Teh Chad

Thanks to Jimmy Mackin for connecting me to Steve Yegge’s rant.

I’m all about solid foundations and understanding of the basics. Well, something just hit me that I have not really considered. Accessibility.

In computers and business, accessibility is really A, #1, the end all, top priority. If you can get the technology, you can let it run. If you can get the personnel, including great managers and staff, your company can take off. But that is given you can get them.

Let’s change the relationship to your customers. What do they need or want? How can you get them to your product?

Again, this is a fundamental concept. You give them access to your product and get out of the way.

“If you build it, they will come” right? If there aren’t roadblocks keeping them to just window shopping.

What if your sole purpose was to get the product to your customers and that was it? No more signups for some damn newsletter; no more 3 phone calls to get in touch with the right person; no more surveys for some case study. JUST PRODUCT!

From this standpoint, what of those “signups” are really needed to get the job done? What other avenues can you put your product in front of the customer’s eyes? How can you get out of the way of your own product?

Google has this great tendency to experiment. They change things and then let us know a few days afterward. It appears that they are looking to compete with even more of the little guys and their ideas now.

Google has joined the ranks of Bit.ly, digg, and many others with their URL shortener. Aptly, their page is at http://goo.gl.

The short URL has really changed how we do SEO in the area of linkbuilding. Linkbuilding is simply getting links to your site on other sites. This can be done in many ways, blog comments being very common.

With the advent of Twitter (i.e. “a little bird told me”), mini blogs exploded. Facebook definitely contributed too. And social media was born! We found ALL of our friends! Then we shared cool links with our friends and business acquaintances. Why not share our new stories too?

Sharing our stories, posted on other sites of course, with business associates is really where social networking for SEO was born. Now we can share posts like this one with everyone we know in seconds. But who is really going to shove “http://tehchad.com/seo-google-entered-short-url-market/” into a tweet? When you’re limited to 140 characters, a URL like that is just too long. Ergo, we use things like bit.ly and goo.gl.

People talk about Google and business all of the time. Some people take a step further and talk about SEO or search engine optimization. Still others take a shot at doing for a given website.

There are bunches of people who work in the SEO realm, most call themselves freelancers. Again, many people attempt it, few people DO it.

There are many ways to optimize a site, but when you knock SEO down to business there are really three places that need attention. You key words should go in these three places:
> The title bar
> The header tags / blog title
> In the blog content.

The first two are normally taken care of during the design phase of building your site. Once in a while, some versatility will be needed when going after new key words. In this case, the header tags may be set around each individual blog post title. The SEO writer will then have to focus on keeping key words in blog titles as well.

Blog content is the bulk of a business writer’s time and work. Writing optimized content is something of an adjustment for most people as it does not read well. We have been programmed into write things that “flow” and “hold the reader.”

As you can imagine, natural writers can adjust and produce lots of great business content. The rest of us have to work at it!

It should be noted that this is the main focus of SEO; there are MANY other things that you can do to gain strength on Google’s pages.