Category: Business

This week I learned a great deal about how to increase my business’s ranking in search engine optimization lists (SEO). One of the main tools that I used to accomplish this was to learn about the different ways in which one can get links back to their websites from other sites. One of the most interesting ways to do about this that I read about was guest blogging. Guest blogging involves the owners of two different sites collaborating to spread information about their sites with the viewers of the other site. This usually involves writing a blog post about one’s site or on a topic related to the topic of one’s site. Both parties then include a link back to the other site, which helps both sites to increase their SEO rankings. This is also a fun way to get to know different people who work in your industry or in similar industries, as well as get your name out there.

For this week, I learned a great deal about how to advertise the website for my father-in-law’s business on social media networks like Facebook and Twitter. In particular, a strategy that stuck out to me was to include meta tags on all of the website’s pages. These would ensure that information about the site would be included underneath any links to the site itself when shared on social networks. This also helps people who view the links to have a better idea of what the site is about as well as what makes it stand out amongst all of the competition. Implementing meta tags is a very easy thing to do, but the return that one receives on the time investment to do so is immense. People like to know what a website is about before they will even consider clicking on a link in the first place. Making that information easily accessible to potential visitors can drastically increase traffic to one’s website.

This week I learned a great deal about how to optimize the landing page of my website, as well as how to increase its rankings in popular search engines like Google and Bing. One of the most important aspects of landing page optimization is to make sure that the page loads quickly. Pages that take a long time to load are likely to turn away visitors, as well as cause them to look elsewhere to find someone providing the services that you and your business offer. In addition to quick loading times, it is important to have relevant content immediately accessible to visitors. Knowing for certain what the page is about and what services the website offers helps visitors to get engaged quickly and to remain on the page. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) involves using relevant words on your website’s pages and titles to make them appear higher in search engine results. Doing this can drastically increase the amount of traffic that’s brought to your site.

This week, I learned a great deal about measuring the return on investment that I get from my website’s ads, as well as how to optimize my ads to give them the widest reach possible and at the lowest price. In order to properly measure one’s return on their investment, there are a great deal of tools that have been provided by Google and others to do so effectively. One of the most useful of these is conversion tracking. This is essentially where a website tracks visitors when they come from an advertisement link, and it also tracks if they follow a link to a product, submit a contact form, or some other action that can potentially be converted into a sale. In order for this to work properly, a page needs to use Google Analytics in addition to special conversion tracking tags that are provided by Google. Through implementing these tools, a web business owner can receive incredible insights into the effectiveness of their ad campaigns.

This week I learned a great deal about how to set up Google Analytics and how to improve the quality score with regards to my Google Ads campaigns. After setting up an account through Google Analytics, I was able to ad a simple script to all of the pages on my website. These enabled me to track things like how many visitors were currently viewing the site, what pages they were looking at, and how long they spent on the site. This will allow me to better track the effectiveness of my website’s design as well as to measure the impact of any ad campaigns that I run.

The quality score allows me to measure how highly ranked my ad will be compared to similar ads for the same keywords. Through using the metrics provided by Google, I can see what needs to be done to improve the quality score – things like the wording used in the ad itself or how fast the linked page loads. This lets me claim higher spots amongst ad listings versus my competitors.

During this week’s reading, I learned a great deal about how to both create and improve text-based web advertisements. Google actually has a large number of documents and videos about the process of creating an ad, as well as tips on how to make those ads more effective. Some of the most important points that I gathered from reading through their materials were as follows:

1. Do things to make yourself stand out. Through highlighting what makes your business unique from others of its kind, you make your ad stand out more in the minds of all those who see it.
2. Avoid typos. This is simple but crucial to the success of the ad campaign itself. Failure to use correct spelling and grammar will damage the credibility and professional image of your business.
3. Appeal to customers on mobile. Nowadays, the vast majority of people using the web do so from the convenience of their mobile phones or tablets. Through catering the ad towards these viewers, the ad is more likely to be successful and make a positive impact on those who see it.

This week I learned a great deal about how to begin an ad campaign through Google, as well as how to select effective keywords for it. In the process of creating my ad campaign, I gave a lot of thought to the potential regions and languages that I wanted to target. Since my site is for an English speaking voice actor, I realized that it made little sense to target my ads towards non-English speakers. Similarly, I don’t want to have to deal with the complexities of processing international payments, so I decided only to target those individuals who are living in the United States. When focusing my ad campaign like this, I will spend my advertising budget more effectively. I will also be able to avoid going over my budget because I won’t be wasting my money on ads where I don’t need them. I’m confident that my ad strategy will be more effective than if I had not focused it.

This week I learned a great deal about the different legal structures that are available for anyone looking to start up a small business. The two most attractive options that I found were a sole proprietorship and a limited liability company (LLC). While there are pros and cons to each of these structures, I believe that a limited liability company would be the most beneficial to me. The biggest advantage that a limited liability company has is that it protects the owner of the company from being directly liable if the company gets sued for any reason or if it defaults on its debts. A sole proprietorship has the advantage of being slightly cheaper than a limited liability company, but this comes at the cost of being personally liable for anything and everything that the company does – and in some cases this could be financially devastating for the owner. Even thought the majority of small businesses in the U.S. are sole proprietorships, I would not feel comfortable without having the protection that an LLC provides.

This week I was surprised as to how simple it was to integrate credit card processors into a website design. PayPal makes it incredibly easy by generating all of the HTML code needed to put a functional payment button on a page. Apart from my surprise at the ease of integrating payment processors, I found that there are numerous tools available that make creating an attractive website page much easier than I was familiar with. CSS frameworks like Bootstrap make prettifying a page as simple as adding classes to all of my HTML tags. I also had a chance to try using Adobe Dreamweaver and I was amazed at how many things that it allows you to do by simply dragging and dropping content. In my previous website design and development classes, I had to make everything from scratch using raw HTML and CSS. While I still intend to continue developing these skills, it’s nice to know that there are all kinds of aids out there that can make my work less tedious. I think I place more value on knowing how to do something myself, but these tools will certainly have their place for me.

One of the most important things that I learned this week about site builders and hosting was that you always need to read the fine print before agreeing to any terms or conditions. When I was looking through plans for Weebly and Wix, their cheapest plans looked like a decent deal until I discovered one major caveat. The cheapest plans required you to include Wix’s or Weebly’s ads on your site, so it is something that you don’t have any control over. The plans that don’t require advertisements cost significantly more than the basic plans with ads. Similarly, sites like bluehost and HostGator advertised extremely low prices for hosting, but it turned out that the price only applied to thirty six month long contracts. Shorter plans can potentially more than double the monthly price of hosting through these services. I guess the old adage still rings true. “If it sounds too good to be true, then it probably is.”