Google Webmaster Tools

It's been crazy lately! Hockey season ended, I went on spring break (home and San Francisco) and then went to the American Marketing Association International Collegiate Conference in New Orleans! Because marketing is entering the Golden Age of technological advancement, I’m going to talk about Google Webmaster Tools and how they will be useful for our client’s digital marketing efforts in the future.

Google Webmaster Tools can be very helpful when running a website. Image from: http://www.searchenginejournal.com/google-webmaster-tools-now-tracks-indexed-urls-specific-sections-website-including-https/96749/

To start using Google Webmaster Tools, one first has to sign up and verify the account. There are four ways to verify that the account is really you: by uploading a file to your server, adding a meta tag to your HTML, adding a new DNS record, or by using your Google Analytics or Google Tag Manager account. There are a lot of different things that can be helpful with the webmaster tools. Once you have signed up you will have access to your site’s traffic referral sources, like pages that link to yours, and your internal links. You will also be able to see what search queries match with your site, and which search queries people will be searching for when they see your site come up in the results. For our client’s digital marketing efforts, I would say that using Google Webmaster Tools would be a great choice.

A very important part of making sure your site is working properly and that your users computers and information are not being compromised by hackers and malware, and the Google Webmaster Tools help you to track anything that could be malicious on your site. In addition, you must update your software regularly, so sign up for any mailing list that your website management tools utilizes to make security announcements so that you know when there is new software available or a new bug to watch out for. It is also possible to set up Google Alerts to notify you when there is a spam-related keyword detected on your site. There are also user-generated spam issues that can come about from forum posts and comments on content by users. We’ve all seen the annoying social media comments and tweets from spammers where there are twenty in a row with a link and some eye-popping caption or title. Users may be inclined to click on these spam comments and be sent to a harmful or undesirable web page. The easy way to get around this is to create a spam policy to protect your site from these spammers. It would be good for our client (who’s site is an online gift registry in which you can categorize and make your own items with links to product pages, or any page really) to make sure that a good spam policy is in place for all wish list products. It would be very easy for anybody to link to a malicious site through the product pages.

There is also information on how to improve your site’s HTML and you can get suggestions on how to do this, as well as how to removed a page or site from Google Search results if you do not wish for it to show up on a search results page because it is under construction or old. You can also submit a sitemap to help search engines with their crawling and categorizing. I would suggest that our client would submit a sitemap so that Google could easier crawl and categorize the website.

Is working at Google really like the movie, "The Internship"?

So much has happened in the last week, I will have to flood this blog with posts tonight! I have another post due before class tomorrow, and I am planning to write another about the guest speaker we had in one of my other classes - I am super excited about that one too! Hopefully there will be time to write everything tonight, in between studying for a Spanish exam. This post is also really long because I love the Google office and really, really would like to work there... gotta get my internship in order. Sorry in advance! But seriously, if you ever have the chance to visit a Google office, go. The Pittsburgh office is apparently considered relatively conservative compared to the rest, but awesome nonetheless.

