Perhaps the worst SEO post title I could possibly use. If you are still wondering what SEO is ask Nitin Parmar ;)
After over 15 years of working with web technologies, this is the first time I’ve learned about #SEO. Interesting stuff! #futurelearn
— Nitin Parmar (@nrparmar) July 15, 2013
Still lost? SEO is Search Engine Optimisation. I’ve had a long interest in SEO primarily in selfish terms to try and get this blog more read, but also in a wider ‘educational resource discovery’ context. I was the author of the ‘SEO and discoverability’ chapter in Into the wild – Technology for open educational resources, which highlights the importance and UKOER programme experiments with SEO.
So it’s perhaps no surprise that I agree with Tony:
Thinking that if learning tech and library folk aren’t aware of SEO, they really are out of the game…
— Tony Hirst (@psychemedia) July 15, 2013
Something I’m increasingly become aware of is SEO is not just about having the right metadata on your webpage, in fact arguably this is the least important aspect. The area I’m particularly interested in is the tools/techniques the SEO community use to gain ‘actionable insight’.
Ironically this is an area I’ve been inadvertently contributing to without really knowing it. Someone who spotted this early was Wil Reynolds founder of SEER Interactive:
Love finding a non-seo who SEO’s should follow – @mhawksey – G’docs skills are insane – http://t.co/NqNrxwO1 & http://t.co/gfw53eBt
— wilreynolds (@wilreynolds) June 12, 2012
SEER Interactive offer services in Paid Search Marketing and Search Engine Optimization but what’s particularly interesting is their commitment to being “an Analytics first company, and we will not take on projects where we can’t analyze our impact on your business”.
So what do I do that’s of interest to the SEO community? Well it seems like me SEOers like a good old-fashioned spreadsheet. They also like a good old-fashioned spreadsheet that they can hook into social network channels. A recent example of this is the work Richard Baxter (CEO and founder of SEOgadget) presented at MOZCon which extends TAGS (my Twitter Archiving Google Spreadsheet solution) demonstrating How To Use Twitter Data for Really Targeted Outreach. The general synopsis is:
an alternative method to find sites that our target audiences may be sharing on Twitter. With that data, you can build content strategy, understand your market a little better, and construct an alternative outreach plan based on what real people are sharing and engaging with, rather than starting with sites that just rank for guest post queries.
It was really interesting to read how Richard had used the output from TAGS, which was ingested into Excel where additional free Excel based SEO tools could be used to gain that all important ‘actionable insight’.
So ‘learning tech and library folk’ if you are planning your next phase of CPD maybe you should be looking at some SEO training and perhaps I’ll see you at MOZCon next year ;)
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