DUE Tuesday, Apr 03 – 4 points
(Wednesday NOON deadline)

In this assignment we will be looking at search engines and other tools for promoting your web site.

• Driving Traffic
  This tenth chapter of the Website Owner’s Manual looks at how to drive traffic to your web site.

• WordPress SEO
  This post is considered by many in the WordPress community to be the definitive guide to optimizing WordPress for search engines. The whole article is a good read, but the quiz questions will only come from the sections listed below:

  • 1. Basic technical optimization
  • 2. Template Optimization
  • 4.3. Linking to related posts
  • 5. Conversion optimization

Once you have completed the reading, you will need to take a quiz of ten true-false questions. (These questions will be randomly selected from the questions below. You can retake the quiz up to five times. Don’t stress about getting 100% on these quizzes: if you get 80% or better, you will be ready to proceed to the next activity and I will give you full credit.)

All questions should be prefaced with an understood, “According to the author of the material … “:

1. T/F? Web sites are like the Field of Dreams: build a web site, and visitors will turn up.
2. T/F? Paul mentions BMW as a company removed from Google’s search engine for attempting to inappropriately manipulate its ranking.
3. T/F? Good and trustworthy search engine optimization (SEO) companies will often contact you out of the blue.
4. T/F? “Doorway pages”  often have poor content and exist solely to funnel search engine traffic to the other main pages of a site.
5. T/F? The description for the image in bottom-left corner of page 198 of Website Owner’s Manual accurately describes the image.
6. T/F? Short web addresses that are readable by a human being are more likely to be found by a search engine.
7. T/F? A text browser like Lynx can help you see what your site looks like to search engines.
8. T/F? Google has made public the formula it uses for ranking web sites.
9. T/F? First-time advertisers often try to target keywords that are too broad.
10. T/F? Promoting a web site offline can be very effective if you are trying to reach an audience in a specific geographical area.
11. T/F? Paul recommends putting your web address wherever you would put your logo in offline promotional materials.
12. T/F? Promoting your web site on social sites like Facebook is an easy way to generate large amounts of traffic with relatively little effort or commitment.
13. T/F? Most editorial sites are willing to consider submissions.
14. T/F? Leads generated by viral marketing tend to be of a very high quality.
15. T/F? Paul recommends tracking hits and page views as useful indicators of your site’s success.
16. T/F? Paul recommends creating landing pages to track if users have come to the site via a particular campaign.
17. T/F? The metric “conversion ratio” is the sum of all people that have responded to your call to action.
18. T/F? Joost recommends changing the permalink structure to /%postname%/ or /%category%/%postname%/, which you can change in WordPress under Settings > Permalinks.
19. T/F? Joost recommends using the All-in-One SEO plugin for WordPress for optimizing the title tags for each post and page.
20. T/F? Joost recommends using any one of a handful of plugins to automatically generate descriptions.
21. T/F? “Breadcrumbs” are links that usually appear at the bottom of a web page that show all the top-level navigation pages for the site.
22. T/F? On single post and category pages, the name of your web site should have a heading with no more importance than an <h3>.
23. T/F? Joost recommends putting a blogroll in the sidebar of every page of your site.
24. T/F? Joost recommends using a related posts plugin to make it easier for search engines to find your older content.
25. T/F? Joost believes it is important for bloggers to provide a way for visitors to receive RSS updates through email.

DUE Tuesday, Apr 03 – 4 points
(Wednesday NOON deadline)