A good weekly journal entry will accomplish some combination of the following go
ID: 329485 • Letter: A
Question
A good weekly journal entry will accomplish some combination of the following goals for your E-Marketing class: ( Please do not attempt to solve if you can not answer all )
Please review the lectures below and answer the generated questions at the end.
Lecture 2-1: Part A - Planning
Amazon.com
Chapter 2 of your textbook starts off by discussing the so-called "Holy Grail" in e-businesses - Amazon.com. The first sentence in the Amazon.com story is probably one of the most interesting statements in the chapter. Amazon.com started in 1995 and didn't post a profit until 2001. What kind of business is allowed to basically operate at a loss for 6 years, losing millions every quarter?
They were obviously first to the market, and first with a vision of wanting to sell everything to everyone.
They came to existence during a period of time where all Internet stocks were selling like crazy whether the companies were making money or not.
Access to credit was at all time highs.
Venture capital levels were at all time highs.
The pressure on boards to get company books in order and start making money was not nearly what it is now. It was all about "future opportunities" and growth.
Most business strategy experts will tell you that "being first" to a market often does not often lead to a long-term competitive advantage. Simply put, what's successful is bound to be duplicated by others, therefore flooding the market with copy-cat businesses after the same market and customers. Amazon.com, however, is a company that looks poised to be able to maintain a long-term strategic advantage by being "first".
There are a number of reasons for this, but I think that Amazon.com's success is as much a factor of the market conditions at the time as much as it was being first. Again, at the time, there was not a lot of pressure on e-businesses to make a profit immediately. Amazon could grow and grow and carry out its vision while its stock price kept going up and they didn't have to make a profit. Nowadays, I think the business climate is much, much different. At the end of the day, do you think a business like Amazon.com would be able to do what it did in today's economic climate?
Strategic Planning
While we're not going to spend a lot of time talking about marketing plans and the strategic planning process in this course, it is important to recognize the importance of these topics in the concept of not only building your e-business, but also in measuring how successful you are (which is definitely something we're going to talk about this week).
The importance of having a plan cannot be overstated. I cannot tell you how many times I've walked into a consulting engagement where the company's defined strategic objective is either "a new website" or a loosely defined list of features. Folks, this isn't a strategy!
The company is on a ridiculously short time frame to get the site done.
The company is trying to get rid of their existing vendor before they find out about it.
They have never developed a strategy for their business, let alone for their e-marketing initiatives.
They have no idea what they're doing.
They are afraid to ask questions.
They are cheap and don't want to pay someone to help them "do it right".
They have an idea they haven't completely thought through yet.
This might seem like a very blunt critique of some of the business problems out there, and it is. And, lest you think that this kind of thinking is limited to small businesses, it most certainly is not. I have seen Fortune 100 companies make these same mistakes.
While I don't pretend to have all of the answers, I can tell you that these types of things should be major red flags when you're entering into any engagement, let alone an e-marketing one. It has been my experience that these types of initiatives are full of finger pointing, headaches, and ultimately, failure.
To give you a couple of examples, I will tell you a couple of quick stories to illustrate how fast things can go wrong without a strategy:
On one engagement, it was decided that a new development platform that was allegedly going to "save the company a bunch of money down the road" was absolutely going to be used for a very large e-marketing initiative for the company. The problem was that the new development platform wasn't ready to go, and there wasn't any room for error for the project. The result: colossal failure. The whole environment crashed as soon as it went live and was never stable during the term of the entire e-marketing initiative.
Looking back on it, it is obvious to me what the strategy for the project was: find a way to use a piece of technology someone had bought without really understanding it, and do it before someone questioned why it had been purchased in the first place. Ultimately, the new development platform was completely the wrong technology to use for the company, and it was ultimately scrapped.
On another engagement, the client wanted a way to allow customers to put a down payment on a big ticket item (more than $10,000) that they hadn't even seen. The idea was that customers would browse the available inventory, fall in love with the product by looking at a few pictures, and immediately want to put a down payment on it. For those of you who don't know, doing this sort of thing takes an investment of money - you have to set up merchant accounts, site security, and payment gateways. This type of set up isn't cheap, but the client was convinced it would help to grow sales. I think you can guess what happened here.