Perhaps you have seen the movie, "The Internship"; where two best friends in their late 30's/early 40's or so get an internship at the Google headquarters, and realize how awesome it would be to work at Google - three meals a day provided, snacks, you can work wherever you want as long as you get your stuff done, a really cool office with all kinds of themes and innovations. I can now confirm with you, that "Yes. The Google offices are that cool."
Yesterday, our Digital Marketing class had a field trip to the Google Pittsburgh office in Bakery Square, where we were joined by the clients we will be working with and a few guests from Chatham. The closer we got to getting inside the building, the more excited I got. I was really excited - I had heard good things, and I had seen "The Internship". I was hoping it would be like the headquarters in California that were used to film the movie. We gathered in the main lobby and took the elevator up to the seventh floor, where we were given visitor tags and briefed on the security protocols (unfortunately for everyone, photos are not allowed). The first thing one sees when walking in to the offices is a games room (what a great start, right?) and micro kitchen. The Pittsburgh headquarters has quite a few micro kitchens, two cafeterias, office space for 300 people, and much more spread out over four floors of the Bakery Square office building.
The building is very unique and each floor is themed: there is a Kennywood themed floor, a tunnel and outdoor areas of Pittsburgh themed floor, and a Nabisco themed floor (the building was once a Nabisco factory). Nabisco is the company that makes Triscuit crackers, Ritz crackers, etc. and each room on the Nabisco floor is named after a Nabisco product, each room of the Kennywood floor is named after a ride at Kennywood, and the Pittsburgh floor had rooms named after parks, tunnels, and landmarks in Pittsburgh. One of the best features of the whole tour was the cargo net lounge, which is a cargo net suspended above some of the office space, with pillows. When we went by, there were Google employees seated comfortably in the net with laptops propped up on pillows, working. That's the beauty of Google - you can work anywhere in the building and make your own day as long as you get your work done. We were walking past the language support office space and were pleasantly surprised to see an adorable French Bulldog wagging her tail at us a we passed. You can also bring your dog to work as long as you have proven that they are a safe animal to have around. The cafeteria has a hydroponic spice garden, an outdoor summer garden and beehive, and a heated chicken coop outside with laying hens. Not only is Google innovative, they are trying to be more friendly to the earth, and promoting healthy diets among their employees. The micro kitchens were filled with healthy snacks like dried fruits and açai berries, fresh fruit, and various healthy snacks. The kitchens have feature chefs every once in a while, and serve a delicious spread which we unfortunately were too late in the afternoon to experience.
After our tour, we attended a private presentation on Search Engine Optimization, and were able to network and have a question and answer session with experts at Google. My questions about link farming were answered and I got to find out for myself what Google is really like. The visit to Google gave me hope that I can someday have an office job (I am not the type of person that easily sits still and does the same thing all day, in the same cubicle, with the same people, every day) and that I would like it.

Sometimes I miss classes - No big deal!

Due to the nature of competitive hockey, my team is forced to travel all over the northeastern United States to play against opponents in our conference. We are doing well this year, and recently broke the program record for wins in a season (we are 7-6 overall and one spot out of playoffs). This weekend we travel to Oswego, New York to play against SUNY (State University of New York) Oswego Lakers. We travel by bus, around seven or eight hours on Friday, in order to play on Friday night, so I will be missing all of my Friday classes. To make up for our absence, Dr. Chung has instructed my teammate, classmate, and good friend Marie and I to write an extra blog post this week. The topic of the blog post must be about what the class is supposed to go over during the session that we miss.

This time, we are missing a discussion on how search engines work. We were asked to take a course on "the Search Landscape" (it's videos and easy listening - a man with a British accent narrates! Click the link to see for yourself), read chapter 2 of our online textbook from Stukent, and take a quiz afterwards. The course content includes the history and evolvement of search engines and the "search ecosystem". Also included are the trends of search and audience behaviours and insights, and the implications of search for marketers.

The reading from chapter 2 of the Stukent textbook explained how Google works and provides the basic PageRank formula used to calculate the website's popularity, as well as how a search engine calculates the relevance of a webpage to a certain keyword. For instance, the keywords that show up at the top of a webpage give the webpage a higher PageRank score as opposed to the words at the bottom. It is also important to know the difference between a webpage and a website: a website can have thousands of pages (webpages).

Also included in the reading for chapter 2 were two important Google updates: Google Panda and Google Penguin. Both updates include changes to the google search algorithm to try to make the experience of using Google Search better. The Panda update helps to filter out websites with thin content and lower relevance from the top of the search results page and show the more relevant results at the top of the page while the Penguin update aims to decrease the rankings of pages that use black-hat search engine optimization techniques. Search engine optimization was also explained a little bit, but will be covered a little bit more in Chapters 3 and 4. Search engine optimization is a very important thing to have knowledge about if you would like to have a good online presence, and would like to avoid black-hat techniques.

Google Panda and Google Penguin are updates to Google's search algorithm that improve the overall search experience for everyone, except the black-hatters, that is. Image from: http://giselleaguiar.com/social-media-training/understanding-googles-panda-penguin-hummingbird-seo/

I'll admit that just like many others, I have very little previous knowledge of how search engines work and this is a lot to take in at once. Who knew search engines had rules for the sites that end up on the search results? I can't wait to learn more about search engine optimization and to start working with our client for the Google Online Marketing Challenge.