Xin Yang

This is a report for my SEO experiment for my webpage “love JMU”. Overall, my page rank just moved up a couple of spot, still needs more improvement to be within the first ten pages. I’ve made comments on classmate’s website, politely asked for approval, but it seems not enough. I’ve added my targeted webpage on my Google+ profile. Off-page link building factors still need more work.

According to the free SEO tool webpagefx , most of my on-page optimizations are “excellent”.  Here is a list of examinations the tool had listed for me:

• Keyword Page Density includes using keywords in page title, page description, H1, strong or bold text, number of times used in body copy
• Heading Summary concludes the HTML structure is excellent
• Image Summary reports that one URL has missing Alt Text
• Title Tag and Meta Description Tag are both good.
• Server Info indicates my page’s content-type is text/html and needs improvement.

My off-page optimization is much weaker. It is the main reason my page’s organic ranking is still low. Here is also a list of things I can improve on, mostly relating back to building more links:

• Number of Incoming Links is still low
• Google PageRank still shows a PR0
• Search Traffic is less than $100 worth of search engine traffic per month
• Organic Keyword shows 0. Needs more keywords.
• Tope 25 External Links is still low, so there are not many links pointing to my website.
• The best one among all poor off-page result is a “fair” Social Media Mentions. It seems that the brand is establishing on the social media networks.

PS: I don’t know if anyone had experience the same as I did, but an interesting fact I realized is that when I logged in my Gmail, and was searching “love JMU” on Google, I could easily find my webpage on the first page, but with a little “blue person” icon beside it. At first I thought I ranked so well and was so excited, but I started to doubt it after running the crawlfx report. I logged out of my Gmail account, then redid the search, my page is on page 10, which was so disappointing to see.  

According to the Search Queries, the keywords that are relevant to my new theme post have higher impressions. Keywords that are JMU related are also highly searched queries. This makes sense to me because the AdWords performance of my new theme post has a higher click through rate with a higher impression number. However, my average position was very low, some are over 100 and some around 50ish.

Currently, I have total four links to my site, which I still need to work on to improve my SEO.  The HTML suggestions show I have two short meta descriptions but no long meta descriptions or duplicate meta description. I noticed the Crawl stats fluctuates but the pages crawled per day is gradually going up.

Google Webmaster also has some important diagnostics function such as Malware, Crawl errors and so on. Google has not detected any Malware on my website. There are two Crawl errors. Both of them relate to non-exist URL but I’m not sure how to fix them on the Webmaster Tool, but it seems not, so I would like to learn more about how to fix the errors. Also, I’d like to learn more about how to set the Crawl rate for the site.

I think Google Webmaster Tools is a good resource for marketers to use. It provides a lot of information on the behind-the-scenes details of a website. Also, it can help a company know if there are any Malware issues or Crawl Errors within the site and in the way Google reads the site. Google Webmaster Tools provide important tools to fully optimize a website through search engines and internet marketers are becoming more and more aware of them. How about you?

I wanted to start off by giving our guest speaker Lindsay Crone, from The Search Agency, with a very big thank you. Thank you for taking time out of your day to come into our classroom last week. You showed us real life examples of what we are learning in class and give us a greater appreciation of what we are really doing. It is helpful to understand where to use these things in everyday business life. Thank you again!

Ms. Crone is a JMU Marketing Alum (’08) and currently works for The Search Agency as a creative editor in its Baltimore office. The Search agent is a search engine optimization/marketing firm that was founded in 2002. The company is privately held with headquarters in Los Angeles, CA and some additional offices located in Tampa, London, Sydney and etc. It is continuing to grow fast with currently 160+ employees. If you are interested learning more about the company, please check out their Website, Blog and Facebook.

Ms. Crone’s lecture was very interesting and informative with her personal story sharing and images in the PowerPoint. Ms. Crone gave us an overview of how the paid search, organic search and search results page work. “Search” has becoming more and more important for businesses. Search Engine Marketing is continually growing into a larger industry. In her daily work, she is responsible for the day-to-day and long term creative optimization and maintenance projects for search engine. She opened my eyes on the search engine marketing field, and by serving different clients, she was able to learn all different kinds of industries.

Ms. Crone also shared her post-graduate job hunting experience with us. Her stories really inspired me. I should never give up and be focused! Keep networking with people. She highly suggested using LinkedIn as a resource. I was able to connect with Ms. Crone after the class and continue our conversation through her LinkedIn page. As she said, never be afraid to ask for help! She was extremely friendly and was willing to help the students either with networking or reviewing resumes. I highly appreciate that we can have such warm-hearted alumni to support the JMU students.