When this site was set up, the client was initially very pleased to see their vision put onto the page. However, costs started to mount and (shockingly) no one was using the service. Just about a year after it launched, the entire program was scrapped.
It has been my experience that clients who start engagements without a plan are almost always happy at first. After all, they got something out there - their job is done. However, I have seen so many times where they are unhappy a year or less later that it would shock you. At the end of the day, it ends up being that the company spent a lot of money and didn't get very far. Thus, I am reminded of the old adage, "If you don't have the resources to do something right, how are you going to find the resources to do it over?"
More importantly, having a plan in place sets you up for (but doesn't guarantee) success. Through the planning process, you come up with your goals, which you can then measure against. And, it's important to be realistic with your goal setting - there is nothing so demoralizing as to be looking at trying to achieve a goal that's impossible. You're going to end up making a lot of people work hard so they can be set up to fail.
Preparing for Success
The fact of the matter is that these things happen (I have a really interesting story for later in the course when we talk about Bots next week) - your e-marketing campaign works way better than expected and next thing you know, your server is down or you're out of inventory (or both). What do you do?
As part of your campaigns, you need to consider having plans in place to deal with "worst case scenarios" - both utter failure and spectacular success. I have unfortunately been in a position of dealing with both scenarios. To be honest, the former problem is easier to deal with from a strategy perspective. You shift gears and you move on. However, in the latter case, you need to consider strategies that can help you deal with high demand. A couple of things I've seen done are as follows:
Setting the cap on the number of people who can take advantage of an offer, and then informing users on your home page when the offer is over.
Having extra server/network capacity available on standby in case it's needed.
Throwing up a page that says "Sorry, site is temporarily unavailable. Please try again in a few minutes".
Throttling back your site features so that the server is optimized to only deal with what 95% of your customers are looking for.
Each of these options have their relative strengths and weaknesses, and are by no means a comprehensive list of options. The last thing you want to do, however, is damage equipment or put yourselves into a position of having to apologize to a majority of your customers!
Lecture 2-1: Part B - Applying Performance Metrics and Capturing Data
E-Business Models
I'm not going to spend a lot of time talking about e-business models in the lecture. I think your textbook does a very good job with this information, and I think a lot of the information is really somewhat self-evident if you spend much time on the web. The one thing I will do here is encourage all of you to visit the websites mentioned in the textbook so you have a little better context for the business models as they are discussed.
Performance Metrics
For example, consider this Scenario:
So, say you have 100 site visitors in May, and 33 of those users engaged in desirable site behavior (33% conversion rate). In June, you had 100 users, but the number of users engaging in desirable site behavior went to 50 (50% conversion rate).
For example, say that in both May and June you had 25 users engaging in desirable site behavior. However, in May your site traffic was 100 users (25% conversion rate) and in June the number of site visitors dropped to 50 (50% conversion rate).
With all of that out of the way, I want to focus on some techniques e-marketers use to capture data. Your textbook mentions four key technologies (and I purposely changed the order here):
Web site server logs
Page tags
Cookie files
Geolocation
Again, this is not a comprehensive list - you can actually build website tracking right into your web pages. In other words, you can create program logic that says, in effect "when a user comes to this page, add one to the number of people who have accessed this page in the database". However, the techniques mentioned in your book are perhaps the easiest to carry out. I am going to cover number one and two here, and focus on the use of cookies in a lecture later in the packet. Geolocation is an idea we'll cover late in the course.
1. Web Site Server Logs
Talking about Web site server logs for a minute, the first thing you need to know is that web servers keep two log files of all the activity on a web site.
One log is called the "Access" log, and it literally contains a list of everything users access on your site - every page, every image, every media file.
The other file is called the "Error" log, and contains a list of all of the things users tried to access, but were unavailable.
For the purposes of our discussion on analytics, the log file we're interested in is the "Access" log. Since they contain information about literally everything a user accessed on a site, these files are absolutely huge - hundreds of thousands of lines per day for medium traffic sites, and millions of lines per day for high traffic sites. So, when your textbook talks about huge volumes of data, they are not kidding!
