Career Building Through Using Search Engine Optimization Techniques [1 ed.] 9781477717332, 9781477717264

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CAREER BUILDING THROUGH CREATING MOBILE APPS CAREER BUILDING THROUGH USING DIGITAL DESIGN TOOLS CAREER BUILDING THROUGH USING DIGITAL PUBLISHING TOOLS CAREER BUILDING THROUGH USING DIGITAL STORY TOOLS CAREER BUILDING THROUGH USING MULTIMEDIA ART AND ANIMATION TOOLS CAREER BUILDING THROUGH USING SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION TECHNIQUES

Published in 2014 by The Rosen Publishing Group, Inc. 29 East 21st Street, New York, NY 10010 Copyright © 2014 by The Rosen Publishing Group, Inc. First Edition All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Suen, Anastasia. Career building through using search engine optimization techniques/ Anastasia Suen. — First edition. pages cm — (Digital career building) Includes bibliographical references and index. Audience: Grades 7-12. ISBN 978-1-4777-1726-4 (library binding) — ISBN 978-1-4777-1744-8 (pbk.) —ISBN 978-1-4777-1746-2 (6-pack) 1. Search engines—Vocational guidance—Juvenile literature. 2. Web sites—Design—Vocational guidance—Juvenile literature. I. Title. TK5105.884.S84 2014 025.04252023—dc23 2013015915 Manufactured in the United States of America CPSIA Compliance Information: Batch #W14YA: For further information, contact Rosen Publishing, New York, New York, at 1-800-237-9932.

CHAPTER ONE What Is SEO? • 4 CHAPTER TWO Why SEO? • 14 CHAPTER THREE SEO and You • 23 CHAPTER FOUR Is SEO in Your Future? • 31 CHAPTER FIVE Your Career in SEO • 40 Glossary • 50 For More Information • 52 For Further Reading • 55 Bibliography • 58 Index • 61

WHAT IS SEO? oday, we use search engines to find what we are looking for online. We can do that because search engine robots, called spiders, have crawled the Web looking at every Web page they can find. They do that by following links. One Web page links to another page. Link by link and page by page, search engine robots travel across the Web. They are constantly adding new pages to their index, a giant list of what they have found online. You access that index each time you use a search engine. You type a few words into the search engine box at the top of the page. Then you press enter and the search engine goes to work. It looks through its index

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What Is SEO?

When you type in a keyword, a search engine can give you millions of matching results in a matter of seconds. It does all of this work for you free of charge.

and finds Web pages with the keywords you have entered. In seconds, a page of results shows up on your screen. You click on the links that look interesting to you and start reading. Today, there are so many Web pages online that it can be hard to stand out. Companies that are selling products want to be noticed. They want consumers to find their Web pages online. To help companies reach consumers online, a new type of business has emerged, called SEO. SEO stands for “search engine optimization.” The idea is to “optimize” Web pages for search engines. The people who work in SEO help businesses improve their experience online. They do that by

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helping their clients make their Web pages more appealing to search engines. Search engines use a program called an algorithm to make decisions about Web pages. The algorithm is a secret, and it is always changing. But that doesn’t mean that SEO is a guessing game. It’s not an impossible task. Understanding how a search engine looks at a Web page can help you improve it. There are specific things that you can do to a Web page to improve its search engine results. There are many free tools online that you can use. There are also free videos and tutorials. Search engine companies make money when people buy ads, so they want to help their customers, too. Follow in the footsteps of other teens and grow your own career. Yes, you can begin your career in SEO right away. You can use these tools and techniques right now. Find out which classes to take in high school. Discover the two college majors that SEO experts recommend. Learn about how the professionals stay in touch. Get connected now. The power is in your hands. How do you find something online? The short answer is SEO: search engine optimization. The person who created the Web page you found used certain techniques to make it easy to find. Those techniques are the optimization part. When you optimize something, you make it more efficient, more useful. There are many items you need to include when you create a Web page. Each item determines how your Web site will be found. But there is more to SEO than what you see on the page. There are two kinds of SEO.

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What Is SEO?

The Bingbot search engine spider crawls the Web for Yahoo! and Bing. Optimizing a Web site so it can be crawled by a search engine spider is very important.

First, there is the SEO on the page. That’s what everyone sees. The second kind of SEO is off the page. That’s how the rest of the world views you as an “expert” (or not). As their spiders crawl the Web, search engines look both on the page and off the page. A search engine spider isn’t an insect. It’s a computer program that follows links. Search engine spiders are also called crawlers or bots. Google calls theirs Googlebot. Today Bing and Yahoo! both use the Bingbot. Being discovered by a search engine spider is the key to being found on a search engine.

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On the Page According to the experts at Search Engine Land, the three items that search engines look for on your page are content, HTML, and architecture. These are all things that you control. You add them to your Web site or blog when you create it. 1. Content You write the words that go on the pages. That’s your content. But there’s more to a Web site than just a list of words. What the words say matters. People find content online by typing words into a search engine. The words they use are called keywords. To make sure that people find your Web page, you need to test the words on your pages. 2. HTML The most important element of HTML is the page title. Unfortunately, there are countless Web pages that use the word “Home” as the name for their home page. That title doesn’t tell anyone who you are or what you wrote there. Under the Web page title, it’s a good idea to use a meta description tag. This is a short line that describes the content of the page. The title and the description line will appear together in the SERP, the search engine results page. The title you gave each page will be in a large font. It will also be underlined so that everyone knows it is a hotlink. Clicking on the title of your page will take search engine users to that page on your Web site.

