Post de Leila Nachawati Rego, vocal de Aerco responsable de Relaciones Internacionales

I just joined the Third Marketing Tribe forum to learn and discuss about the latest trends on social media with international referents such as Chris Brogan and Sonia Simone. As International Representative for AERCO (Spanish Association of Online Community Managers), I will be sharing a weekly post on things that those working with social media for organizations, brands or causes could benefit from. I hope the AERCO community will find this information useful, everyone else is welcome too.

We all want conversation around our projects. Whether it is for the products our company sells or the causes we believe in, it´s all about engaging people and conversation. SEO (Search Engine Optimization), the so many times pronounced 3 letters in marketing context, is just a part of this, one that most people get intimidated about. This was the topic covered by web designer and SEO Conrad Walton on his interview with Sonia Simone, from Copyblogger

. Since I started working as a community manager for EOI I have been reading about SEO basics and have never found it put in such a nice simple way as in this seminar. Here is a list of the things that I found enlightening about it and that you don´t easily get to hear elsewhere.

Common missunderstandings about SEO:

• SEO equals more traffic: SEO CAN bring more traffic, but it´s not the only aspect to keep in mind. Your traffic can come from advertising, social media, from cultivating your reputation as a whole.
• SEO is very difficult and only experts can work on it: SEO is intimidating for many, but although there is a techinical part to it, anyone with time and energy can make improvements without being an expert.
• You can pay someone to take care of your SEO and forget about it: That´s not how it works. It´s not a product you can buy, it´s like tuning a piano.
• Google is very smart and it´s difficult to deceive: Google is just “a big stupid puppy” trying to figure things out. We are way smarter than him. Spiders (programs that browse the Web and provide search engines with up-to-date data)are like puppies looking at the code behind your page and trying to know what your page is about from a literal analysis.

What Search Engines like:

• Keywords: Everything revolves around keywords, which refer to what your site is about. So the first thing you should know is what your site is about and how you want to be found. (Walton´s “Survivor”, for instance). Once you find your keywords you have to stick to them. Use it in your title, your url, your tags… be consistent and patient. These hings usually take time and you will not see results in just a few days.
• Interesting content. Sometimes you need an SEO Ninja because you have no interesting content on your site. Creating interesting content is basic and it will make the rest of it way easier.
• Good titles and headlines. Content is important but good headlines matter too. According to Sonia …, Copyblogger, which gets 50% of its traffic from Search Engines, puts a lot of thought into really good headlines. Title tag the html the way you want it to be on search engines and have the friendlist headline for your readers.
• Lots of pages. Search engines like a lot of pages. 200 pages on a site rank better than 20 pages, so creating and publishing content regularly will help. Update regularly and link.
• Clean friendly code (as in wordpress blogs). Some people still hire programmers who create ugly code pages with programs like Dreamweaver that will only confuse “the puppy”. Search engines want to give people what they want as accurately as possible by a literal analysis of your code. If your code doesn´t look good it will only confuse the spiders.
• Your About page: Put some thought into your About page. Since you are worrying about what the search engine is looking for, what does your About say about you?
• SEO is like high school. You control titles, urls, links on your site… but what matters is what everyone else says about you. In high school you´re cool if others think you´re cool. If they see you as a bycicle expert and link you on bycicles sites you´re going to score high for bycicle searches, no matter how you view yourself.

Some more things you can do:

• Use Tools such as Google Adwords keyword too Google Adwords keywork search and Yahoo site explorer

Look at who links to you and why. This will give you a lot of useful information

Look at who links to your competition and find out why they link. You can also go to these people and introduce yourself

Find how many people are looking for a specific keyword and who your competitors are (Wikipedia,other brands sites?)

Look at the relative numbers but don´t take them as Gospel

• Keep an eye on the things Search Engines like(keywords, title) but remember you´re writing for people. SEOs won´t pay you, it´s human beings that will use their credit cards.
• Be nice, make friends, hang out with people. Google is trying to mirror an organic world, be the person people want to talk to. The more human interaction, the more people will link to you and you´ll be fine.
• Give things a little time and hard work. If you rank quickly you can unrank as fast and don´t get any lasting value. Some basic stuff will take you far.

And remember: It´s not only about SEO but about the big picture: social media, relations and cultivating your reputation.

What do you think? Have you tried any of this? Was it helpful?