Consider a website that looks like the following image:
This is a very simple site with a couple of images on it. When you access this page, data is written to the web server "Access" file that says "A user loaded the home page, and all of the images that were referenced from the home page." Let's take a moment to look at what this would look like in a log file:
127.0.0.1 - - [10/Oct/2015:13:55:36 -0700] "GET /index.html HTTP/1.0" 200 2326"http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=boat&btnG=Google+Search&aq=f&oq=" "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/49.0.2623.87 Safari/537.36"
127.0.0.1 - - [10/Oct/2015:13:55:36 -0700] "GET /main_image.jpg HTTP/1.0" 200 2326"/index.html""Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/49.0.2623.87 Safari/537.36"
127.0.0.1 - - [10/Oct/2015:13:55:36 -0700] "GET /promo_image.jpg HTTP/1.0" 200 2326"/index.html""Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/49.0.2623.87 Safari/537.36"
If these three lines look like a confusing mess of junk to you, do not worry. Below, I have a key that explains each element in detail, and its relevance to metrics.
Color
Now, imagine you have hundreds of thousands of lines like the ones above from different IP addresses, accessing different files, using different browsers. How do you make sense of all that data? Remember when we talked about data overload? This is where the rubber hits the road...
What happens is that there is special software that's out there to help isolate users by their IP address and make sense of their behavior in order to determine patterns. This is something computers do very well (and very quickly) that humans cannot. Believe me, I've looked at these log files for years, and I can tell you it's quite a strain on your eyes. I have, in the past, written a number of tools that have helped me to quickly query a log file in similar fashion to how you'd query a database for information. For example, often times I've wanted to see how many users clicked on a particular promotion in a day. Log file analysis makes this task possible.
When you think about it, though, this is all pretty disturbing. What I am telling you here is that your actions on the web are being recorded all of the time, and analyzed. Even if we can't pin a specific IP address down to a name and a phone number easily (though you will see later in the course that it is fairly simple to tie an IP address to a location pretty reliably), everything you do online is subject to someone else looking at it. This has a lot of privacy folks concerned and for good reason - look at all of the things you see in the news regarding how companies can't seem to keep their data safe from attackers. It's a very scary picture; not only is your privacy being invaded to some degree, but you also have very little control over the data after it's been collected.
With all of that said, I hope it's clear to you just how useful web server log files are in website analysis. There isn't a lot of magic to it. I think anyone with a little knowledge and a lot of time can manage pretty well with it.
2. Page Tags
Now we'll turn our attention to the second data capturing technique discussed in your textbook - page tags. Ironically, page tags actually have a lot to do with web server log file analysis. As I mentioned, the web server access log has a record of all of the things a user has accessed while navigating through a site, including images. What you do in this case is place an invisible image on your page that is tagged in some manner to indicate what the user is doing, and that image will show up in the server access log.
You might be wondering why on earth you'd want to do this. After all, isn't knowing what a user clicked on enough? Not necessarily, as you will see in a second.
Consider the following example page below:
From the page, you can see that there are potentially two ways to view the shopping cart page - by clicking the "Shopping Bag" button, or by clicking the "Add to Shopping Bag" button. Now, consider the following entries in the web server log file:
127.0.0.1 - - [10/Oct/2015:15:55:36 -0700] "GET /catalog/product.asp HTTP/1.0" 200 2326"/index.html""Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/49.0.2623.87 Safari/537.36"
127.0.0.1 - - [10/Oct/2015:15:56:36 -0700] "GET /catalog/shopping_cart.asp HTTP/1.0" 200 2326"/catalog/basket.asp" "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/49.0.2623.87 Safari/537.36"
From these two lines, you can see that a consumer using your site went from a product page to the shopping cart page. However, you don't know if the customer simply clicked on "Shopping Bag" or actually added the product to the cart. Yet, this is definitely information we might want to know about. Did the customer buy, or did they decide that the product they were looking at wasn't worth it and decided to move on.
What we would do, in this case, is use page tracking to tell us what the user did. On the shopping cart page, we would embed a hidden image in the page that would indicate whether or not someone added a product to the shopping cart. This image would then show up in the log file if the user had added the item to the shopping cart. Otherwise, the web server access log would look like the example above. To give you an idea of what the web server Access log would look like if the user had added an item to the cart, I have provided an example below.
