Get noticed and make sure to Tweet about it

Hello and welcome to read my blog!

Hope you all have a successful and instructive week behind. Our week at school has been about learning search engine optimization, using Twitter and finally presenting our team work's results for the client company SSM (Suomen Suoramainonta).

SERP & SEO

On Monday we got a lecture held by Mercy Maina, former student from Laurea and nowadays student in Lappeenranta University of Technology. Google has recognized Maina as an AdWords and Analytics certified professional, meaning that she has passed multiple exams that assess that her product expertise.She has worked for example as a digital marketing and sales manager.

Maina was giving us tips on how to get more visitors to your blog and how to analyze your visitors and their behavior. In her opinion, it is important to be able to accurately describe the target persona of your blog or home page. Integrated Marketing & Content Strategy Ginger Zumaeta advices in her LinkedIn article, how to create an exact target persona in 8 steps.

A search engine results page (SERP) is the list of results that a search engine returns in response to a specific word or phrase query. Each listing includes the linked web page title, the linked page URL (Uniform Resource Identifier), a brief description of the page content and links to points of interest within the website.

There are 3 main types of results on a SERP

• Pages that the search engine spider has crawled and indexed

• Pages that have been manually added to the search engine’s directory

• And pages that appear as a result of paid inclusion. The highest-ranking hits generally link to the most useful information; links grow less relevant as they move farther down the list.

Depending on the number of web pages that contain a particular word or phrase, a SERP might show anywhere from zero to millions of items. In most cases, search engine users will look at only the first one to three pages of hits. Web designers and site owners use search engine optimization (SEO) methods to make their sites and pages appear at or near the top of a SERP. Maina's recommendation is that if you want to be found on the internet, the best location is on the search result page 2-3.

By aligning the content you publish with your customer’s interests, you naturally attract inbound traffic that you can then convert, close, and delight over time.

Your search engine optimization strategy can be divided into two different categories: on-page SEO and off-page SEO. Both are crucial to the success of an SEO campaign, but they're on completely different sides of the fence when it comes to improving your search engine rankings.

Two main buckets that search engines look at when evaluating your site compared to other sites on the web, are:

1. On-page: what is your site/page about? One of the most popular ways that search engines worldwide tend to rank websites is by looking for the prominence and frequency of certain keywords and phrases on various facets of your site, and assigning an appropriate degree of weight accordingly.

2. Off-page: how authoritative and popular is your site? Off-Page SEO is the use of keywords off your site. Search engines use mentions of your site, business name, and keywords used on other places across the web in order to determine your ranking in their results.



Great ways to optimize your off-page SEO value on your own include setting up social media accounts on popular sites like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Google+ so that interested parties can follow you and share your posts. As with on-page SEO tactics, always make sure that you keep your preferred keywords and phrases in mind when you update your social media accounts. Always make your social media updates as helpful, interesting, and relevant to the consumer as possible and feel free to engage your followers in conversation if a question is asked. Like Mercy Maina said, useful content is a key; if you have content, you have traffic!

SEO expert and Google Adwords specialist Karthikeyan Maruthai have written in his blog about 10 Must Know Off-page SEO Techniques for 2017. I find Maruthai's tips very useful and up to date.

In addition to being able to draw people to your site, you must also be able to analyze the number of visitors and their behavior on your page. To measure the results of your ads, you have to have the data. Google Analytics provides a great help here. It can show your visitors traffic sources, behaviour, interests, age, gender etc.,all in the same place. This analysis helps you to create a custom audience and content according to their needs.

Tweet you little bird

Monday's another lecturer was Vesa Robertsson, CEO at Linked by Music. He told us about the use of Twitter and the benefits of the service for both private and corporate use. The main advantages are that Twitter is free, you can follow anyone, and it reaches huge masses without knowing people personally. 

I also hooked up for Twitter! Please don't hesitate to follow 😄

To get the best out of Twitter:

• Tweet regulary, reTweet Tweets you find interesting and relevant

• Repost to other user's Tweets and use hashtags to gain visibility. 

• You can create public or private lists to manage users. 

• Create account for colleagues etc. Even if they don't manage them themselves.

• Follow different hashtags with different acccounts.

• Cross Tweet and like each others → Much more visibility.

• Use for example "TweetDeck" to manage multiple account on one page.

• Unfollow them who don't follow back.

• Just make it active!

Presentation for SSM

On Wednesday, the day before the client company's visit at school, our team Di6iBrainiacs gathered to prepare the presentation for them. Teamwork was efficient and we were finally ready for presentation.

On Thursday we then got to present our suggestions for the development of SSM's social media and web pages and we also got to listen to other teams' ideas on the same subject. The company representatives were really impressed with all the teams' ideas and hoped they could continue to cooperate with the students in the future. Later this spring, teams will visit the SSM's office and present the ideas to a slightly larger audience in the company.

Before that, we have plenty of time to refine and prepare a presentation even better! I'm excited that we get to visit the SSM's office, because I think the company visits are by far the most interesting things throughout the course.

Next week we will do a workshop for a quite different company, so it pays to be tuned again. Have a sunny weekend you all!