13 Profitable Ways).” Kinsta®, Kinsta®, 21 Oct. 2022, https://kinsta.com/blog/how-to-monetize-a-blog/.
Shwake, Emily. “How to Monetize a Blog and Maximize Profits.” Wix Blog, Wix Blog, 12 Mar. 2023, https://www.wix.com/blog/2019/01/how-to-monetize-blog/?utm_source=bing&utm_medium=cpc&utm_campaign=ms_us_dsa_Feb20%5Eblog_bl_monetize_dsa&experiment_id=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.wix.com%2Fblog%2F2019%2F01%2Fhow-to-monetize-blog%5Ebb%5E79233688671437%5Ehow+to+monetize+your+blog&msclkid=fdf906c5c68f1f2a5af562ee5beb7225.
As an up-and-coming blogger, improving my SEO or Search Engine Optimization, will have a huge impact on my website’s success, especially if I plan to monetize my content. Having a good SEO means your website is geared towards search engines, thus appearing higher up on the results page. Our readings this week emphasize the importance of building your SEO, to widen brand reach and website visibility, as most consumers don’t look past the first few results (Hollingsworth, 2021). Until now, I have been focusing mostly on creating content and finding my footing building a website–something I have never done before.
But, this inspired me to test my blog’s SEO. When looking up “Fridays with Frosty” directly in Google, my site came up first! Thanks family and friends for that boost. This is huge for my site, as our readings say, “If you’re not on page one, you’re not winning the click” (Hollingsworth, 2021).
But, when you change the search terms, even slightly, to something like “Fridays Frosty” I disappear right off the first page of results. It looks like I still have some work to do.
This week, I used google analytics to try to improve my SEO. It says that 92% of my site’s viewers come via a direct search and are located in Canada. (Shout out again to the fam jam!)
But, 88% of the viewers on my site come through desktop, something I wasn’t expecting. This posed a problem for the way I integrate videos into my blog. My site isn’t user-friendly enough when you are on desktop. This had to change, because good user experience improves SEO. Our readings talk about this, stating “Google has learned how to interpret a good or unfavourable user experience, and a positive user experience has become a pivotal element to a website’s success.” (Hollingsworth, 2021).
My issue is I have been making my videos on TikTok, then saving them to my computer before posting, rather than just embedding the TikTok directly. This means that on mobile, watching the videos is fine, as they are already sized to fit the screen. On desktop however, the video size and vertical proportions are too big for the screen. You can’t see the entire thing. You have to do quite a bit of scrolling to even get to the bottom of the video. It doesn’t making watching easy. So, I needed to fix this for my larger desktop audience and hopefully, it would boost my SEO.
I had to redo all my video blog posts and embed them directly from TikTok. I decided I could also improve my website’s marketability at the same time, by creating a Fridays with Frosty specific TikTok. Up until now, I have been posting on my personal TikTok account. Once I reposted all my videos to the new account, I uploaded them to my blog as TikTok’s. Although it was frustrating to have to post everything again, it was worth it. My site looks way cleaner, and I have a head start expanding my brand over multiple channels (Check out my plans for that here).
Learning about SEO made me realize that I may have been using tags on my posts incorrectly. I have been treating them like keywords, and have since learned they aren’t the same. I decided to enlist ChatGPT to help me improve this. I imputed my most recent post, about Caitlin Clark (She’s awesome, check it out here!), into ChatGPT and asked it to generate tags for me (and it came up with the tags for this post too). It came up with some basic stuff, like “Caitlin Clark”, “Iowa Hawkeyes”, and “women’s basketball”. But it also came up with a few things I hadn’t thought of, like “basketball records”, and “TV viewership”.
I’m anxiously waiting to see if AI can help improve the traffic to this post, and my SEO, through improved tags. If it does, I will be going back and getting it to come up with tags for all my older posts.
The readings did demonstrate a few things I have been doin well in terms of SEO. They say good SEO “offers users the information they are looking for in fewer clicks, quickly and easily,” and “builds trust & credibility” which a positive user experience is part of (Hollingsworth, 2021). By splitting up my content into written and video sections, navigation is easier, making content faster to find. I have also made decisions about comment modifications that will foster a positive user environment. Read about those decisions here!
In the future, there are many things I could do to improve my SEO, with the help of analytics, like improving code so my website loads faster. But, those changes seemed daunting at this point and I would be way out of my depth. If I continue my blog, it will definitely be something to think about. Until then, I’ll just keep telling everyone I know to check out “Friday’s with Frosty” and hope it boosts my SEO.