127.0.0.1 - - [10/Oct/2008:15:55:36 -0700] "GET /catalog/product.asp HTTP/1.0" 200 2326"/index.html""Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/49.0.2623.87 Safari/537.36"
127.0.0.1 - - [10/Oct/2008:15:56:36 -0700] "GET /catalog/shopping_cart.asp HTTP/1.0" 200 2326"/catalog/basket.asp" "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/49.0.2623.87 Safari/537.36"
127.0.0.1 - - [10/Oct/2008:15:56:36 -0700] "GET /images/tracking.gif?product=candy HTTP/1.0" 200 2326 "/catalog/shopping_cart.asp" "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/49.0.2623.87 Safari/537.36"
In line three we see our page tracking image. From a close examination of the line above, you can see that the user had added some candy to their shopping cart. Thus, we now know that the user did add an item to their shopping cart from the previous page. Therefore, we know our product pages are turning into buying decisions, which helps us to determine the overall success or failure of our site.
Again, we are dealing with fairly straightforward pieces of information here, so I hope you can all see how this works in a bit more detail. Essentially, as we move down the list of data collection methods, we're arriving at data that gives us more and more information about users.
3. Cookie Files
We're going to move on from this point, but keep in the back of your mind that we still have one tracking method left - cookies. However, before we do that, we need to spend a little time talking about JavaScript. This will then lay the foundation for the lecture on cookies.
Lecture 2-2: Javascript
Last week, we also talked about the importance of designing to your audience with respect to site design. A user's screen resolution and web browser were two things we said you needed to be cognizant of. Already, you have a couple of tools available that can help you obtain some of this information (W3C and web server Access logs), but there are certainly other ways. One of them is by using JavaScript. Below, you will see the browsing environment you are currently using:
You're using Chrome 65 on Mac!
Your current resolution is 1440*900.
What can e-marketers do with this information? Well, for one thing, they can use it to determine website usability standards, as well as display/not display content based on a users' browsing environment. In this way, designers can get around problems where a certain web site feature doesn't work in a certain browser. Also, websites can also send an alert to people browsing their site that it may not work well with the browser/display settings they are currently using.
Advertising
Another use for JavaScript involves the highly annoying - advertising. I am pretty sure you've all browsed a site at one time or another when you were inundated with pop-up window advertising. As a matter of fact, this problem got so bad that newer web browsers started building pop-up ad blocking software right into the software. The worst problems occurred when you'd browse to a site that'd open three pop-up windows, and each of the three pop-up windows would open three more pop-up ads each (now you have 12 pop-up windows open). Some sites basically kept going and going without any regard for how incredibly irritating this is. Ultimately, the only way to stop this was to shut your computer down.
That said, e-marketing professionals still use JavaScript all the time to advertise or entice/force users to provide information back to the web site. Here are a couple of examples that should help you get the idea:
Click here to see an example of a screen overlay!
Form Validation
I am sure that you are all familiar with having filled out a form on a website in order to request information or order products. It was stated above that JavaScript can be used to force users to provide information back to a website. But, how do websites prevent you from simply submitting a blank form? The answer is JavaScript.
JavaScript allows for a large number of form validation possibilities. For example, let's use an example of a form that asks for a user's ZIP code. You can perform several types of validation:
Making sure a user entered something into a box
Making sure that the user entered only numbers into the ZIP code field
Making sure that a user enters a ZIP code that is exactly 5 characters
The example below is configured with all of these JavaScript checks. Try it out for yourself so you can see how this works in practice!
FORM VALIDATION EXAMPLE
Cookies
We are going to talk more about browser cookies in the next lecture, but JavaScript is used to set browser cookies that are used to not only authenticate you to websites, but also to do things like track your behavior on websites (tracking cookies) and store shopping cart information.
You need to know that anything can be put into a browser cookie. For example, the value you input into a web form can be placed in a cookie. The site that referred you to the site you're on can be put into a cookie. Password information can be put into a cookie. Do you feel your privacy starting to slip away? Wait until you read the next lecture...
Summary
Since this is not a programming course, you are not going to do any JavaScript coding this week for practice. The main thing to know is that you have a very powerful e-marketing tool available to you with JavaScript, so you need to know what this technology is capable of so that you can find the best ways in your organization to use it.
Lecture 2-3: Cookies
Before you get too far into this part of the lecture, let's do a couple of thought experiments.