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What Is SEO?

The description line you wrote will appear in the search engine results underneath your page title. It will be displayed in a much smaller font. Your description helps bring visitors to your Web site. How can you get a higher rank for your Web site? Yahoo! Help says, “After the title, the description is the most important draw for users.”

3. Architecture How you build the “rooms” on your Web site is your architecture. Search engine spiders move from “room” to “room” on your Web site and make a copy of each Web page. Then they add your Web pages to their index, a massive list of every page on the Web. The best way to make sure that everyone can find what they want on your Web site is to include a sitemap. Place a link to your sitemap at the top of the page in your menu bar. Or put it at the bottom of the page in the footer. That sitemap link will instruct the spider to search your entire site. Search engine spiders also like it when you add a name for each image on your site. Spiders can only read words, not pictures. If you want to have your images found by a search engine, you need to name them. Long page titles and long descriptions may be cut off on the search engine results page. Get to the point or…

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The “Secret Lives” of Teens Online In 2012 Business Insider released a study of teens’ online habits. They called it “The Secret Lives of Teenagers Online.” The report won’t surprise you. It said that only 4 percent of teens today like to talk to their friends on the phone. And they don’t like e-mail or IM (instant messaging) very much either. Only 30 percent use e-mail every day, and only 19 percent use IM daily. Few teens used tablets, but almost every teen had a phone. From 2010 to 2011, teen mobile data (that’s texting) increased 256 percent. Texting on their phones was how teens wanted to communicate. Sixty-nine percent of teens reported that they texted every day. In fact, teens sent more text messages than any other age group. Teens aged thirteen to seventeen exchanged an average of 3,417 messages each month. Eighteen to twenty-four-year-olds, on the other hand, averaged only 1,914 messages a month. According to the study, Facebook was the other way that teens communicated with their friends. Fifty-one percent of teens said that they checked up on their friends at least once a day. They looked at each other’s wall posts and wrote public messages on their friends’ walls. The teens in the Business Insider study used their desktop or laptop computers to play online and conduct searches. Many of those searches happened while the television was on. Teens checked e-mail (52 percent) or looked up sports scores (34 percent). They also looked up information about the show they were watching (37 percent). But social media usage during a television show won hands down. Sixty-two percent of teens visited a social media site while their TV program was on. That number is the highest for any age group. Communicating with words on an electronic screen is what teens prefer. That’s how SEO works, too. Why not take what you do every day and turn that into a career?

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What Is SEO?

Off the Page The four items that search engines look for off the page are the things that are beyond your control. They are the items that involve other people. They are your links, your online reputation, your authority, and your personal location. 1. Links Who links to you is important and so is their reputation. A search engine spider will count the number of links pointing to your Web site. It will also decide how important those links are. Yes, some links are more valuable than others. A link from an expert counts more than a link from a person that no one knows. 2. Social Your social media reputation also matters. Sharing links to your Web site is another way that other people can show they trust you. Once again, this off the page item is about how other people connect with you and your content. Who you know on social media sites is just the first step. How many of your links these people share is what a search engine counts. 3. Authority People don’t want to get advice from someone who is just making things up. They want to know that you can be trusted. What kind of experience do you have to make you an authority on the matter? Fiction is fine when you are writing a story, but for most other things, the facts matter more. You really

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The Google Maps app, seen on this Apple iPhone 4S, can give you step-by-step directions. It can also find stores, restaurants, and more near your current location.

do have to know what you are talking about and be able to back that up. This is why links to trusted authorities on the matter are so important. If you link to sites that do know what they are talking about, it raises your standing, too. It shows that you have done your research. Did you notice how that went full circle? You have to do your research to find Web sites that can be trusted first. Then you link to those trusted sites and create your own content. Soon you will be a trusted resource for others and they will link to you.

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What Is SEO?

4. Location If trust is so important, then why does your location matter? Although we live in a global society online, sometimes we need to find someone nearby. This is often the case with dining and shopping. Because search engines sell ads, they also want to know who is where. When your smartphone knows where you are, it can recommend a place to eat that is just two blocks away. In fact, it will probably recommend several places near you, so you have lots of choices. And when restaurants and stores get new customers, they know that their ads are working, so they will buy more. This is another circle, but this one involves money, and that pays the bills.

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WHY SEO? id you know that the search engine Google was invented by two college students? In 1996, Larry Page and Sergey Brin were Stanford computer science grad students. Working together, they created a search engine they called BackRub. Brin and Page explained how this worked in a paper they wrote for school. “Search engines index tens to hundreds of millions of Web pages involving a comparable number of distinct terms. They answer tens of millions of queries every day.” The name BackRub came from the unique way the new search engine worked. To rank how important any Web page was, the search engine looked at how many

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Why SEO?