Works Cited
Hollingsworth, S. (2021, August 9). 15 reasons why your business absolutely needs seo. Search Engine Journal. Retrieved April 9, 2023, from https://www.searchenginejournal.com/why-seo-is-important-for-business/248101/#close
This week in PUB 101, we got to revisit Google Analytics. I installed this plugin for my blog in the first or second week of this course, but had yet to look at the data, so I was intrigued to see what kind of activity had been tracked on melatonin gone missing so I know what’s working and what could be improved in regards to my site’s SEO.
Google Analytics
The first thing I looked at, purely out of my own curiosity, is my audience overview. I wanted to see exactly how many people have checked out my blog.
From this graphic, I can see that melatonin gone missing has been visited by 151 new users and accumulated 640 total page views. Seeing this data and knowing that my blog has only existed for a few months is honestly quite amazing… I feel like a real website owner! The number of users on my site regularly fluctuate, and I could guess this is because I usually only post once a week, attracting the most traffic which then decreases until my next posts are up the following week.
I also was curious about user acquisition, because after all, this is only a blog for an SFU course… who’s finding it besides my TA, professor, and classmates? And how are they finding it?
It’s interesting to see how users have come from social media sites like Facebook and Instagram, considering I have personally not linked my blog to either of those sites. The direct and google channels are probably mostly me, and the Posiel channel appears because my posts are connected to the Posiel feed, so these are unsurprising. Users have come from Jellylift as well, thanks to Antalya’s links in her peer review of melatonin gone missing (go check it out!).
Seeing that visitors really do come from social media and external links demonstrates how important a good and continuously improving SEO is for site traffic. Sam Hollingsworth explains this further, saying how having a good SEO is “the most viable and cost-effective way to both understand and reach customers in key moments that matter”. For melatonin gone missing, this means being accessible and easily usable for my target audiences, which I identify in my Imaginary Audiences post. I want my audience to find my blog in a pinch!
Growing my SEO
To improve my site’s SEO, as it is evidently quite important, I will aim to do things that Dr. Norman calls “ingredients for a good SEO”. Some of these things include effective use of keywords, including strong headers in your posts, and having outbound links to reliable sources. Although I strive to include all of these elements in my weekly posts, there are always ways to aim higher and ensure my SEO is being considered in every aspect of my blog design/content.
Stay tuned to see melatonin gone missing skyrocket in SEO success!
References:
Hollingsworth, S. (2021, August 9). 15 reasons why your business absolutely needs seo. Search Engine Journal. Retrieved April 10, 2023, from https://www.searchenginejournal.com/why-seo-is-important-for-business/248101/#close
Norman, N. (2023). Data and SEO [PowerPoint Slides]. Department of Publishing, Simon Fraser University.
Photo:
Joyce, J. (2021, February 20). 10 great google analytics alternatives. Search Engine Journal. Retrieved April 10, 2023, from https://www.searchenginejournal.com/google-analytics-alternatives/347638/
SEO is one of those fancy-sounding acronyms I keep hearing about, but I don’t know much about what it is. Yes, I know it stans for search engine optimization… but what does that mean? Well, I’m going to find out.
What is search engine optimization?
Search engine optimization (SEO) is a means of understanding and reaching your audience. Not only is it a practical tool that can improve a website’s searchability and visibility, but it’s a cost-effective one too (Hollingsworth, 2021).
Hollingsworth (2021) goes on to outline 15 different reasons we need SEO, including that organic searches are the main source of website traffic and that SEO builds trust and credibility.
While this is all great and insightful information, what does it mean for me and Two A.M. Thoughts? How can I boost my website’s SEO?
Three ways to boost SEO
Natural links. One way to boost my SEO is to include natural links throughout my content. These aren’t links that are paid for, monetized, or tracked in anyway. Rather, they are links that are there to reference other content, websites, or sources. Links are something I include in my posts regularly, but a majority of them are external links that take readers to outside sources and websites. One thing I’d definitely like to work on is linking and referencing more of my own blog posts in my content—internal links.
Analytics data. Website analytics are another way to boost SEO. Particularly, they help us track users’ behaviours so that we can adapt our site and content to suit their needs. Analytics are something I have set up, but I could sure spend more time looking into them to help cater Two A.M. Thoughts a little more.
Positive user experience. A positive user experience can change everything for your site. Being able to offer users with the information they’re looking for in as few clicks as possible can make your site stand out from others alike, notes Hollingsworth (2021).