Have you ever wondered how some sites keep track of your login information, or how other sites seem to provide you ads based on the sites you access? What could be going on there?
The answer is that it's browser cookies that get set as you browse the Internet (Facebook is notorious for this). Other sites (including ad sites) read those cookie values and use them for a variety of things.
But, what's a browser cookie? A browser cookie is a way that websites can store information on your computer. As was mentioned in the JavaScript lecture, this information can be identity information or information about what's currently in your shopping cart. Cookies are the reason that Amazon.com knows your name when you browse to their site (presuming, of course, that you have recently purchased something from them) and are the reason why you can go from Yahoo Mail to Yahoo Fantasy Sports without having to re-login.
The nice thing about cookies is that they make using the Internet more convenient for users. Having to login and re-login to sites would be a real nuisance, as would shopping from a single page that contains every product a company has for sale (can you imagine how this would work with sites like Amazon.com?).
Again, though, cookies can be used for less noble purposes. I will get to how this works in a little bit, but I want to spend a little more time talking about cookies first.
You need to know that there are two kinds of cookies:
Session Cookies are cookies that disappear (or "expire") when you close your browser down. So, they have a very limited lifespan, and are often used for authentication purposes because it is more secure to destroy authentication information when the browser closes rather than relying on the user to log out of a site.
Persistent Cookies are cookies that do not disappear when the user closes their browser. They have a specific life span - from a few days up to a few months. Earlier in this document, I mentioned Amazon.com showing a welcome message if you've purchased from them before. This would be an example of a persistent cookie. Note, however, that in order to purchase from them, you still need to log into the site, thus setting a session cookie that positively identifies you.
As you can see each type of cookie has its uses, and both types are often used in tandem to achieve specific functionality goals.
Cookie Scope
Cookie scope is defined as who can set and read a cookie. Remember last week when we discussed DNS (Domain Name System)? This is where that information will come in handy.
The good thing about cookies is that they arerestricted by domain.
That is, you can only write a cookie for walshcollege.edu if the page is actually being served from a walshcollege.edu web server. Also, you can only read a walshcollege.edu cookie from a page being served from a walshcollege.edu web server. This is by design - to do otherwise would invite a host of security issues. Imagine if a hacker site was able to view authentication details from your Yahoo account. This would invite disaster. Therefore, web browsers implement a security model that prevents this abuse, and websites often encrypt their cookie data to protect it from attackers.
The "bad" news about cookies is that, even though cookies are restricted by domain, companies can still leverage them to spy on users and track behavior.
While this is very good from an e-marketing standpoint because this allows us to collect quite a bit of data about our users without anyone taking notice, it does have privacy advocates quite concerned. Would you, for example, allow a camera crew to follow you while you're shopping at the store watching everything you pick up, every store you visit, and every person you talk to? I doubt most people would allow this, but this is done all the time on the Internet.
How do they do this? There are actually a variety of techniques, but there are three common ways this is done:
Setting up a domain like tracking.walshcollege.edu that is run by a third party, but can actually read browser cookies set by walshcollege.edu. Thus, information can be passed from walshcollege.edu to the site run by the third party (tracking.walshcollege.edu) seamlessly.
Including a file containing JavaScript (called a .js file) that is hosted elsewhere, but is called from HTML contained on walshcollege.edu. Thus, third party tracking services such as Google Analytics can have data passed back and forth between walshcollege.edu and their service.
Using frames that embed an HTML file from a third party in their site that data is passed to. Again, in this fashion, data can be passed back and forth between the two sites.
Number two and three above might seem a little abstract to you, so I want to spend a little more time discussing those.
In the case of number two, I want to go back to the sample HTML page we discussed last week.
This may not make a whole lot of sense, but let's break it down:
The first set of tags are saying to the web browser:
"please embed a file from Google Analytics called "urchin.js" (urchin is a tracking utility, by the way)
In the second set, we are:
Passing the account name for the website (UA-2053083-8)
Activating the tracking utility (urchinTracker();)
As you can see, there isn't a whole lot to getting this to work. The code in the "urchin.js" file does all of the work for us (and we're definitely not going to spend time breaking that file down - it's way, way beyond the scope of this course). From there, Google Analytics then takes all of the data collected by "urchin.js" and presents it a usable format for the web site.