  First of all, what is retargeting? Here is a story Julie Matlin shared. She recently saw a pair of cute shoes on Zappos.com but wasn’t ready to buy it. Then for the following days or weeks, the ads of the exact shoes started to follow her to every site she went on. This experience made Julie feel uncomfortable, just as being stalked. I’ve personally experienced similar situations like Julie. I felt the ads are pushing me to buy the stuff that I wasn’t ready to buy; it gets kind of annoying when they constantly reminding me about it.

 As a marketing major, I understand that the sellers are trying to personalize or customize the ads to get a higher conversion rate; however, sometimes the ads are not what I want, because they don’t know me. Some people react to retargeting ads just as normal people would tell the strangers “Don’t follow me if you don’t know me!” More consumers started to feel the intrusions into their privacy.  Joseph Turow, a professor from University of Pennsylvania, studies digital media and digital advertising, said he had a negative feeling to the ads, and he sensed that people will not like it once they know how this is happening.

Though there are some negative voices among the consumers, retargeting seems still becoming an advertising trend in the internet marketing field. According to the research from Forrester, search marketing will remain the key player in the next five years (till year 2016). Based on this research, Magnetic, an internet marketing agent, blogged that the interactive marketing trends point to search retargeting.

According to eMarketer ’s analysis, though social media like Facebook as gets more and more attentions and usages, Email still tops Facebook for keeping in touch. It is definitely true to me. Checking email is always on my daily check list.  Recently, I’ve been cleaning up my email account and noticed that I’ve received more than 1,000 emails from different retail companies about their sales, deals and etc. Humm, how come I never really noticed my email account is half filled up by SPAM?! Well, as a marketing student, I’m curious to explore a little more about email-marketing and how does it work for marketers.

I found some interesting articles in my MKTG470 professor’s Delicious stack. Many of the articles are from Emma Email Marketing Blog. The word that appears the most in these articles is “Subscribers”. One article says “No sizzle, no signup, no sale”. I started to recall my own experience about email-subscribing. I didn’t even remember that I signed up for so many retail stores until I was cleaning them up. I realized that as time goes by, I just became less and less interested in them, treated them as SPAM and finally I unsubscribed them to make my email clean and fresh. I know this would sound disappointing to businesses and marketers, but it is true for many consumers.

From a marketer’s standpoint, how to make their signup forms attractive for people to sign up is critical. As the same time, retaining the consumers on the email list is also important.  Here are some suggestions the experts give out:

• Subject line should highlight purpose–savings specifics “Up to 50% Off”, urgency “This Saturday Only” and etc.
• Cut the words in Email Copy actually result in higher click through rate.
• Segmenting audience list to send targeted, relevant messages.
•  Use tools such as web analytics to track email open rate, email messages and etc.
• Enhance social-sharing experience by creating short, focused share-worthy emails.

It does hurt when we notice our hard-work being seen as SPAMMER. As a marketing student, there are still a lot of things to learn about Email-Marketing. In between a daily email user and a marketing major student, I’m trying to stand at both consumer and marketer’s sides and being aware of how the dynamics between them works.

Being a traveler between the worlds of China & US, I want to blog a little about US Twitter and Chinese Sina Weibo.

I just finished my Twitter exploration for my MKTG470–Internet Marketing class.Before MKTG470 (Internet Marketing), I wasn’t into Twitter at all. I felt it was kind of ridiculous how quickly people tweet and why they tweet little things, such as their breakfast, their lunch, their dinner, you name it. However, today’s experience did gave me a good impression and overview about Twitter. I would say now I’m willing to be more active on Twitter because there is really so much information on there across all industries. I was excited when I found “Jeremy Lin” on Twitter (@JLin7). His great start in NBA has made millions of Asians and Americans excited for this NBA season.

Besides following celebrities, I followed some of my classmates and friends. It was very interesting to view my classmates websites through their tweet. It is pretty helpful when I’m still trying to decide what new theme I should use for my blog.

Before trying Twitter, I was very active on Sina Weibo, meaning “microblog”, is currently the one of the most popular and influential social medias in China. The population of using Weibo in My generation and younger generations are quickly expanding within the past few years. Mentioned in the article “China’s Weibo vs US Twitter: And the Winner Is?“, 140 million users are on Weibo by the end of first quarter in 2011.

After experiencing Twitter, I noticed some interesting differences in terms of usage and functions between the Weibo and Twitter. Broadly speaking, there are more things and features in Weibo, you can insert rich media like images, videos, music, emoticons, and even polls without any plugin required. These features sparks interesting debates and sharings between microbloggers.

It was an interesting experience using Twitter, and I will keep using it to discover more functions. Both Weibo and Twitter help me connect to the world and people, how exciting it is to be in this social media world!

Follow me on Twitter or Weibo, and let exciting information fly around the world.