Takeaways of search engine optimization
SEO is an essential for all websites. There are so many more ways to boost it than the ones I’ve listed above, but those are just a start. Some things to keep in mind are that SEO is the key to long-term success. It’s a cost-effective and quantifiable gateway to new opportunities, so it doesn’t hurt to start adapting your SEO today.
This week, we learned all about how to optimize our blogs for every website’s best friend and greatest enemy: Google. So I decided to look closer at Spilling the Royaltea’s analytics to see who is visiting my site. Then, I did the same to my search engine optimization or SEO to try to figure out how to grow my audience and rank higher on Google searches. (For an explanation of the random underlines, read further):
Diving into Analytics
This week, I did a deep dive into Google Analytics for my website, and looked at who’s been looking at Spilling the Royaltea. Here’s what I found in terms of website traffic:
Since Spilling the Royaltea’s inception, there have been exactly 100 new users and 745 page views! The number of users has stayed pretty consistent over time, with the occasional peak of 5 users a day. While it’s good to know that I haven’t been losing viewers, it would be nice to see this increase sometime soon. Hopefully, by improving my SEO in the coming weeks, I’ll see an improvement shortly.
Unfortunately, since I just recently enabled the option to view demographics, I am unable to see data on this section of my website analytics. Seeing my audience’s demographics would be extremely useful when ensuring I’m catering my data to the right people. For example, I am currently assuming that my audience consists mostly of young people, so I’m using quite a bit of Gen Z jargon in my content posts. But if mostly older people are looking at my blog, I’d have a little bit of a problem, since they might not understand the nuances of the language I’m using. When this part of Google Analytics updates, I’ll be sure to use it to help decide my content.
Implementing Effective SEO
Hollingsworth really drives home the importance of implementing SEO in businesses (and I guess Spilling the Royaltea could be considered one?) to help increase visitors to websites. For example, it builds trust and credibility. By creating an accessible, effective user experience that can be easily found on Google, people feel more comfortable going to my site for information. I’ll also get a larger audience by building this sense of trust and credibility. It even helps me with my knowledge of the web because I need to stay updated about who’s doing what to improve their SEO.
And in this week’s lecture, we learned exactly how we might go about improving our SEO, so I tried out a few of these tactics this week. Firstly, we learned about implementing effective keywords. These keywords are what searchers enter into Google, so I need to make sure I’m implementing enough of these to improve my ranking on Google searches. So for this process post, with the help of ChatGPT, I entered the prompt: Generate keywords for a blog post related to analytics and SEO, and here’s what it gave me:
And while I couldn’t include every single one of these keywords in my posts, I tried my best to organically include as many as I could (or slightly varied versions of them), the first occurrence of which I underlined throughout my post.
We also learned about including strategic headers. Although I thought I was already doing this pretty well, I learned about a few things I could do to further improve. For example, I should be using actionable headers, which I did for this post: I included the verbs “dive,” “implement,” and “create” to add some dimension and interest. I also included keywords in my headers, like “analytics” and “SEO.”
The final thing I want to do is work on the branding of my site. So far, although my website is consistent in its theme, nothing in terms of branding really makes it stand out and become memorable for visitors. I think that part of creating this “memorability” is making a logo. Coming soon…
Creating my Digital Garden?
But what about creating a digital garden just for me? In my previous process post about analytics, I spoke of maintaining my site as a digital garden instead of monetizing it and trying to grow my audience. Because of this, I concluded that I wouldn’t worry too much about gaining readers, just because I wanted to make it a space for just me and my own thoughts.
However, after learning about analytics and SEO this week, I realized that I’m already doing a bunch of the things I need to do to increase my audience like summarizing my article in the subheaders and writing high quality information. And after all, I realized that making a few improvements to potentially invite more people into my blog requires a few simple changes that don’t take away from the intimacy of my blog like I previously feared. So at the end of the day, having a big audience to share my interests with sounds like a pretty great thing to me.
From last week’s process post discussing analytics, this week’s readings proposed a visual of Data.ai. The content used analytic reports to show which apps and websites are frequently used/downloaded. It is a useful tool that helps navigate businesses and users to improve their projects and increase engagement. It is ideal for decision-making processes and delivers overall insight into the performance of the gaming market for instance (Data.ai., 2022).