In 2008, Google cofounders Sergey Brin (left) and Larry Page talked about the new Google browser, Chrome, during a news conference at Google headquarters in Mountain View, California.

other Web pages linked to it. These links from other sources were called backlinks. After the first year, they gave it a new name. They chose a word that described how vast the Web was becoming. The number googol was written as a 1 with a hundred zeros. Brin and Page used a new spelling of this very big number and called their project Google. At first, Page and Brin worked on their new project using the Stanford University computer servers. As the search engine grew, so did the amount of space it used. After the first year, the university said that BackRub was taking up too much bandwidth. They had to find another place to host it.

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First Created by Students Google was a search engine created by students, but it wasn’t the first one. Alan Emtage, a student at McGill University in Montreal, created the first search engine in 1990. He wanted to call the program “archives,” but the name was too long for the Unix computer system he was using. It was shortened to Archie instead. Archie is often called the “grandfather” of all search engines. Three years later, a student at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) created the first robot on the Web. Physics student Matthew Gray called his robot World Wide Web Wanderer. At the time, most Web sites were at universities. For a school report, Gray wrote, “In Spring of 1993, I wrote the Wanderer to systematically traverse the Web and collect sites. I was initially motivated primarily to discover new sites, as the Web was still a relatively small place. As the Web grew rapidly, the focus quickly changed to charting the growth of the Web.” How much did it change? In June 1993 Gray’s Wanderer found only 130 Web sites. Only 1.5 percent of them had a “.com” name. Only companies used the “.com” at the end of their domain name. Universities used “.edu” instead. In December 1996, Gray’s Wanderer found one hundred thousand Web sites and 50 percent of them had a “dot com” domain name. With more Web pages to read, it became harder to find what you wanted. Having an effective search engine became even more important. The year that Gray’s Wanderer found one hundred thousand Web sites was the same year that Brin and Page began working together on a new way to search the Web.

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Why SEO?

The following year their college project Google became a company. In September 1998, Google opened its first office in Susan Wojcicki’s garage. Their first employee was Craig Silverstein, a fellow computer science grad student at Stanford. In December, Google was on PC Magazine’s Top 100 Web Sites for 1998. It had been a business for only one semester. Two months later, in February 1999, Google outgrew the garage, and it kept growing. Today, there are more than thirty thousand employees, known as Googlers, at work in offices all around the world. The Web site WorldWideWebSize.com keeps track of how many Web sites are indexed each day by Google, Yahoo!, and Bing. In March 2013, it estimated that there were at least 12.71 billion Web pages.

Different Kinds of Search Engines Today, there are many ways to look for information online. Because there is so much to search, there are many ways to do it. According to the blog KISSmetrics, there are forty different search engines. Every search engine has its own algorithm, its own formula for selecting pages to match keyword searches. These forty search engines also have different specialties. Some search engines are for general searches, while others search for only one kind of item. For example, Topsy will help you find the latest tweets on Twitter. Need to make your school report look better? You can

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use Wikimedia Commons to find free images, sound clips, and videos. Scribd finds books and documents for you online. Some of the general search engines also have specialized searches. You can click on a keyword in the menu at the top of the Google homepage and just search for maps or for images. Google owns YouTube, so you can begin your video search on Google’s homepage. Google also has Advanced Search, Google Scholar, and Google Books for specialized searches. The Bing search engine also has a list of keywords at the top that open search for images, videos, maps, and news. The Yahoo! homepage has a list on the upper right for special searches like movies or sports. Yahoo! also owns Flickr, where millions of users upload photos that you can search. In March 2011, Search Engine Watch determined that Google was used for 67.5 percent of all searches. Yahoo! came in second with 16.1 percent, and Bing was third with 13.6 percent. The remaining two had only a tiny share of the market. The search engine Ask had 3.2 percent and AOL had 1.7 percent. A StatOwl study at that time came up with different numbers. It determined that Google was used for 78.56 percent of all searches. Bing had 9.14 percent, and Yahoo! had 9.09 percent, which is almost a tie. Tied for a distant third were the search engines Ask, with 1.73 percent and AOL, with 1.46 percent. The remaining searches were only 0.02 percent.

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Why SEO?

Take a look inside the Yandex company headquarters in Moscow, Russia.Yandex is Russia’s most popular Internet search engine. (You can tell a site is Russian by the “.ru” at the end of the URL..)

Try a Metasearch If you want to get a taste of several search engines you can use Dogpile. It does a metasearch on three large search engines: Google, Yahoo!, and Yandex. So how is a metasearch different from a search engine search? To find out, InfoSpace, Inc., the company behind Dogpile, did a study. Researchers from the University of Pittsburgh and Pennsylvania State University conducted Web searches on different search engines. They discovered that “only 3.2 percent of first page search results were the same across the top three search engines for a given query.” When the

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study was repeated later with the top four search engines, the number dropped to “0.6 percent on average for a given query.” When you use a metasearch engine, what really happens is several simultaneous searches. A metasearch engine takes your keywords and uses them to search several popular search engines at the same time. Then it makes a list of the top results for you to see. Regular search engines crawl the Web and search each Web site page by page. A metasearch engine doesn’t visit each page it recommends. Instead, it relies on the work that the other search engines did. Never heard of Yandex? Let’s take a closer look. Yandex says it is “one of Europe’s largest internet companies and the leading search provider in Russia.” It is one of several search engines that focus on the market in their own country. Baidu is a search engine used in China. Naver and Daum are search engines used in South Korea. .

