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July 1, 2014Analytics Quinnipiac

Quinnipiac Assignment #07 – A Crash Course in SEO

Quinnipiac Assignment #07 – A Crash Course in SEO

This week’s assignment was to either write an essay or record a video about a problem that a company was having with being found online. We got a crash course in SEO.

The company chosen was the Miami Seaquarium, which I have never been to, but apparently they are located near Key Biscayne.

The specific task was to find a way to attract Internet searchers to their dolphin swim adventures.

MozBar

With information about their competition, I found a way to showcase their keywords, and those of their competitors.

The tool (and it is free, which is even better) is called MozBar. It allows you to look a little bit under the hood on websites.

While I am also able to right-click any website and just select “view page source”, the MozBar laid things out a lot more comprehensively. The tool calculated the percentage of verbiage on that site, versus coding.

Keywords Gone AWOL

The thing that leaped out immediately was that the site did not have any keywords!

Without keywords, they were inadvertently making it more difficult for people searching on Google to find them. They also did not seem to realize that their site (which really is beautiful) is barely readable by search engines.

Search engines like Google, Bing, Yahoo! and others can really just read verbiage, numbers, and special characters. They do not yet have the ability to read images and truly comprehend them.

You and I look at a picture of a dolphin and we know what it is. Even people wholly unfamiliar with dolphins can figure out that they are animals of some sort. But search engines are completely lost.

Further, the site had a lot of great verbiage, but it was all a part of the images. It was, e. g. pictures that said things like dolphin swim. But there was no alternate text to cue in the search engines.

A Crash Course in SEO: The Fix

So, how do you fix these problems? My essay (which I will not reprint here, as the grade is still pending) goes more into depth but there are two easy, low-hanging fruit actions that the webmaster can take.

  1. Research keywords and add them, and
  2. Add alternate text to every single image on the site.

There are a lot more things that you can do, but those two are quick and fairly easy. And, psst, they work!

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