The reading even acknowledges the age of technology we’re in. Linking to my last process post, technology has evolved into a new age and is advancing as we speak, it has brought Gen Z to what it is today (Data.ai., 2022). With Gen Z, comes new trending sites and apps. Data.ai. has reported that TikTok has ranked “Top Apps” in the 2021 market.
As a social media user, I agree with this report. TikTok has grown a huge community of creators and overall is an entertaining app. I think that TikTok has become very successful because it offers short collections of entertaining content that keep the audience engaged and active since videos are around 15-30 seconds. Compared to an hour-long youtube video, TikTok has an advantage as it caters to short attention spans. I do find myself scrolling for hours in my free time which is probably me contributing to levelling up TikTok’s ranking.
Speaking of technology, SEO is introduced as “Search Engine Optimization.” The Search Engine Journal states that SEO is the most viable and cost-effective tool to understand and reach customers (Hollingsworth, 2021). The article elaborates on reasons why SEO is crucial for businesses. From this reading, 2 reasons stood out to me the most. 1: Organic search is often the primary source of website traffic (Hollingsworth, 2021). This is a true statement, considering where we all start online is with a browser, an organic search engine. 2: SEO is a strategy used for the long term (Hollingsworth, 2021). This is a factor to consider because technology and the internet have impacted society, and are constantly changing.
I’ve known about search engines beforehand since it is a daily tool I use, although this is my first time digging deeper into the topic and hearing about SEO.
– Eliza (aka Peanut)
Reference:
data.ai. 2022. State of Mobile 2022
Hollingsworth, S. (2021, August 9). 15 reasons why your business absolutely needs SEO. Search Engine Journal. Retrieved March 21, 2023, from https://www.searchenginejournal.com/why-seo-is-important-for-business/248101/#close
In State of Mobile 2022, Data.ai reports that each user spent on average 4.8 hours on their phones, which is one-third of the time we typically are awake. Reflecting on my own device usage, my screen time averaged about 10 hours and 50 minutes across all of my devices in the last week alone. Of course, this covers more than just my phone—so a more realistic look that I’m able to access is my social media usage, which has solely been on my phone. Just yesterday, I was guilty of being on TikTok for 9 hours and 7 minutes, which is so wild.
As somebody who clearly spends an unhealthy amount of time on social media, I believe SEO is crucial to reaching the customers, readers, subscribers, and users you want—whether you’re an individual or a business. Whoever your intended audience is, SEO is a force that captures leads towards what you are putting out in the digital world. In “15 Reasons Why Your Business Absolutely Needs SEO,” it states that SEO can boost the effectiveness of the user experience of a website, and can drive trust and credibility in an online space (Hollingsworth, 2021). Over time, trust and credibility can be built with consistent care for SEO, to keep brands relevant and more easily discoverable. When we better understand how our own audience is trying to find us and meet them where they are, we’ve already created a trail that they can start to follow.
SEO doesn’t just cover websites either—for example, Instagram users heavily rely on hashtags to extend the reach of their posts beyond those who already follow them. By making sure they use the right hashtags, users can reach more people who find their content relevant. When I used to post for a small Instagram shop I was running with my friend, a decent amount of time was spent testing combinations of hashtags, from ones that had less than 10,000 posts to ones that had over 300,000 posts in them, to see how popular and lesser-known hashtags would affect our post reach. The analytics we reflected on in our Professional account each week helped us see which posts were doing well, which hashtags were associated with it, and where our audience was coming from, so we could continue to target those people.
It’s not easy to build an audience from the ground up, but with consistent effort and reflection, it’s definitely possible. However, in our heavily saturated digital world, I’ve observed that it takes zeroing in on a niche, as well as being insanely active on multiple platforms, to really see growth. With the need for a considerable amount of effort, the communities that last online are likely founded on passion rather than a fleeting need to go viral.
So for this week, I’ve been trying to brush up on my analytics and better understand how to generate more traffic for my site. Admittedly there is a lot to learn!
Of course, I have Site Kit, and of course, I’ve connected that to Google Analytics, but I wanted to take it a step further than that. I want to understand SEO better to make the most out of the data I’m collecting, which means learning a ton of new terminology-all with their strategies.
Social media
I hate social media, for the record. I’ve spent years and years disavowing it. Staying clear entirely. But now it seems like those days are done. I decided social media was the best way to start getting my link out there. But I need a reason to have, say, a Youtube account. Then it hit me. Why not migrate my recent video onto Youtube? Then I can just embed it onto my site! That is a win-win-win situation! First, I don’t have to take up the valuable space on this site hosting a video. Second is that I now have content for youtube, and the third is I have a network to cross-promote.
