WEEK 4: A Conversation with Guest Speaker Tony Adam by Vanessa Becerra
By UCLA X469.21 Student Vanessa Becerra
Tony Adam
As I sit here looking for ways to describe our recent guest discussion with Tony Adam, it’s hard not to let my mind drift and go back to that hour and a half when my brain was overstimulated with fascinating new learnings – an experience I would normally label as a “learning high.” I must confess, my brain was getting information much faster than my cerebrum could process, and I’m not going to lie, I absolutely loved it.
One thing I love in life is taking my intellect for a wild ride. Learning new things fascinates me. My nightstand is currently home to books on meditation, diving, neurology and digital marketing (I don’t kid when I say I need to learn new stuff – regardless of the subject — otherwise I get absolutely bored). So, if you add up “love for learning new things” plus the fact that those new things are related to my field of work, the sum equals awesomeness (aka, a learning high).
Back to the star, Tony Adam, he painted a beautiful picture and gave SEO a very interesting/intriguing/fascinating/captivating intro. It was much better and real than anything I had ever read before (including the book my husband wrote on social media… he doesn’t need to know I said this). Tony covered topics from SEO, to the proper use of SEO, what not to do with SEO (aka black hat activities), and everything in between.
For starters, you can learn and know tons about SEO, but the key to success relies on two simple attributes: relevance and authority.
Relevance:
In order for SEO to be effective, it’s imperative for marketers to develop content that is relevant. Ultimately, content is like the mother of all things social media, so it only makes sense that the content developed and published is not only representative of the website publisher’s product and/or service, but also (and most importantly) contains a high level of keyword search relevance. The relevance in content could and should be present in every form, including the page URL, title tag, headers, video content, etc. Having content with high relevance can “assist” Google in properly determining the content category, which has a positive impact on search performance.
Authority:
As Tony said, authority is the second primary attribute that one should keep in mind when thinking SEO. Establishing authority can help improve (and increase) the likelihood that a site will show up high on a search. Authority can be achieved through links from other sites and influencers (through their blog posts and comments, social media feeds, etc.).
Aside from relevance and authority, here are a few other things that one should keep in mind when SEO’ing.
- Understand your audience and what your audience searches for.
- Write content based on what people are searching for.
- Dilute negative content through positive content saturation.
- Don’t underestimate the value of header tags and site maps.
- Black hats are cool but not in the SEO world.
- Next time you listen to Tony Adam speak, make sure you have an audio recorder with you so you don’t miss anything he says.
