Today’s Goal:

• Learn how to make your site “findable”

 Today’s featured websites:

• http://papertoilet.com/– Oddly satisfying! Also check out these young students who submitted Doodles for Google’s annual contest (and cast your vote for ones you like!).

 How to make your website “findable”

Questions

• What are some ways people find websites?
• Do you usually go directly to a site or do you search for something?
• How do you think people get visitors to find their website?
• Let’s do some searches and see what comes up: best pizza medford ma; medford ma; celtics; avengers

Important terms

• Search engine optimization (SEO): optimizing your website so people will find it by using a search engine (paid search is called SEM, or search engine marketing)
• Meta tags and keywords (let’s also see http://www.heymeta.com/url/apple.com)

Google

• Paid ads vs organic search results
• Title tags and headlines
• Mobile friendly design
• Links from other sites
• Good writing and keywords
• The Knowledge Graph, Live Results, and Questions & Answers– Google’s customized responses to our searches that might keep people from clicking through to your site
• Predictive text

Domain Names

• How do you pick one?
• Try going to nikes.com
• Why do companies buy similar domain names? Can you find other examples?

Social Media

• What role do you think social media plays in driving traffic to websites?

Web Traffic Basics

• Unique visitors
• Page views
• Hits

Top Websites

• Name some
• Why do you think these so popular?
• https://www.alexa.com/topsites
• Who knew- check out the top government sites here: https://analytics.usa.gov/