Girls In Tech

Last nights “She’s Savvy: SEO” event with Chelsea Rustrum in Santa Cruz was a real success. I was so happy to see a packed room full of a lot of new faces.

I promised the group last night that we would publish Chelsea’s slides as they had a lot of great content in them and we wanted to share it with everyone who couldn’t make it. Chelsea did a great job of defining SEO and walking us through some best practices:

Tile Tags
- First, make sure they are unique and well researched
- Try and keep them to 65 characters or less because that will show up in Google
- In formatting them, put business name behind the keywords (example in slides)
- Remember: first words in tile tag are weighted more highly

Links lets search engines know you exist and how valuable they are. Are all links created equal? No – a link from your best friend’s blog isn’t weighted as heavily as CNN.

Link text is essentially the same as anchor text
- Create quality content
- Use social media icons to your benefit – Tools like Facebook and Twitter are free. Link to them and build your community that way.

“Text is why the search engines live breathe and consume.”
- Text needs to be unique – well written
- A great source for writing copy is: Copyblogger

Quotes to live by from Chelsea:
“What’s good for humans is good for the search engines.”
“Just build something cool.”

GOOGLE
Google Suggest is helpful with articles or blog posts to find out how many search queries are made each month – that information could be useful in writing and optimizing your article/post.

Google AdWords keyword tool is a FREE service and will help with title tags
Something to think about: the longtail – perhaps there is less competition when you are more specific

Google universal search integrates all different media sources

Did you know:

• 10% of NYTimes.com traffic is coming from Twitter
• Facebooks traffic surpassed Google’s last week