SEO Buzz

May 23, 2007
At Max’s Restaurant, my second time this week.

A friend of mine just sent me an SMS about two girls talking in line at a money changer. Girl #1 said that she’s going to enroll and get a course in SEO because she heard SEOs earn six figures per month. Girl #2, apparently a SEO, said that she’s earning very little since she learned from the company she’s working for.

My unsolicited advice to Girl #2, do some freelancing and then quit your job and do it full time. (I just hope you’re not an employee of one of my friends). LOL. Who knows, you just might be the next SEO World Champion.

Anyway, during the IFEX I got asked a lot about “getting found on top at Google”. I had to be careful about using the words “ranking”, “search engine optimization”, “algorithms” and “robots”. Whenever I mentioned one of those words, the person’s eyes I was talking to would glaze over. Those simple, almost non-techie terms is not the way to explain SEO to traditional business people. (Put down your brows my dear tech blogger friends, try sitting in my workshops and you’ll understand what I’m saying).

Search engine optimization is "The act of altering a web site so that it does well in the organic, crawler-based listings of search engines" (from here). There is a whole industry for this and they basically work on getting your website to the first page of the search results to your query. Lost? It’s like when you open the yellow pages, it’s the first ad that comes to your attention (the biggest one usually).

SEO is very exciting and it’s interesting to note that SEO Philippines founder will be teaching in a university soon. It’s also part of a workshop series I will be doing with the Philippine Trade Training Center. Abangan.