Online marketing for farmers

1. Online marketing for farmers By Farooq A. Kperogi, Ph.D., Assistant Professor of Journalism and Emerging Media School of Communication and Media, Kennesaw State University, GA

2. First Steps in Online Marketing • First get a well-designed and esthetically pleasing website • Choose a catchy and relevant URL • Helps with SEO • Use lots of images • Video • Converged content • Why? • List your website/business for free at Google Local • Share your content on social media • Engage with your readers: ask questions and answer questions

3. Search Engine Optimization • A Geeky SEO joke goes like this: “Where do you hide a dead body? Answer: On the third page of Google results. • What does this mean to you? • 92% of Internet users use search engines • 59% of all Internet users access search engines daily • Using search engines is the most popular online activity • More than 18.4 billion searches in April 2015 • 90% of users click on results in the first 2 pages

4. What is SEO and how does it work? • SEO is process of increasing the visibility or prominence of websites in search results for free • search engines are a larger source of business referrals than the Yellow Pages • businesses no longer need to spend thousands of dollars on advertising in directories and magazines • Search engines rank sites related to these keywords based on relevance, authority and, increasingly, “social signals” (i.e., social reputation/social shares. • Search engines “crawl” the net and extract these keywords from the on-page text, headers, page titles, tags/labels, inbound links, etc. of websites • Choosing the right keywords is often the difference between getting found in search and not getting found • Right keywords improve “relevance”; right inbound links improve “authority” • Keyword=on-page optimization; inbound links=off-page optimization

5. On-Page Optimization • On-page optimization is basically about two things: • 1. Picking the best keywords around which to base each of your pages • 2. Making it as clear as possible to search engines that your page is relevant to those keywords • People optimize page content through “keyword stuffing” • That is, they force keywords in URLs, page titles, meta description tags, and aggressively throughout the page content • From 2013, Google started to penalize keyword stuffing; looks for “natural language” • Keyword variation is key • Use keyword density analysis tools (See other free tools)

6. On-Page Optimization • Use your analytics to determine the keywords that lead traffic to your website; statcounter.com a great tool • Since conversion and user experience are also important, make sure your content is easy to read. Use generous formatting to break up the content with: • Short paragraphs • Bulleted or numbered lists (where relevant) • Relevant headers and sub-headers throughout (to make scanning easier) • Conversion-focused links within the content area of the page

7. Off-Page Optimization: Linking • In Google’s revised search algorithms, links are the biggest factor in gaining “authority” • “Surface” links and “deep” links. Difference? • The more other sites link to your blog or website, the more authority search engines will assign to it and the higher it will rank in search results • “Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote by page A for page B” • “Linkbaiting” helps. Describes being the first with a tidbit of “breaking news” about an event, an issue, a celebrity, etc. • Many websites will link to the “baiting” website because there is information there that is of extreme interest to a large number of people

8. More on Linking • Backlinks from authoritative sites on a given topic are highly valuable • If both sites have content geared toward the keyword topic, the backlink is considered relevant and believed to have strong influence on the search engine rankings of the webpage granted the backlink • This is called “web page content congruency” • Ways to legitimately improve linking include • 1. Reciprocal linking • 2. Resource linking • 3. Forum signature linking—some sites have “nofollow” attribute” • 4. Blog comments • 5. Directory link building • Mutual admiration societies • Guest blogging (List of sites that allow guest blogging)

9. Tools for Link Search • It’s often useful to know about the links your site or your competitor’s site currently has. • This information can help you make decisions regarding whether to aim for more links that will build site authority or to focus on deep links with specific anchor text (i.e., the clickable text of a link) • Open Site Explorer - http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/ • Ahrefs Site Explorer- https://ahrefs.com/ • HubSpot- http://hubspot.com/products

10. Other Online Marketing Tips • 1. Practice “Defensive Googling”--Google yourself periodically; also search yourself on Bing and Yahoo • 2. Set up Google Alerts on your name or company • 3. Have a blog/website with your byline • 4. Set up community profiles such as Quora • 5. Optimize your video search by getting YouTube and Vimeo accounts at the minimum • (What’s the second most popular Search Engine after Google?) • 6. Image search is important, so have a photos page (on your blog and elsewhere); save the pictures in your name before uploading them anywhere on the Web • 7. Manipulate Google Autocomplete • 8. Use Statcounter/Google Analytics • 9. Promote your content on social networks (helps your social credibility) • 10. Pay per Click Interference. Buy Google AdWords to push away negative stories about you