SEO Consulting With so many Web sites and so many different search engines, helping people find things online became a special job. Companies want consumers, the people who buy their products, to find those products online. A firm that specializes in SEO consulting will be hired to do the job. So what does an SEO consulting firm do? James Agate, the founder of Skyrocket SEO, explains. “The ideal way to start any link building campaign for an established

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Why SEO?

Search engine optimization isn’t just one thing; it’s many things.You need to take all of them into account when you are working on a Web site for yourself or for a client.

Web site is to take stock of the existing link profile.” In other words, you need to find out what links the company’s Web site has now. The next step is “competitor link research.” You need to know what other companies like yours are doing with their Web pages. Who do they link to, who links to them, and what do they talk about on their Web site? After you know what the client has and what the competition is doing, it’s time to make a plan. Agate calls this “opportunity mapping.” The goal is “to try to identify key opportunities and niches to target.” You need to make a

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map of where you are going next. “Communication with the client is key at this stage,” says Agate. The free Web tool Open Site Explorer is a “search engine for links.” The instructions say, “Enter a URL to start searching 82 billion URLs and .771 trillion links.”

Using Social Media Social media is an important way to build backlinks to your client’s Web site. One way to do that is by writing a guest blog post on someone else’s blog. “External links are the holy grails of overall SEO,” says Salesforce.com marketing blogger Stuart Leung. External links are “the reason why Google’s algorithm is years ahead of any other search engine.” So how does writing a guest blog post on someone else’s blog help your client? Leung explains, “I always say that SEO is one part knowledge and two parts experience, but you have to start somewhere!” Sharing content, says Leung, “is crucial for link development as it's the most efficient means of broadcasting your content out quickly and exponentially.” The guest blogger’s Web site is always mentioned in the blog post. This builds a backlink from the blog host to your client’s Web site. It can also add more traffic as blog readers click over to see what else your client has to offer.

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SEO AND YOU eople search the Web for information, so what you write on your own Web page or blog will determine how people find you. Let’s say you made something for your club’s bake sale at school. You made one of your favorites, banana bread, but you want to give it a fun name. What can you call it? Bananas remind you of monkeys, and your favorite movie is The Wizard of Oz, so you call it Flying Monkeys Banana Bread. You want to advertise it as a “one-of-a-kind” treat on the club’s blog. How can you find out if that is really true? Use a search engine. Type the words “banana bread” into a search engine and you’ll get millions of results. Banana bread is

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In less than a second, a search engine can give you millions of results for your keywords. Some topics are very popular on the Web.

extremely popular, so you’ve made a good choice. But did anyone use the same name? It’s not on the first few pages of results and you don’t want to look at all several million results, so you try again. This time you look for “flying monkeys” and get 1,369,828 results. That’s still a huge result. The Wizard of Oz movie comes up first. Next are the Web sites that sell flying monkey merchandise. There is even a flying monkey slingshot toy that screams when you shoot it across the room. There isn’t any banana bread, so it’s time to try again. Two words at a time didn’t give you the results you wanted, so search for all four words this time. Type in “Flying Monkeys Banana Bread.”

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Turning Your Hobby into a Paying Job Did you know that SEO could make you money online? In 2006, one teen made it happen. Chloe Spencer was fifteen when she decided to start a blog about Neopets. Before she made the blog for these virtual pets, Chloe did some keyword research. She discovered that “neopets cheats” was an extremely popular search term. Chloe used those words to name her blog The Ultimate Neopets Cheat Site. At first Chloe used the free WordPress blog platform. In two weeks her blog was on page 1 of Google for the keywords “neopets cheats.” To take it to the next level, she tried to buy ads for the blog. Then she found out that was not permitted on a free WordPress blog. She had to upgrade to WordPress.org. The software for Wordpress is free. But taking care of the rest is up to the user. Chloe had to buy a domain name. (She chose NeopetsFanatic.com as her new blog address.) Chloe also had to find a place to host her blog and pay for that service as well. After the new blog was up and running, Chloe was finally able to buy ads for it. She added the code for Google AdSense to her blog. How does that work? The Google AdSense page explains the program: “Display ads on your website that are suited to your audience's interests, and earn from valid clicks or impressions.” After blogging for a year, Chloe earned $20 to $30 a day. To do that, she had to give her readers a reason to come back to her blog. That meant coming up with new ideas for blog posts each week. CONTINUED ON NEXT PAGE

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Thousands of players from around the world visit the Neopets Web site to take care of their virtual pets.They also buy NeoPets toys and other merchandise.

CONTINUED FROM PREVIOUS PAGE She also checked the blog daily to look at the comments and moderate the scammers. “Some of my blog posts get between 200 to 350 comments,” said Chloe. “Many of my site pages have that many comments, too. One page has almost 900 comments.” As with many online sites, scammers tried to trick Neopet users into giving away their passwords. All of the scammers’ blog comments had to be deleted. Do you have a hobby that you enjoy? Chloe earned money from her Neopets hobby by working on her blog “around 5 hours a week.” With SEO, she was able to make her hobby into a paying job while she was still in school.

