Eco-Friendly Digital Marketing Internship

During this fall internship, we’ve been devoting a lot of time and energy to search engine optimization (SEO) — both learning what it is and how to do it, and then putting that knowledge to use. Up to this point, businesses have provided SEO as a service to those hoping to bring traffic to their website. But now it seems that might become a thing of the past. Everything on the Internet is shifting towards keywords and tags. Soon that will be the model upon which the Internet is navigated. So then one might ask, “Is there a way to automatically generate keywords based on a site’s content?” And it turns out that such methods are being developed today.

The first one I found is particularly applicable for bloggers such as myself. It’s a WordPress plugin called All In One SEO, developed by Semper Fi Web Design. I came across it last week as I was searching their plugin database for helpful tools. Out of 279 user reviews, it has an average rating of about 4 out of 5. But what exactly does the plugin claim to do? As stated on the WordPress page, the plugin should optimize your blog for search engines, generate META tags, avoid duplicate content, and more. The plugin claims to work “out of the box” for WordPress 2.3, with no fiddling necessary (Unfortunately we’re on to WordPress 2.6.2). They also say you can override META tags and specify most settings.

That all sounds great, but is there more to the story? As far as I can tell, there’s no way to confirm that the plugin is actually doing what it’s supposed to do. Time for some more research, and more writing about Digital Marketing on my own blog.

As a current student at Michigan State University, one subject of intense interest to myself and my fellow students is graduation, and how to prepare for it. Taking those first steps from university to the real world can be intimidating, and many current students are unsure of how to make a smooth transition from co-ed to corporate. How can current college students take charge of their digital personas and put them to work for themselves?

My first piece of advice would be to Google yourself, and look carefully at the results. They might display one of several things:

1. That article you wrote for the high school paper
2. Pictures of you from last year’s spring break in Cancun
3. Nothing at all.

Whatever comes up about you, don’t despair – while high school accomplishments aren’t bad, they aren’t really current and don’t display all of the hard work you’ve been (hopefully) doing in college. While certainly great keepsakes, your spring break pictures don’t really convey a sense of professionalism. If you’re not coming up in search results, maybe you’ve kept a low profile, but isn’t it better to be proactive rather than reactive?

Is this what you want employers to remember about you?

Take charge of your search results! Make a great impression when employers are looking to learn more about you, instead of keeping them in the dark about what a great candidate you would be for that newly-available position. To do this, create some professional profiles for yourself on sites like LinkedIn, Naymz, ZoomInfo, and AboutUs. Make sure that the information you offer up in these profiles is professional and highlights the skills that will help you find the job you want. The Washington Post offers some tips on what to include or keep private on your LinkedIn profile that can be applied to other social media sites.

Part of making the most of your online reputation is keeping some things out of the public eye – for those profiles that are more social than professional, you may want to restrict your privacy settings to make yourself invisible in search results. Facebook offers an option to take yourself out of search engine results, found in the Privacy Settings tab. If you’re proud of your Facebook profile, and think that it passes professional muster, you can also use this feature to create a public search listing for yourself - just make sure your profile isn’t going to keep employers from hiring you.

We’ve all heard about how your digital identity can work against you, but by showcasing your great features in a professional way, you too can feel confident with your online reputation. Social networking doesn’t seem to be going away anytime soon, so you might as well make sure that your online image makes an excellent impression.

In today’s working world, employers are starting to embrace social networking as a time-saving, financially savvy way to keep their employees connected, according to USA Today, and as a college student or recent grad you will almost be expected to be a social networking guru. Make sure that you exceed the expectations and enhance both your digital and professional reputations.

If you’re anything like me, anytime you find yourself uncertain about anything, you simply open your browser and ‘Google it.’ I do this literally dozens of times a day (I know, I know…) but until fairly recently had little awareness that I could actually have an influence on what results show at the top of the page. Enter the “Google Experiment.” Creating a more easily searchable online presence is one of Ingenex’s many specialties. So, one of our assignments for this week was to pick several search terms, weave them into the title and body of our personal blog entries, cross-link everyone’s keywords to our blogs, and watch our chosen terms rise on Google’s search rank. We took two screen shots of our Googled our words pre-blog and post-blog to demonstrate the efficiency that cross linking blogs and blog entries can have. As I am interested in the environmental side of digital marketing, my chosen search keywords were Eco-Savvy Marketing Ann Arbor

Eco-Savvy Marketing Ann Arbor Before Picture

Eco-Savvy Marketing Ann Arbor After Picture

As you can see, this experiment proved to be quite successful for my search terms. The rest of the Ingenex team’s blog entries and keywords proved to be similarly successful. Derek wrote on Digital Marketing Education, Pedro chose Experimental Marketing Michigan, Amanda did Marketing an Eco-Friendly Expansion, Nick chose Online Publishing Marketing, and Jennifer worked on Digital Eco Fusion. For more insights regarding keyword and search engine optimization, I suggest you check out their blog posts. Although my personal blog entry was not the first result, it was in the top four. Prior to my blog entry and my fellow interns cross-links, there was no one such thing as ‘eco-savvy marketing in Ann Arbor;’ rather it was a mishmash of vaguely relevant isolated words. Hopefully, after Derek and all interns have posted their weekly eco-friendly blog entry detailing their keywords and linking back to mine, I will see an even higher rank for ‘Eco-Savvy Marketing Ann Arbor’ on Google. This phenomenon, or keyword optimization as the digital pros call it, is extremely important when trying to digitally publicize a product, blog, person or website. Therefore, one’s keyword choice is something that deserves a special degree of thoughtfulness regarding the desired outcomes. As you could imagine, it is important to have several words that are more common and popular. However, if all of your keywords are fairly commonplace, it will be quite difficult for Google to return your desired page with a high rank, as these words are competitive and used frequently on many pages. If in 2-3 words you can carefully describe what it is offered on your site, then you are far more likely to achieve successful results. In the blogosphere, cross-linking to blogs using keywords can achieve similar results to running an online search. As our intern experiment proves, keyword optimization serves as a useful tool to spread the word about your product, blog or website. It can also be an effective tool for the consumer; I can’t tell you how many times I have chosen the higher ranked websites returned from my search. Keyword optimization will prove to be exceptionally useful, especially as we are actively expanding the eco-friendly internship across the midwest and using a variety of different types of media.

So until next time, keep Googling (thoughtfully, of course.)

This week we set out to “own” a set of personalized keywords using search engine optimization. The goal was to try to get my blog to appear very high up in a Google search of certain keywords. I used the terms “Online Publishing Marketing” on my Digital Marketing Blog. I chose these terms because of my goal of combining web publishing (both journalism and creative writing) with digital marketing. I took a snapshot of the Google search at the beginning of the experiment, and set up a Google Alert for the three keywords. Then I blogged about it using the terms in the title, as well as the beginning and end of the blog post.

As you can see in the enlarged second image, the search terms “online publishing marketing” now bring up my WordPress blog tags fairly high in a Google search.

The other Eco-Friendly Interns and Ingenex CEO Derek Mehraban will be doing the same, and then cross-linking between our posts. Amanda Marandola posted on “Marketing an Eco-friendly Expansion.” Katie Hyzy posted on “Eco-Savvy Marketing Ann Arbor.” Pedro Martin posted on “Experimental Marketing Michigan.” Jennifer Harrison posted on “Digital Eco Fusion.” Derek Mehraban posted on “Digital Marketing Education.”