WEEK 2: A Conversation with Guest Speaker Tony Adam by Patricia Galera

By UCLA X469.21 Student Patricia Galera

Patricia Galera

For Week 2 we were honored with the presence of Tony Adam, legendary SEO guru who taught us a few things about implementing SEO tactics that can increase traffic to a site. He discussed the two main points to consider when implementing an SEO campaign:

1. Content Optimization (establishes your site’s relevance)

2. Relationship Building (establishes your site’s authority)

Tony Adam

We also discussed and defined several key terms by reviewing a series of examples. One such term is “crawling,” which occurs when Google reviews web pages to determine how they should be indexed. Google looks for both relevance and authority on each page. For example, if a very popular site such as NYTimes.com has a link to your blog, that will raise your blog’s authority. Tony also discussed how Twitter in particular can influence Google indexing. According to Tony, Twitter is crawled almost constantly, so links on the site get indexed quickly and can boost SEO.

Another very important topic Tony addressed was managing online reputation. He reviewed various tactics for the dreaded situation when you search Google for a specific name or company, and find the first page full of negative reviews or damaging news. The goal in this situation is to tackle lowering the negative results so they don’t appear on the first page. Tony explained how this can be achieved by pumping up the searched for name/company on social media sites such as Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, Vine and others.