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What will you find? The first result, the Flying Monkey Sandwich, was inspired by the flying monkeys in The Wizard of Oz, but it’s not banana bread. It’s a peanut butter sandwich with a mashed banana and Marshmallow Fluff. Banana breads with the word “monkey” on the page also come up, but they do not have the same name. The closest result is “Flying Monkey Banana Fudge Brownies.” It has the flying monkey slingshot toy from your previous search, but it’s not the Web page that sells the toys. It’s a recipe on a cooking blog. The flying monkey toy was used as inspiration for a banana brownie recipe. It’s mentioned in the title of the page, shown in the art, and mentioned in the text. The first three words of your recipe are the same, but bread and fudge brownies are not identical. If there were an exact match, it would have come up first in the search engine results. So at this moment in time, no one has a Web page with this name on it. When you put the name on your club’s blog, it will come up first in the search results for those keywords. You can use the free Google Keyword Tool Box to test the keywords on your Web site. All you need to do is “type in a word or phrase, or Web site name.” It will rank the “competition” for your keywords as low, medium, or high. Global and local results for how many people used those keywords in the past year will also be shown. In addition, “Tool will show you a list of similar keywords with a count of how often each word is searched.”

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Coming in First Coming up in first place for a search result is the goal of every SEO expert. They want to help you create a Web page or blog that has the key ingredients. Every search engine has its own algorithm, its own formula for selecting pages to match keyword searches. Google has one algorithm while Yahoo! and Bing use a different one. How each algorithm is constructed is a trade secret. They are also updated constantly. If your content is not on the first page of search engine results, it probably won’t be seen. SEOBook asked consumers, “If you use a search engine but don't find what you are looking for, which are you more likely to do?” A majority, 55.7 percent, said they would search again with new words. Only 44.3 percent would go to the

It looks like almost everyone has his or her eye on the search engine Google. Using Google’s free Web tools will help you see who has their eye on your Web page. 28

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second page of results. (It didn’t even ask if people looked any further.) The best way to come in first is to think like your readers. What are you sharing that people want to know? Then make sure that you use words that mention those things on your page.

Keywords Are the “Key” to SEO A search engine can turn up a million results for the keywords that someone enters. Very few people are going to look at the 1,369,828 pages that come up for the keywords “flying monkeys.” This is why search engine optimization is so important. If your Web site is the fiftieth result, how many people will see it? It’s easier to just look at the first few results that come up. More and more people use mobile devices to access the Web. When the search engine results come up, smartphone users won’t even see all of the results right away. The screen is just too small. They have to scroll down to find the “bottom” of the “top ten” listings. To reach search engine users, you need to have content on your page that people want to see. The best way to do that is to test your content. Use the free tools online and let them help you. Before you start changing things, test what is there right now. Make a screenshot of the “before” results and save it in a file. Then use keyword tools to find new keywords for your page. Update the Web page with these keywords and take a break. It will take a few days for the search engine spiders to add your updates to their index.

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A few days later, try the tools again. How much did it change? Make a screenshot of the “after” results. Now share it with someone else. Congratulations! You’re on your way to becoming an SEO expert. A free counter service, like StatCounter, can keep track of who visits your pages. To get started, you just create an account and place their invisible code on your site. It provides detailed information about each visitor, including keyword analysis. This shows you exactly which words the visitor used. You can even click on those keywords to see the other search engine results.

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IS SEO IN YOUR FUTURE? et’s face it—being a teenager is expensive,” said teen “ LEd Fry. “Whether it is going out, seeing friends, buy-

ing clothes and gadgets—even a car—the point is…it all adds up.” Ed started his first business when he was fourteen, “selling snacks at school.” And he just kept going. Ed is the teen who created the Web site Your Teen Business. At age sixteen, Ed “had the opportunity to spend two weeks in the Distilled office in Cannon Street, working with the SEO team.” And what an opportunity it was. This is the company that partners with SEOmoz. At SEOmoz they make SEO software and sponsor SEO events online and in person all around the world.

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Ed had a two-week internship in the London office of Distilled. While he was there, “us n00bs were called in and given tasks to cover some of the early tasks Distilled do in a consulting project: • Benchmarking – Where are they and what are they doing? • Competitive Analysis – Where are their competitors and what are they doing right? • Technical Site Review – What is happening on their Web site? I got the benchmarking task, and set about experimenting with some of the SEOmoz Labs tools.” How did Ed get this internship? The first place he asked never answered him, so he kept looking. He offered this advice: “And if you’re young and looking for work experience or an internship of sort, start by fishing out the experts in your sector.”

The Skills for SEO You need to have skills to do any job. Which skills you need depends on the job. An SEO job is a mix of many different skills. First, you need to be able to build a Web site. This takes time, but it is something that you can learn on your own. You don’t have to write all of the code by hand. You can use a software program to help you. But you do need to know how a Web site works, inside and out. Analysis is the next key skill. Do you know how to figure out how many visitors a Web site has? Which pages are popular? How do visitors find those pages? You 32

Is SEO in Your Future?

