Introducing Tara the newest member to the Baldydog SEO team. Tara has a background in web design/development and photography.
Wow- have things changed in the SEO world!
I’m not just talking about Penguin either. Several months ago a penguin was a flightless bird to me, but now with my new position at Baldy Dog I am learning all about the Google Penguin.
I was last in the SEO game before SEO was even a term. I was reminiscing about the days when we picked as many keywords as you could and threw them everywhere on the site, content, images, Meta tags and then submitting the site to search engines and directories. Trying to swap out links with other sites, no matter how irrelevant, was a good practice. Yahoo was the ‘go to’ amongst many search engines and I just heard of this upstart Google.
My how things have changed…so out with the old and in the new. The good thing is that I’m not set in my ways and yet the past has set me up with a good understanding of what is going on in SEO today. The old basics still hold true, but with a twist.
The Good Ol’ New Days
Some things from the past are still important, such as:
- Keywords, you need to find a niche and really focus on a good set that your site content backs up.
- Tags for images and Meta are still a good idea, though not as important as they used to be.
- Links are very important but more important is that they are “good” links from relevant, branded, and/or authoritative sites.
Social is New, but not Really
The new is the dawning of Social Media. This is it getting people to share information and links to your site and making it easy to do so. It’s the old “word of mouth” marketing with a new spin.
It’s important to get people talking and give them something to talk about (ie: Press, Articles, and Blogging). No one thing is going to get you listed in the first slot at Google and it’s a constant work in progress.
It sure is a lot to keep track of and our pros at Baldy Dog have been doing this before SEO had a name and are still on top it. Robots are not going to cut it with Google, only the real people behind the scenes like those in my office.