Ashley Han

When it comes to generating and determining the success and traffic of a webpage, keeping track of how much your page is actually “worth” can be tough to determine. Ashley Han taught our class about Google Analytics, which can be used to determine how often a keyword is being searched for, how much traffic it can generate, and how much each of those searches is worth. We started by searching for keywords that could possibly be used for our personal sites, to give us a better idea of the topics we selected and how often they are searched for online. It brought up some interesting ideas for sections of my personal site that I had not considered.

For my baseball-related site, there are a plethora of searchable terms because of the nature of the sport itself and the advanced statistical data involved with the evaluation of talent. Ms. Han also had us search for terms that would be applicable to a local farmers market, which led in to another discussion about appropriate terms and how they can be involved in the search engine optimization of any business, especially in a growing online marketplace. Due to this, it is extremely important to be efficient with terms and sections on a webpage, as it now more important than ever to be as close to the top of a search engine such as Google’s shortlist in their formula for determining which web pages they display first.

Ashley Han’s presentation and application of Google Analytics opened my eyes to how important search engine optimization is for a business, especially if your main mezzanine is an online marketplace. While also developing quality content, you must run your webpage as efficiently as possible in regards to searchable terms to drive maximum traffic to your site.