Again, it's a very simple technique. Now, let's look at how the frames method (number three) works. For this, we're going to take a look at another picture:
Above, you see a simple website with a square after the last paragraph of text. The square represents a frame where the tracking content from a third party is embedded into the page (most of the time, though, note that you wouldn't see the edges of the frame - they are generally invisible to users. To use an analogy, it's like "picture in picture" technology used on your TV set:
On the big page, you have your primary content. In the little window, you have content that's being brought in from somewhere else. The difference is that, in this case, you can't see the content that's hiding in the little window, and it's used to track your behavior online. Data is passed to the tracking frame from the bigger site (called the "parent" frame), where the data is then processed by the third party.
All of these uses of cookies are perfectly allowed within the allowable "scope" for cookies, and in the case of the second and third bullets, you can track behavior across multiple sites since the tracking content is actually being hosted by a third party on its own domain. Therefore, you can find out things like "people who come to my site also like sites about animals". This kind of knowledge allows you to make better decisions on what sites you should use to place banner ads and where you should pursue strategic advertising partnerships.
Privacy
Before we wrap up this lecture, I want to again mention the privacy aspect of cookies. Privacy advocates are very concerned (and who can blame them) about all of the data that's being collected about customers and how it's being used. Further, in some cases, it is very possible to track behavior to a specific user since they are often logged in to sites that they use (though many sites say that they do not do this). These concerns have caused some users to take advantage of cookie blocking features in their web browsers. The problem with this is that doing so pretty much renders many sites completely unusable. Try blocking all session cookies sometime and see how useful your favorite sites become. At the end of the day, there are some things users can do to protect their privacy (including blocking cookies from only certain third parties), but there are so many different ways for marketing companies to get the data they need that many people don't even bother, accepting the fact that their data is being tracked.
Note too that companies say that this tracking is beneficial to customers in that:
More targeted advertising allows users to find information faster.
More targeted advertising allows companies to take maximum use to their advertising dollars, thus saving money. These savings can be passed to the consumer.
Ultimately, cookies are a very, very important e-marketing tool. They make sites a lot more usable and allow us to gather a lot of useful data on our users. I just wanted you to have all of the facts with respect to cookies.
Lecture 2-4: Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
Consider This Scenario
You forgot that your 10 year anniversary is a couple of days, and you wanted to get your spouse that special item they've been talking about all year. Realizing that there's still time, you head to your favorite search engine and type in what you're looking for. Even though there are pages and pages of search results, it turns out that the first site that comes up offers overnight delivery. BINGO! You've got the item ordered and on its way in 10 minutes. Won't your spouse be pleased...
The fact of the matter is that no discussion of strategy and metrics would be complete without some discussion of Search Engine Optimization. You've built your e-business from the ground up, but no one knows about it because you're on page five of the search results and no one knows about you. How do you get on page one? Or, better yet, how do you become the first site that comes up in the search results? The answer is Search Engine Optimization (SEO).
There are a lot of companies out there that will, for a fee, help you move your site from page five to page one. There is definitely an art to it, and there is no "one" thing you can do to get your site up in the search engine rankings; it is a combination of the following things:
Domain name
Title and META Tags
Links
Text Content and Emphasis
Let's take a little time to discuss some of those things now.
1) Domain Name
Your domain name matters when it comes to SEO. For example, if you are a candy company, you definitely want to try and have the word "candy" in the name of your domain. What most companies will do is register several domain names with keywords likely to be used in a search (this can be for as little as $7.00 a year, depending on your vendor) and point them to the same website. Using the candy example, a candy company called "Tom's Candy" might register the following domain names:
tomscandy.com
toms-candy.com
tomsconfections.com
toms-confections.com
tomssuckers.com
toms-suckers.com
tomstreats.com
...
What you then do is point all of these domain names to the same web server. Search Engines uses special programs called spiders (or robots, which we will discuss more next week) that crawl those massive directories (think phone books here) for lists of the domain names that point to your site. So, the more domains you have pointing to your content with descriptive keywords in the name of the domain, the better.
2) Title and META Tags
Once again, let's revisit our simple HTML page that we talked about last week:
What happens from here is that those Search Engine Spiders I mentioned before crawl through your site and catalog your site based on the content you've placed in the <title> and <meta> tags. You are basically telling a search engine, in the case of candy, "For Candy, visit here".
