WEEK 2: A Conversation with Guest Speaker Tony Adam by Joachim Weruersson
By UCLA X469.21 Student Joachim Wernersson
Joachim Wernersson
Tony Adam was the guest speaker for our Week 2 class discussion. While Tony addressed the SEO part of the course, it didn’t take him long before he showed competence in multiple areas, including strategy and marketing.
“The only thing that I can say I am REALLY good at is growing businesses.”
Well, that’ll probably still get you pretty far Tony… and it has.
Tony discussed his resume and what he learned working at companies like PayPal, Yahoo, MySpace and Eventup.
Tony Adam
He explained that while at Eventup (the company he founded but no longer works with), he drove traffic to the site almost solely through SEO and SEM. The coolest thing he told us about Eventup is that even today, the site is ranked number-one on Google for the search “Los Angeles event venues” — a pretty sought after search phrase, one can assume. What makes this even more impressive is the fact that nothing has been done in a very long time to optimize the Eventup website.
This just goes to show that doing SEO the hard way (i.e., not hustling or trying to manipulate the system) can really pay off in the long run (even though Tony admitted that he’d pushed a few boundaries back in the old days).
Tony told us about how SEO really boils down to two things:
- Keyword research
- Building an SEO friendly website
He elaborated and told us that you have to optimize for both ON PAGE FACTORS as well as OFF PAGE FACTORS. Examples of ON PAGE FACTORS are the content on the site and the user experience (i.e., how it all interacts). OFF PAGE FACTORS include inbound links. Tony also explained the importance of getting links from Twitter. It turns out that Twitter is constantly crawled by Google, which makes its link very valuable for getting a page indexed quickly. That’s great information for anyone trying to improve their rankings!
The last thing that I think everyone should take away from Tony’s guest speaker appearance was his discussion about blogs.
“Companies that blog 15 or more times per month get five times more traffic than companies that don’t blog at all”
If that’s not a reason to spend some time blogging, I don’t know what is.