The Analytics page for your Web site will give you lots of information about who visits the page and what they are looking for there.

can’t improve something that you don’t understand. SEO firms call this information the “diagnostics.” Google has a free program to do this called Analytics. You can sign up for Analytics and add a few lines of code to your Web page to see how it works. The ability to sell is the third key skill. You can make a Web site and fill it with Lorem Ipsum text (“Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet…”). People have been using this Latin text since 1500. But “Lorem ipsum” isn’t going to bring search engines to a Web site. Great content does, and someone has to write it. Someone has to figure out what sells. In school, writing to sell is called persuasive writing. Some companies call it SEM, search engine marketing. Others use the name Internet marketing. 33

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Creativity is next on the list. A customer wants results, and that usually means more sales coming in on its Web site. To “optimize” a client’s Web site, you will need to analyze it both on a technical level and from a sales perspective. Then you will update both. After you see what you have, a creative approach is needed. New images and new words may be what the client needs to increase sales. Or the words and images that are already there may need to be rearranged. Can you use a mix of new and old to create success for your client? To make all of this happen, you need good communication skills. You need to be able to talk with clients to find out what they need and communicate clearly about the work that you have done. The client may not understand all of the technical words you know. You have to be able to explain your work simply. Staying in touch with the client and your coworkers about your work is an important work habit. Communicating with your team about deadlines helps everyone. So does getting the work done on time. The work habits you have learned at school will help you on the job as well. A desire to keep learning is the final skill you will need. What happens online is always changing. As teens grow up, more of what is seen on the Web will be on mobile devices. As search engines update their algorithms, SEO will have to update, too. You can learn more about Google Analytics with the Google Analytics IQ Lessons. All of the lessons are free online. You can even take a test at the end to earn a certificate. This would look great on your college application or résumé.

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Is SEO in Your Future?

Your Next Step Take some time to think about what you like to do right now. Do the skills needed for this career interest you? Do you like to update Web sites for other people? Are you interested in trying out different keywords and phrases to see what attracts visitors? Do you have a way with words? Do you like to communicate with others? No one said you had to know how to do all of this now. But if you think it sounds interesting, you don’t have to wait until you grow up to try it. You start now, while you are still in school. You will learn some of the skills you’ll need later, and see if this is the job for you. Volunteering is the simplest way to get started. You can volunteer to update the Web site for one of your

Remember to check the big Internet companies when you are thinking about interning over the summer. Facebook hired these two high school students from Oregon as summer interns.

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clubs at school. Community organizations and local charities are great places to volunteer your services. You can work on your service hours and grow your job skills at the same time. A summer internship is another way to try out new skills. When you work as an intern, you work for free at a real company. The best place to start would be at an SEO firm, but don’t stop there. Are there any advertising or marketing agencies near you? Can you help out at a company that makes Web pages?

Grow Your Portfolio Keep a record of what you have done to grow your career in SEO with an electronic portfolio. You can show your work on an e-portfolio at your school. You can also make a portfolio of your own by creating your own Web site or blog. SEO takes place on Web sites and blogs, so having one of your own is a great way to showcase your skills. Talk about the work you are doing now in a positive way. (Employers like to hire people who can get along with others.) Remember to add captions to any images. Add names and dates to all of your material. It will show that you have a history of getting work done. (This is important to potential employers.) When you work on your own portfolio, you are also building your reputation online. You’re working on your own SEO. You don’t have to wait until you grow up. You can help yourself right now.

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Is SEO in Your Future?

Once you have some skills, you can freelance. A freelancer is self-employed. You do work for others and they pay you for it. Yes, they pay you, so now you have a real SEO job. That will look great on your college application. Google isn’t the only one giving away free SEO advice. Use the free SEO tools at SEOBook. There is even a “Spider Test Tool” that will let you “View your web page like a search engine spider.”

A Hack Day Imagine yourself in a room filled with people on computers all working nonstop to create something new. That’s how a hack day works. It’s not a day when people follow the rules and do the same old thing. It’s a day filled with innovative thinking. Some hack days are contests. There is even a Hack Day Manifesto with guidelines for organizers. There is no charge for attendees. Food and drink are provided. At the end of the day or the weekend, prizes are given out. People come from all over the world to attend a hack day. Not just anyone can attend. You have to apply to go to this “technology startup” event. For HackDay Miami in 2012, the stakes were high, but so was the reward. “The judges will select the winner of the $30,000 grand prize.” And there was more! The winning team would be asked to work “full time on the project for the next 90 days.” For that, they would

37

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This team of University of Michigan students won first place for the app they made during a twenty-two-hour hackathon at their college campus in 2013.

38

Is SEO in Your Future?

be paid an additional $20,000 and given “free co-working space at LAB Miami.” The goal of a hack day is to create something new. This tech company practice is also used by SEO firms. At the Distilled office in Seattle, they have a Link Building Hack Day once a month. All of the employees work together at the same table for an entire day. Distilled employee Rob Toledo explains. “Nothing is off-limits here. This time should be used for hyper focus on one project, figuring out what expectations you can set, and making a plan to achieve your goals all within a limited one-day period.” Midweek is the best. “We try to avoid scheduling outreach hack days on the bookends of the week as Tuesday and Wednesday are typically the most fruitful.” At the end of the day, they send the client a report. It shows all of the new links they built that day.