Note that you can go overboard with keywords! If you try and put a dictionary worth of keywords on your HTML pages, search engine spiders notice this and will actually lower your page ranking in the search results. This is called "Keyword Spamming", and is something you need to be very careful about. Use a restricted site of critical keywords and focus on optimization around those words. You will find that your optimization efforts will be much more effective.
Also, note that some search engines (like Google) will (at present) ignore the keywords tag entirely. The reason I say "at present" is because Google is always tweaking their algorithm (as most companies do). There are a lot of fads that come and go here, so it's important to stay on top of the latest trends!
3) Links
We discussed links in the context of our discussion of HTML last week. What you want to try and do is find as many people as possible to link to your site, and have those people use your keywords as text in your link. To review, the basic format of links is as follows:
<a href="http://www.anexamplesite.com">Some Text</a>
This will display as Some Text when viewed by a web browser on your site.
Using our candy example, what you would want to do is place a link like this one on a site that, perhaps, contains reviews of various candy manufacturers:
<a href="http://www.tomscandy.com">Tom's Candy and Confections</a>
Search Engine Spiders crawl through sites, looking for links like this that help to further classify your site.
So, you want to have as many links as possible pointing to your site with as many of your keywords as possible being used as your link text. Note also that many search engines keep track of which links in their results are clicked on, and which are not. The links that are more often clicked on usually go up in the search engine rankings over time.
4) Text Content and Emphasis
The final area that we're going to talk about with respect to SEO is text emphasis and content. First, know that what you write on your pages absolutely matters when it comes to SEO. You can also "help" search engine crawlers along by emphasizing certain key words and phrases in your content. we'll address text emphasis.
Going back to last week, recall that we talked about tags that bold (<B>) or underline (<U>) text, along with header tags (<H1>, <H3>) that both make text larger and bold text. Ideally, you want to place emphasis on your keywords to help them stand out with search engines. Search Engine Spiders will then crawl through your site and see where you've added these types of emphasis. Where you've added emphasis, the Search Engine Spider will take notice and use the information to help improve your site ranking in the Search Engine's database.
Again, you need to note that you can go overboard with the places where you place emphasis. If you tag everything with emphasis, then you are again engaging in "keyword spamming", which will lower your page ranking in the Search Engine's database.
Now, you might be looking at the list of tags you were presented with last week and be thinking, "Boy, those sure are ugly". And, you'd be right. In the next lecture, we're going to talk about Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) that allow you to make standard HTML tags look a lot prettier on the screen. We'll talk about that topic shortly...
Now, you might be looking at the list of tags you were presented with last week and be thinking, "Boy, those sure are ugly". And, you'd be right. In the next lecture, we're going to talk about Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) that allow you to make standard HTML tags look a lot prettier on the screen. We'll talk about that topic shortly...
Other ideas:
There are a number of other things you can do to improve your site rankings in search engines such as the following:
Submitting your pages to search engines directly (note that this can be overdone too, which will lower you page ranking) or
Submitting your site to services, but the techniques I've outlined above are generally the most effective. The message here should be clear - your content is going to be a primary driver for how Search Engines find and categorize your site.
Your site's ability to be viewed on mobile devices is increasingly a way search engines like Google rank your site. So, if you're not optimizing for smaller screens and mobile connections with smaller image sizes, you could be inadvertantly lowering your rank!
Note too, that the metrics we've already talked about play a very key role for determining which keywords are being used to find your site. You can then take that information and use it to further improve your page rankings. In the end, you're never really "done" with search engine optimization - it's something that needs to be measured and revisited on a regular basis.
Paid Search
I would be remiss if I didn't talk about the concept of "paid search" in this part of the lecture. The idea here is that you can pay a particular search engine to show your website when certain keywords are searched for by users. So, for example, say I was looking for "Tax Software". Odds are that a company like Turbo Tax has paid sites like Google and Bing big bucks to be listed at the top of their search engine rankings so they are "first in line" for consumers' interest. This is the idea behind paid search - you are paying for a high ranking in a popular search engine (Incidentally, this is why having a good search engine matters - if your search tool is good, more people will use it. If you have more people using it, you can charge more for keyword rankings).