Okay, so I did it! Here’s the link to my new youtube channel!
I also did a Twitter thing… why in the name of God did I do that?? Recently, I was mentioned on Twitter for my talk at a journal conference, and I felt a bit of FOMO not being able to reply to thank them for the shout-out. Keeping in line with my goal to get serious about my promotions, I bit my tongue and signed up. Now I can promote new pages and at least squeeze a bit of analytics out of it.
Another step I’m taking is to hone in on some SEO research. Last week, I decided I wouldn’t mind a side hustle as a copy or content writer. In addition, how cool would it be to generate money from this little publishing experiment? BurritoReProductions isn’t meant to be a content mill. Still, at the same time, it would be kinda cool to build a subdomain to showcase some content and copywriting to give me future opportunities. This week I’ll analyze the data and see which keywords and topics are naturally coming up as a launch point. I also plan to look at more trending topics and see if I can write a few samples in the vein of those topics. We’ll see how it goes!
I also want to start cross-posting… I wonder who among my classmates would be interested in some cross-posting mutually beneficial marketing.
Design
I’m still struggling to find my own in the design side of things. I don’t know what I want it all to look like. I’ve tried many variations but keep returning to this green page. It’s my fallback! I’m trying to stay positive, though. I know that perfectionism kills progress. It may not be what I want, but it gives me a platform to work from. I will keep playing around, and hopefully, something will become of it. But I’m no longer as concerned about the design as earlier this semester.
I enjoyed reading the article “Design Machines: How To Survive the Digital Apocalypse.” Not only is it fantastically written, but its design is also exquisite. There was so much that I had intuitively felt was true but had not quite found the words to express for myself. That we exist in a copycat culture or that so much content online is crap—crap selling crap. Or something not necessarily addressed but of the same vein, that AI templates are quickly becoming the norm for content, only adding to the tensions raised in the article.
I’m unsure how to employ best what I learned from the article. I think it’s just food for thought. I’m tempted to say we need to act more authentic in our publishing spheres because if we become too complacent with that cookie-cutter style of content creation, we will be outsourced by automation. The one thing we have to offer that our machines can not is our humanity, warts and all.
This week’s theme: SEO is relevant to the big data I discussed last week. Before this week’s lecture, I did not have a deep understanding of SEO. Using the definition in the lecture, SEO is simply a way to make Google notice “you” (Lecture 10, 2022).
I further understood my audience through this week’s study and modified the website according to the obtained data.
Sam Hollingsworth said that SEO could help us understand macro market changes to understand consumer intentions in detail. I found that my user participation was meagre when I reviewed my analytics report. Before that, I tried to write a call to action sentence such as “post your views in the comment area below” or “do you have any ideas? Share them with me in the comment area” under each post. However, from the analysis results, it does not have much effect. However, after consulting my analytics report, another helpful information I got was the active time of my audience. This information includes a summary of nearly three months since I published my first blog. This makes me understand that the publishing time of the blog should be modified to the most active time of the target audience to promote participation. At the same time, I also noticed that many users use desktops as their browsing devices. This makes me pay more attention to the typesetting design in line with audiences’ web browsing habits.
Finally, I also learned from the 15 reasons why a business absolutely needs SEO that the article title is the most prominent and direct part of the optimization process. Therefore, the optimized keywords should appear in the title. I modified and adjusted some titles in my blog according to this situation. For example, try to limit the number of words in the title to 20 assignments, prioritize users’ search habits, and consider how to summarize the post’s content when writing the title.
Sam Hollingsworth. (2021, August 9). 15 reasons why your business absolutely needs seo. Search Engine Journal. Retrieved March 28, 2022, from https://www.searchenginejournal.com/why-seo-is-important-for-business/248101/#close
This week (Week 10) we looked at the importance of a SEO. Essentially a SEO can be defined as search engine optimization. Websites and pages with “good” SEO tend to rank higher in search engine and appear within the first page of one’s results. One of the goals for my website is for it to appear as one of the first things if someone were to search for “Marylou Villegas”.
To try to achieve this goal, I went ahead and installed the plugin “Yoast SEO” onto my site. Aside from the multitude of features to optimize one’s website, they highlight 4 essential elements located in a Yoast SEO sidebar. These include:
The focus keyphrase
The readability analysis
The SEO analysis
The Google preview
Hopefully, the inclusion of these 4 elements while creating blog posts will help my website’s SEO on search engines will improve!
