In our first Meetup of the year, we met at Milton's Pizza to hear these two remarkable people
Jake Bohall is the Vice President of Hive Digital and an instructor for Fortis College through ASPE, leading their Search Engine Optimization Boot Camp course. Jake is recognized as an online columnist, entrepreneur, and serves as a board member of an educational non-profit. His near-decade of experience in these diverse areas make him often sought-after to speak on topics of entrepreneurship, education, and web-based marketing strategies.
Phil is the Director of Technical SEO at Adapt. He has been working on the web since the late 1990’s doing everything from web development and system administration. He found his true calling about ten years ago when he started to move from web development to online marketing. Phil has worked for multi-million dollar e-commerce websites, SaaS software companies, advertising agencies and even other SEO agencies.
Did you know that more than two million blog posts are published every day?
This means that more than one thousand people have posted their blog post since you started to read this.
These days, when content publishing has become so massive, it is necessary to stand out; it's a priority.
SEO techniques give you visibility among the sea of content that has become the web nowadays.
First of all, we need to define what SEO even means, sure it stands for Search Engine Optimization, but we need to know what is being optimized.
It's not only the images, or the design, or even the links... you need to optimize all of these aspects, but not only that.
It is the process of optimizing your content to be in the top results after a search of a particular keyword is performed online.
In simple English: SEO is about making sure that if someone introduces a set of keywords such as "Gluten free pasta," and if you have a gluten free pasta business, your content appears in the top results.
You could check out the Wikipedia's definition of SEO for deeper information
One of the most important things out there is trust, and who you can trust; there are plenty of techniques known as Black Hat SEO which are aggressive strategies that focus not on a human audience but the search engines, and frequently don't obey search engines guidelines.
Among the techniques that might be used for a Black Hat SEO strategy, we could find keyword stuffing, invisible text, doorway pages, adding unrelated keywords to the page content or page swapping (changing the web page entirely after it has been ranked by search engines).
This kind of strategy might lead you to a quick financial return, but in the long term it would end up with your website being banned from search engines, leaving you without traffic. So if you think that this is the way, you should think twice before using Black Hat techniques.
This concept is pretty important because it's all about non-explicit programming, the computer explores, studies, and constructs an algorithm that it can learn from to make predictions based on data.
Being such an important part of the future of SEO strategies, machine learning is something you can expect to make Black Hat techniques increasingly difficult. Check out Wikipedia's definition of Machine Learning to get more insights.
When we refer to Mobile First we are talking about a mobile UX Design by implementing responsive JavaScript, it’s possible to tell websites to adapt to whatever device a person is using to view a website. Want to know more about mobile-first UX design?
You have probably noticed the direct answers offered by Google for various search queries. As an example, take a moment and type "miles to feet" into Google. The result is not only a direct answer, 5280 feet in 1 mile - but also a conversion calculator built into the top of the results page. Think about the Star Trek computer and the number of people that carry a smartphone in their pocket, making those mobile devices into Star Trek computers is probably not far from what Google envisions for the future.
These are also important, but there's no need to rush it. Take your time to implement the following aspects:
This being said, and after all this explanation you should go and read the following:
