The SEO Girl

If you’re reading this, you hopefully like search engine optimizaton. But every SEO Specialist is bound to re-think SEO as a career path every once in awhile. Here’s the reasons why my bumper sticker reads “I Heart SEO”.

• Determination - If you’re going to excel in the SEO world, you need to have determination. You may see your keywords rise to the top of Google one month and see them fall to page 4 the next. SEO isn’t Pay-Per-Click, you must have the persistence to see your SEO campaign through. Keywords rise, and keywords fall. Don’t let one bad month deter you from excelling in SEO in the future.
• Continous Training - Sign up for all the SEO newsletters at sites like SEO Chat, Search Engine Land, Search Engine Watch, and SEOmoz. Read their blogs daily to get insight and tips. Be sure to read the blog of your favorite SEO Girl too! It’s imperative to stay up to date on the latest SEO trends, this is a career path that can at times change every week.
• Broad Skill Set - Are words your specialty, but have no ideal what html stands for? Team up with a developer and you’re good to go. SEO Specialists bring many different skills to the table, and you need to have people who can write and others who are more tech-savvy. Partner the two together and you’re golden.
• Be Friendly - The Search Engine Optimization world is competitive, but it also has a certain camraderie that many industries lack. SEO is the future, and I predict there will be great demand for SEO Specialists in a few years. Don’t be afraid to share your knowledge. Attend conferences, network, and schmooze with the big wigs. Maybe you’ll even spot me
• Experience is Everything - There’s no Bachelor’s degree in SEO. Learn the techniques, read the blogs, and apply it to your SEO campaign. You’re bound to screw up, but learn from your mistakes and figure out where you went wrong.

If your SEO campaign doesn’t seem to be paying off, hang in there kid. There’s no sense in throwing in the towel just yet. The SEO community is extraordinarly welcoming to newbies, so leave a comment on the SEO Chat message boards or on one of my posts, and someone’s bound to help you out. We’re always ready to give you a hand.

You might be a link building whiz kid or an SMO expert, but both search engines and visitors to your site want content. These SEO content writing tips and tricks won’t turn you into Shakespeare, but if you listen up they might just make writing a little easier.

Free Information
Think of content as your opportunity to provide “free information”. For example, pretend you have a site selling high heels. Be sure to have extensive product descriptions of each shoe, but also create articles. Write articles on proper foot care, what styles are in right now, and what kinds of shoes you’d wear to see mom or go to the club in.

Web-Friendly Copy
Notice how I broke this post up into small paragraphs with subheads in bold. Do the same in your SEO copy. It can be difficult to read online, but creating bulleted lists and including lots of white space will make your visitors love your site. Remember that content isn’t just for search engines. Having a high ranking site doesn’t take the place of happy customers.

Go With The Flow
Make sure your content flows. Read it outloud and see if it makes sense. Avoid run-on sentences and long paragraphs. Use spell-check and grab a dictionary. There’s no reason to use a “dollar” word where a “penny” word is just fine.

Meta what?
Search engines don’t reward meta tags like they used to, but it’s still helpful to add a meta-title, meta-keywords, and meta-description to your site. Writing your own meta-description gives you better control over the summary of your site that will display in the SERPs. Write unique meta tags for every page, or at least every section page, on your site.

HTML Knowledge
If you’re uploading the content yourself, be sure to have a working knowledge of HTML. You can download basic HTML editing software like Nvu for free.

Happy writing!

- your darling seo girl!

If you want to talk the talk, you need to first know the buzzwords that will turn you into an SEO expert (or at least sound like one). Here’s the lowdown on Search Engine Optimization lingo:

• Organic/Natural – Organic, or natural, refers to the 1-10 search results in search engines like Google, Yahoo!, and MSN. They are the unpaid, not sponsored, results that you will be targeting in your SEO campaign.
• Paid Listings – Paid listings, or sponsored results, are ads that people buy to market their products online. They usually appear alongside the organic results.
• SERP – SERP stands for “Search Engine Results Page”, or the list of organic results that comes up in a search engine like Google.
• SMO – SMO is Social Media Optimization, the latest SEO technique. SMO involves getting your site and fresh content noticed by social media sites like Digg, Del.icio.us, Reddit, and StumbleUpon.
• White Hat/Black Hat – White Hat SEO refers to SEO that typically plays nice and doesn’t violate Google’s webmaster guidelines. Black Hat specialists aren’t donning devil horns, but they know how to beat the system. Yet, there’s a chance of being penalized by the search engines for black hat techniques.
• Keywords – When you type a term into that little white box on Google, the words you’re typing in are called “keywords” in SEO land. SEO specialists optimize sites for specific keywords.
• Long Tail Keywords – These are keywords that came out of the womb with an extra appendage. Joking. Long Tail Keywords are usually keywords that are more than three words long. These keywords are usually easier to rank for than short 1-2 word keywords. Many SEO specialists who promise results will optimize your site for long tail keywords because the competition isn’t as great for these words. Yet, few people may be searching for these terms, so be careful if an SEO specialist does this.
• Link Building – The part of your SEO campaign that will most likely cause you the most frustration. Think of getting your site ranked with Google as an election that you want to win. Every relevant site that links to you is a vote. The more votes you have from reputable sites, the more likely you are to “win” by getting your site ranked higher.
• One-Way Links - Google is now thought to reward “one-way links” rather than reciprocal links. One way links occur when a site links to your site without you first linking to them.
• PageRank – When looking for relevant links, looks for sites that have a high PageRank. PageRank is Google’s system for determining how much weight a site has. Great sites have a PageRank of 7 or higher. Download the Google Toolbar to see the PageRank for all the sites you visit.
• WTF?! – The cry of a frustrated SEO specialist. *Pat on the back.* It’ll be okay.

This is only a handful of SEO lingo. Leave a comment to post your own!

I like long walks on the beach, watching the sunset, and – oh, sorry, wrong website! All jokes aside, The SEO Girl is a place where I can share my views and insight into the wonderful world of Search Engine Optimization with all of you. I encourage you to contribute your thoughts and opinions on each post I write, I welcome intelligent discussions, witty comments, and anything else you can throw at me (no tomatoes, please!).

I live and breathe Search Engine Optimization every day. SEO is changing every minute, and it’s our job to keep up with it.

If you have any questions or comments, feel free to email me at theseogirl @ gmail.com (remove the spaces around the “@” symbol when sending).

- your favorite seo girl

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