Chapter 19
Safko, The Social Media Bible
If you build it, they will come … right?
No, according to Safko. The chances of your Web site being found by somebody who is searching for content like yours increases greatly if your site is listed on the first page of search results returned by Google or Yahoo!. And that doesn’t happen by itself. It’s a result of a time-consuming process known as search engine optimization (SEO).
SEO has several important components that affect the entire process of building web pages: choosing page URLs, assigning page titles, formatting headers and text, writing content, and assigning keywords and other meta content. After the page is posted, the SEO process isn’t complete; obtaining external reputable links from other sites with high search rankings also affects your page’s rank.
And much of this is time-consuming. Two important steps in SEO, keeping content updated regularly and contacting other web masters to obtain some good reciprocal links, are especially an ongoing investment of time and effort. These are two of the key parts of optimization, yet for a one-person shop such as myself, the time and effort to get these accomplished are hard to assign a top priority. It’s not that they are unimportant; it’s just that so many other things are just as important, and there are still only 40 work hours (give or take) in a work week. So what to do? I like Safko’s suggestion on page 369 to integrate SEO into your daily routine by setting aside an hour a day to blog, post, comment and share and add comment to the web site, social profiles and on-line groups. This might be a way to build these processes into the daily routine.
A previous chapter listed as a source of further information a book titled “Social Media Marketing: An Hour a Day.” Amazon.com, here I come.
I will need to check into that Social Media Marketing: An Hour a Day book. I'm totally with you on this one. I don't have time to worry about SEO for 99 percent of the stuff I'm doing. I think with my news releases, I need to just make sure to get search terms high up in the story, so when people search for a topic, it shows up. Probably adding tags to my news releases would be useful. Still, we have so many topics that to get any mass would be pretty much impossible. So I guess if we focus on optimizing "university" and "Nebraska", this would be good. I still kind-of think it's manipulation to purposefully key in on specific words to make sure they show up first in a search. I guess that's a marketing thing as opposed to a PR thing. ?
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