SEO, here we go!

Ever since I started to try to looking beyond a website's surface appearance and dig deeper, I have consistently run into the mysterious word "SEO" (search engine optimization). Now I am very excited that my APOC class has provided us a chance to learn this concept systematically, as I truly believe that in a world of immense information, the search engine, which provides the road map for people to find your content online, is critical for successfully delivering your content to people that would find it of interest. According to many social media expert like Chris Anderson, content is not the king anymore. Context is, and search engines match things in the right context and help people find it.

Here are five tactics I came up with, at the threshold of the big SEO universe, to improve my blog "Social Media Is Great". 2 months after it has launched, I am very happy to see the site's has been indexed by Google for 49 times and by Yahoo for 3 times. I still have a long way to go, but at least the site is searchable through these two popular search engines now.

The first tactic is to sort the meta elements of my blog and add a meta description for my website, basically, talking to the search engine's robot head directly, hoho. If I can more clearly describe what my blog is about, the search engine can better categorize it and search for it.

The second one would be sorting the content of my blog and taking careful note of the words I put in my article content and titles to make it easier for the search engines to recognize. I should think more carefully about what specific words I choose, because certain words may be more "hot" than others, and come up more in search results.

Third, I add tags to my article. I currently have used labels to tag and categorize my blog posts, but have not done it systematically. I think much more effort could be put here to browse through my posts and see what tags may frequently come up. That way I can have a deeper library of tags within my own blog.

Also, trying to exchange links with other sites and getting my name out there. Thanks to my APOC peers, our blog links have been exchanged a lot, but let's keep it up! We can all help each other by linking and creating more "buzz" for everyone!

Besides that, I have been using many pictures in my blog, so remembering to add ALT tags to these images is another great way to directly talk to the search engines and let them know what my blog is posting about.

SEO, there is still so much to learn, and I am really looking forward to it!