The goal I set for the Internet Marketing Fundamentals class was to get a broad full picture understanding of Search Engine Optimization and why every company should be utilizing it. The original plan was to use the SEOmoz: Beginner’s Guide to SEO, Google’s SEO starter guide, and the SEO Bible which was the assigned book for the class to achieve this goal. I did end up reading a fair amount of the SEO Bible, but Google had tons of how to videos that were much easier to watch and take notes on than droning through a bunch of text in another ebook. I never got to the SEOmoz: Beginner’s Guide to SEO because of all the articles and videos I watched from class. As a result of those articles, discussion board topics, and exercises done in class (like keyword search), I have a firm grasp on Search Engine Optimization and the basic steps of what it takes to get any website on to the first page of the Google search results.
The second part of that goal was to know why every company should be utilizing SEO. I am not convinced that every company absolutely needs to utilize SEO but unless there are security issues, I really don’t see how it can hurt you. I do believe that e-commerce websites have the most to gain from SEO because it affects their business and converting visitors to customers.
I learned many things in class but the one thing I thought was most useful was how to utilize keywords in the HTML of your website. Utilizing the description tag and title tag strategically for each page on your website can make a huge difference. This is one thing that anyone can do because it doesn’t cost any money.
I have already applied what I have learned professionally by editing these HTML tags of my client company’s website. Three weeks ago when I searched for the company’s name nothing would show up in the results. Now the homepage and product page show up on the first page of Google. This is a great first step, but now I will be putting together an AdWords PPC proposal to see if we can start getting results from other keywords and not just the business title.