ONLINE MARKETING, INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE AND SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION

Online Marketing, Information Architecture, and Search Engine Optimization offers a brief introduction into the history and strategies of online and direct marketing; discussing the fundamentals of marketing, advertising, online business and ecommerce; evaluating online media, properties, audience/ circulation, and affiliations/ relationships; optimizing information architectures and document structures; and teaching how to improve search engine rankings, maximize site traffic, and attract targeted traffic.

The course will explore the general system architecture and anatomy of search engines, including crawling, indexing, and searching. Students will learn about information retrieval, search engine generations, methods and technologies; focusing on the linkpopularity and authority based PageRank® system by Google, Inc. Lessons will clarify the underlying procedures, algorithms, and implications. Students will design and optimize information architectures and documents addressing the aforementioned concerns.

The course will also cover advanced methods of code, page and architecture optimization and discuss structural, legal and ethical implications. Students will analyze several case studies, investigate and improve the information architecture, page structure, search engine ranking and traffic of several online examples and assignments. Class members will participate in several directories, Open Source projects and online communities. Students will devise and program several related applications and solutions, and prepare a final project that demonstrates the mastery of the methods and technology discussed in the class.

• CLASS INFORMATION
  • Course Objectives
  • Appointments
  • Course Format
  • Prerequisites
    
• CLASS SCHEDULE

• MATERIAL
  
• REQUIREMENTS

The class will help students to understand the principles of Online Marketing, Information Architectures and Search Engine Optimization. Participants of the class will be able to analyze, implement, and optimize cyber marketing campaigns, and apply the lessons learned on documents, web sites, portals, campaigns, and ecommerce solutions. Students will understand the importance of information architectures, search engines, directories, hits, pageviews, visitors, users, and linkpopularity respective PageRank®.

Students are encouraged to use office hours to discuss the assignments and/or course topics. Additional appointments and consultations can be scheduled with the (Teaching) Assistant.

The class will consist of a mix of lecture, discussion, online participation, and in-class critiqueä sessions. A small set of readings are required to prepare for class and discussion, and an additional reading list will be provided to help student research as they work on their assignments. Throughout the course, students will iteratively critique each other's assignments, ideas, comments, and works. Eventually there will be guest lecturers. In addition, participants of the course will prepare case studies, assignments, and work on team projects.

Familiarity with the Internet, Search engines, HTML, and web design.