W11Reflection: Landing Page Optimization & Basic SEO

     This week had some of the most important and useful information I think I have learned thus far. Let me share some of the things that stuck out most to me specific to my line of work as well as in general.\

    The topics of discussion for this week were landing page optimization and basic SEO (search engine optimization). For landing page optimization I learned that a couple of good practices include making sure the user's experience (UX) is a good one. Some of the ways you can do this is to make sure that your site is easy to navigate, loads quickly, can be used on any type of browser or screen size, and is aesthetically pleasing to look at and understand. Any one of these components can determine whether a potential customer stays or leaves your site within the first couple of seconds of being there. A few other things I already knew but that are important to remember is making sure all searches and inquiries made by someone direct them exactly to that relevant page or information on your site and not just the home page.

    Now for SEO best practices. Everything matters to the specific search algorithm that is being used to connect your potential customers to your business. This means words, titles, links, words in links, keyword placement, etc. Make sure any information that represents your business is accurate. You also want your site to have unique value. This means it needs to be compelling, pleasing, attractive and provide content that has inherent, sharable value. You want potential customers to prefer your site/ business over someone else because of what it offers and how it is offered to them. When optimizing your website take advantage of things you can do to increase your rankings and quality score. One example would be including images and image alt attributes with your brand name/ site associated. I learned that an important checklist item for one's online business is making sure it is crawler/ bot accessible. This is going to allow the search engines to go further with customer inquiries connecting them to your business than it could without them.

    Many of these things made sense upon learning about them but without any history or background knowledge or exposure to SEO and its concepts I would have never utilized many of them nor made changes to certain aspects of my site that could be performing better and benefit both my customers and myself.