39

YOUR CAREER IN SEO reating a presence on the Web is a great way to start your career in SEO right now. There’s no need to wait. You can also use the classes you take in school to help you grow your career. “SEO is more than just Web site techniques,” says SEO specialist Cassiano Travareli. “It’s about business as well.” To build a career in SEO, you need to understand both.

C

SEO Copywriters The people who work at an SEO firm actually have several different jobs. Some write copy. (That’s a fancy way to say that they write words to sell things.) You may be

40

Your Career in SEO

These high school students are taking English Composition 2 at a local college.They will earn both high school and college credit for the course.

able to grow a career as an SEO copywriter. Because content is so important in SEO, what it says on the client’s Web page makes a difference. Mark Twain said it best: “The difference between the almost right word and the right word is really a large matter—’tis the difference between the lightning-bug and the lightning.” The English classes you take in high school can help you become an SEO copywriter. The English composition class that you are required to take your freshman year of college will also help you. Being able to organize your ideas on paper in a logical manner is an important skill. You will be sending written reports to

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clients on a regular basis. Your boss also wants to see what you have done. Taking a speech class is another way to develop your skills in SEO. You will need to be able to present your ideas in meetings. You have to be able to communicate clearly with the client and with your coworkers. This is another high school requirement that can help you after you graduate. Did you know that search engine users can block spam Web sites? That’s good news for users, but bad news for “black hat” SEO. No one wants to visit a Web site that sends spam. Dropping links to your client’s Web site on forums everywhere isn’t the “white hat” way to get visitors. Use your copywriting skills and write something interesting instead. Creating content that people want to read is “white hat” SEO.

SEO Consultants An SEO consultant helps a client with its Web site. Knowing how to create a Web site is extremely important. Taking computer classes is a great way to prepare a career in SEO. When you work in SEO, you will be updating your client’s Web pages. Knowing how a Web page works inside and out is a skill that you will need. You have to understand what you are looking at before you can change it. You must master the basics of the latest computer languages. Do you know PHP, HTML and CSS? When you go to college, you may wish to study computer science. You will have to take all of the general

42

Your Career in SEO education classes first. Every college wants to be able to say that its students have a good understanding of the world. But once you become a college junior, you can specialize in all things computers. That is when the fun really begins. Don’t work with a “black hat” company and get a reputation as an SEO spammer! A “black hat” company will ask you to do keyword stuffing by adding long strings of keywords to the code. It will ask you to add hidden text that only search engines can see. Tricking people isn’t SEO. “White hat” SEO helps search engine users find great content, not lies.

SEO Analysts Making a Web site is only the beginning. Making a Web site that people want to read is what companies want. That’s the “secret” sauce that everyone wants. The best way to find out what works is to test it. Make it and try it, over and over again. It’s just like a science lab. You think of an idea and then you test it to see if it works. You look at what happens and then you try again. This time you do it just a little bit differently. What is the new result? Did you get what you wanted? Try it a third time and see what happens. You can test things over and over, but how do you know that something works? You need to have a guideline. You need a goal of some sort. That’s where the analysis comes in. This is where you need math. There are different types of mathematics classes that you can take to help you. To study computer science in

43

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You can study computer science online with a MOOC, a massive open online course. MIT and many other schools have free MOOCs.All you need is an Internet connection.

college, you will need to take calculus. To study business in college, you will have to take both calculus and statistics. You need to be able to work with numbers to move forward in this career.

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Your Career in SEO

Understanding how the economy works is something that everyone needs to know. What you learn in your economics class will help you outside of school.

SEO Is a Business Business is the other important area for you to study. When you work in SEO, you won’t just be making Web pages. You’ll be optimizing them for many different kinds of businesses. Taking business classes will help you see how businesses operate. A business makes money by selling either goods or services. Learning about sales and marketing will help you with your clients. In high school, you must take economics during your senior year. It’s a graduation requirement. It’s also a ticket to the world of business. Use it to your advantage.

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What to Study in College Everyone tells you to go to college, but what exactly will you study? At some schools you have to select a major when you enroll. The college wants you to decide what area of study you will pursue for the next four years. It would be so easy just to study SEO, but that’s not how colleges work. They don’t have an SEO college degree that you can earn. So focus on the type of job you want at an SEO firm instead. Do you want to work mostly with the computer side of the business? Do you enjoy making Web pages for others? Then follow your interest in computers and become a computer science major. Students who studied computer science are the ones who invented search engines in the first place. Someone has to work with the technology. Why not you? Do you want to work on the business side of this computer business? Do you like talking to people about new opportunities? Then follow your interest in business and become a business major. Someone has to take care of the business side, too. You can’t help clients improve their businesses if you don’t know how to run one yourself.

