Content is king, yes, but you still need to talk to both humans and search engines to attract.
Honestly, I’m in a school of thought that thinks SEO is no longer relevant and social media is the next big thing to gain attention. Over time, I realized I was wrong.
At first, writing to search engines (search engine optimization, SEO) is like pondering to search engines because they have their own set of rules, whereas writing to humans (which is what I do at this very moment) has no rules and almost no boundaries.
You see me post photos of events often and talk about restaurants sometimes, and I do not care about search engine crawling for this humble space. A reason for attending an SEO 101 (organized by the Philippine Bloggers’ Network, or PBNet) is that my work needs this, and at the same time I need to change my antagonistic view of SEO, a completely normal practice for content creators.
Since this is SEO 101, I expect that the bare basics that I’ve already heard (link building, link sorting, keyword research) will be covered; but then again, one can not study things at first glance alone. As I’ve said earlier, I need a refresher.
A few takeaways that I got from this seminar which is taught to us by The City Roamer’s Alwin Aguirre are as follows:
- There are recommended options for images in a blog post — if you’re going to share the post on Facebook, it’s recommended to size your image to 1200 pixels; if you are aiming to have your images load faster, resize it to 600px.
- Keywords are recommended to be placed in the early parts of the post so Google can detect it faster.
- Be wary of linking into too many Facebook pages in one post. In SEO, thou shalt not have many links in a post; and since links of Facebook pages are still URLs, Google sees this as a bad thing. One suggestion I’ve heard is to use the
rel="nofollow”attribute, as well as to use thetarget="blank"attribute when linking to sites. I think there’s more to learn for me on this part. - If you have post categories, it’s not recommended to change it. I overlook this part a lot.
- If you have a post which is relevant for a long period of time, it’s recommended to share it often on social media.
Now that I understand that I still need to write for search engines (as most still rely on search engines to find what they want), I expect to bear fruits in my projects at work. Thanks, PBNet!
Also thanks to the seminar venue The Office Project. This “Co-working Studio” fits just right for a hip workspace, unlimited coffee and a decent internet connection to finish a few backlogs that I still have on my space, all for Php100 an hour. They have my recommendation.
It’s located at the Alpha Salcedo Condominium just near the Embassy of Saudi Arabia and the Mapúa Makati Campus, and is open from Monday to Saturday 9am to 10pm.