At this point you may be asking why the first 80 pages of search engine results are not full of sites who simply paid to be high up in search engine rankings. The reason is simple - search engines generally only have a few "paid slots" available for purchase. They use the laws of supply and demand to set prices for those positions too. As well, you can imagine that at certain times of the year, certain words might be more valuable than others. For example, "holiday gifts" would be much more valuable in November and December than August or June.
Google's system for feeding these paid keywords into their search results is called AdWords, and it is extremely popular. Most people do not realize this, but Google is not a search company or even "that company that makes Android". Truthfully, a vast majority of Google's revenue comes from advertising. Their business model is also a bit unique, where the amount of money they get from businesses who choose to use AdWords is based on the number of people who click on the ad. This technique is called "Pay-Per-Click".
We'll talk a little more about this system next week when we talk about banner advertising, but it makes sense to talk about this concept in the context of SEO this week too.
Lecture 2-5: Cascading Style Sheets
Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) have a lot of uses on the Internet. They can be used to complete the following applications:
Position text
Apply formatting to text
Add/remove borders
Apply background colors
Adjust the colors on images
Do a host of other useful things on web pages
We are absolutely not going to do a full blown explanation of these tags - it'd take forever, and doing so would be very confusing to you, since you're only just being introduced to HTML and other web technologies. Instead, we're going to limit our coverage of CSS to a couple of specific text formatting tags, in much the same way that we only covered a handful of HTML tags last week. These will be provided below, and then I want you to watch a demonstration that will teach you how these tags are used to format text on an HTML page. I think you've probably had quite enough reading this week anyways...
Cascading Style Sheets
Before you move on to the demonstration, note that Style Sheets are usually placed in the <HEAD> tag of your HTML documents and look something like this:
What the above is saying is that any text wrapped in a <P> tag should be in a 12 point font. Again, the basics are pretty straightforward. Please click on the next link in the packet, and I will work through some examples for you.
Answer the following questions:
1) Summarize thoughts and ideas on the material (not the material itself!)
2) Relate relevant experiences and current trends to the material
3) Examine relationships between what you learned and the business world
4) Describe how you would apply learning experiences in the real world
5) Provide additional information related to the material to your knowledge base
Amazon.com is a unique animal, in my mind. I think it'd be nearly impossible to duplicate the circumstances that led to the rise of that company. Consider:They were obviously first to the market, and first with a vision of wanting to sell everything to everyone.
They came to existence during a period of time where all Internet stocks were selling like crazy whether the companies were making money or not.
Access to credit was at all time highs.
Venture capital levels were at all time highs.
The pressure on boards to get company books in order and start making money was not nearly what it is now. It was all about "future opportunities" and growth.
Amazon was very shrewd about how they used the last 4 bullet points above to their advantage while they built their business, but I want to focus on the first bullet for a minute. At some point in your business/educational career, I am sure you've been introduced to the concept of competitive strategies, or means that firms use to gain a strategic advantage over one another.Explanation / Answer
1) Summarize thoughts and ideas on the material.
Ans- a) It tries to explain the importance of marketing plans and the strategic planning process. b) Brief study of online platform developed by clients to allow customer to invest. c) It promotes E- bussiness as a medieum to reach a large audience at lost cost.d) To aquire a measurable goals.
2) Relate relevant experiences and current trends to the material.
Ans- The passage tries us to understand the various experiences and trends.The various questions that need to be understood but the companies fail to think about them and leds to ultimate failure. Another experience was to engage without proper plan. Another experience was witha search engine called Cuil which failed because of down server. This results in new trends in the material. It started the use of E- marketting at a boom with quality services.
3) Examine relationships between what you learned and the business world.
Ans- The fact is we learn with experience. For eg: Every small bussiness is all about relationship. We have to prepare ourself to understand the facts and implementing them, nor neglecting the basic of analysis.
4) Describe how you would apply learning experiences in the real world.
Ans- Application of learning experience :- a) We can apply at work, by enhansing our knowledge and implementing skills. b) Before we have a new start up, we can understand positive and failure that can happen. c) We will ask and make questiore to gather information and suggestions. d) We will use E- Marketing as a base to promotion and branding.
5) Provide additional information related to the material to your knowledge base.
Ans- We can add Excell and I cloud which a main source of data storage.