My day at Tots 100 SEO Academy.

I was recently invited to an SEO Academy hosted by tots 100. Since my knowledge of SEO is absolutely zero, I jumped at the chance to attend. The workshop was presented by Dave Sottimano of Distilled.

Some of the topics he covered were:

Understanding SEO- SEO is short for search engine optimisation, it means writing content that can be found easily by people who search on the net via search engines.  

Using Key Words- using key words in the title gives maximum impact, key words are words that people use to search for specific topics ie if they want a chocolate cookie recipe they search for chocolate cookie So using relevant key words in title will optimize the search. Head terms is one word that describes your topic ie Cookies, Longtail terms are a sentence ie How to bake chocolate cookies? It is also advised to include  head terms and longtail terms in your post.

Permalinks- You can customise your post permalinks to include your key words so that you get maximum optimisation in Google search.

Link building- Build links with other blogs and well know trusted sites. Visit blogs with comment love that allows you to leave a link of your last post. “Ego Stroke” visit other blogs and leave meaningful comments encouraging the recipient to visit your blog and reciprocate.

Follow / no follow links- Be aware of Google wrath, if you are accepting sponsored posts or doing product reviews make sure the content fits in with your blog theme(contextual text) and do follow the guide lines for no follow links. To understand this concept a simple guide to follow / no follow  for bloggers can be found here.

Disclosure on paid posts and reviews- You must declare on your post if the post is review or paid sponsored post. This topic is fairly complex so get more knowledge on it you can read the article on tots 100 “Should I remove disclosure statements on paid posts”  and "What makes a good disclosure policy" explaining this in more detail.

Add author feature- Add author feature to claim your content on Google.This means that when your post URL appears in Google search a thumb nail of the author appears next to it.You can find out how to create your add author feature from google plus.

Add creative commons license - Add creative commons license on your blog home page. Creative Commons license is used when an author wants to give people the right to share, use, and even build upon a work that they have created. CC provides an author flexibility (for example, they might choose to allow only non-commercial uses of their own work) and protects the people who use or redistribute an author's work, so they don’t have to worry about copyright infringement, as long as they abide by the conditions the author has specified.

Images- Make sure all images are named with relevance ie if it is a chocolate cookie image name it chocolate cookie rather than a random  image number. A lot of Google traffic comes from image search.

Text- Make sure you have a minimum of 500 words in your post as this is good for Google search, avoid posts with images only. A mix of text and images is best.Google servers find it difficult to search image only posts.Add a category list to your blog side bar to enable easy search of specific topics for visitors.

Blog promotion-Add your blog URL to your email signature, promote your blog via Google plus, twitter, face book , pinterest, stumble upon and other social networking sites.Encourage others to tweet and share your posts.Add a blog role and swap links with other bloggers.

The workshop was very interesting and covered the above topics and a few others in much detail.I have shared a few key things that I had noted and I would like to thank Tots 100 for  inviting me to the SEO Academy .