WEEK 4: A Conversation with Guest Speaker Tony Adam by Abdullah Salem
By UCLA X469.21 Student Abdullah Salem
Abdullah Salem
Tony discussed several important topics related to content and SEO, starting with how to identify and understand what your audience is looking for when they perform a Google search. For example, most people don’t search for the word “automobile,” they search for the word “car.”
Tony Adam
It’s not unusual for Tony’s clients to ask him why their website attracts so few visitors. His approach to answering this common question is to search the relevant terms used by the target audience. Such research can uncover that there are two or more words that have essentially the same meaning – such as “house” and “home,” but most of the audience searches for “home,” not “house.” Once such a preference is determined for one search term over another, we can help bring a website to the top of search results.
Tony also discussed page URLs, titles and tags. An optimized URL is short and relates directly to the topic and main keyword term for the website. Blogs are also very important; in fact, companies that blog more than 15 times per month get five times more traffic than companies that don’t blog at all. Just about any company can develop a simple blog that will improve its SEO. For example, a company that sells eyeglasses could post blog content about what its sunglasses are made from, how the sunglasses protect users’ eyes, the difference between various types of sunglasses, etc.
Links are also vitally important for SEO, as Google uses your website’s inbound links to determine its authority. While links are crucial, those that lead to a page with a high bounce rate (meaning people leave the page right after they link to it) can negatively impact SEO.
Overall, search optimization is about relevance (the content on your page and in its source code) and authority (the quality of links to your page). To reach the largest audience you must make sure the words you use are relevant to that audience, and you need inbound links from credible sites that will help get you discovered.