Finding an SEO Job After you graduate from college, how will you find a job? Actually, the best way to find a job later is to start networking now. Long before you go to college, you can start paying attention to who’s who in SEO. Are there any SEO firms near you? Let their Web pages

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Your Career in SEO

teach you the business. Read their blog posts and press releases. Maybe you can follow in Justin Ehlert’s footsteps. He started working in SEO before he started college. Ehlert has his own page at the SEO company where he works. His job title is listed as “SEO/SEM Intern.” The SEM acronym stands for “search engine marketing.” Some companies use this name to show their focus in helping clients make more sales. Ehlert’s page tells his story. “Justin is GlobeRunner's youngest member at only 18 years old. Residing in Mansfield, Justin makes the long trek to work in order to develop his skills and learn the fine art of SEM. Justin will be attending the University of Texas at Dallas in the fall to double major in Computer Science and Arts in Technologies as well as minor in business.”

Trusted Authorities You can learn SEO from the experts by attending their professional events. This is how many adults keep learning after they graduate from college. They attend conferences with other professionals in their field. It’s a time to see old friends and make new ones. It’s also a place to find out what the latest trends are. For the cost of attending the conference, you can listen to an expert in the field. Most speakers have a question-and-answer session at the end, too. This can teach you a lot about the job. The other thing to watch for at a professional event is the exhibits. At a small event, there will be exhibitors

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You can meet new people and learn new things at a professional networking event. Give it a try! It’s a great way to grow your career.

at tables in the lobby. At a large event, the companies who are exhibiting will be so numerous that their booths will fill a hall (or two) in the convention center. These exhibitors are there to sell products to the industry. In the exhibits hall, you will see the latest products for people who work in SEO. The people at SEOmoz host events all around the world. Search Engine Land hosts Search Marketing Expo

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Your Career in SEO

(SMX) events. If you live on the East Coast you can attend SES Conference and Expo in New York. On the West Coast, there is SearchFest in Portland, Oregon. It will probably be a few years before you can attend any of these professional networking events. Use this time now to follow the events online. You can find out who’s who in your field before you graduate from high school. You can become familiar with the latest trends in SEO. Let the experts be your guides.

49

algorithm A set of rules for solving a problem. analysis Studying something to determine its essential features. architecture The action or process of building. archives A computer directory or folder that contains copies of files. authority An accepted source of information or advice. bandwidth The capacity of an electronic communications device or system. benchmark To test something before it is changed; a pretest. code To translate a program into a computer language. content The subjects or topics discussed on a Web page. copy The words written for a Web page, radio, newspaper, or advertisement. diagnostics An analysis of the cause or nature of a problem or situation. e-portfolio A Web site that shows a person’s recent work. index An organized list of Web pages discovered by a search engine robot. internship A training program for beginners in an occupation or profession. keyword Any significant word or phrase that describes the contents of a document. location A place for a business, an activity, or a residence. marketing Activities, including advertising, that lead to a purchase by a consumer.

50

GLOSSARY

mobile Describes a cell phone or other wireless device, such as a tablet. optimize To make as effective, perfect, or useful as possible. screenshot A copy or image of what is seen on a computer screen at a given time. sitemap A plan of a Web site showing its contents and where elements of it can be viewed. social media Web sites used by large groups of people to share personal or professional information.

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Pubcon Inc. 10601 FM 2222, Suite R53 Austin, TX 78730 (512) 231-8107 Web site: http://www.pubcon.com PubCon, the premier search and social media conference and expo, holds multitrack events in various U.S. and European cities. Search Engine Land Third Door Media Inc. 279 Newtown Turnpike Redding, CT 06896 (203) 664-1350 Web site: http://searchengineland.com Search Engine Land is a news and information site covering search engine marketing, searching issues, and the search engine industry. Search Engine Watch Incisive Interactive Marketing LLC 55 Broad Street, 22nd Floor New York, NY 10004 (800) 955-2719 Web site: http://searchenginewatch.com Search Engine Watch provides tips and information about searching the Web, as well as analysis of the search engine industry and job listings.

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FOR MORE INFORMATION

Search Marketing Expo Third Door Media Inc. 279 Newtown Turnpike Redding, CT 06896 (203) 664-1350 Web site: http://searchmarketingexpo.com SMX is the global search engine marketing conference series from Third Door Media, the company behind the Search Engine Land and Marketing Land news sites, and the Digital Marketing Depot Webcast series. SEMpdx P.O. Box 83 Portland, OR 97207 Web site: http://www.sempdx.org This not-for-profit organization in PDX (the airport code for Portland, Oregon) has a full-day SEM conference as well as other events for its members. SEMPO 401 Edgewater Place, Suite 600 Wakefield, MA 01880 Web site: http://www.sempo.org Anyone with an interest in search marketing and a desire to help further the industry can join SEMPO, the Search Engine Marketing Professional Organization. SEOmoz 119 Pine Street, Suite 400 Seattle, WA 98101

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Web site: http://www.seomoz.org SEOmoz develops SEO software, hosts an SEO community on the Web, and has an annual three-day conference called MozCon. SES Conference & Expo Incisive Interactive Marketing LLC 55 Broad Street, 22nd Floor New York, NY 10004 (800) 955-2719 Web site: http://sesconference.com Founded in 1999, SES is the leading global event series about search and social marketing.

Web Sites Due to the changing nature of Internet links, Rosen Publishing has developed an online list of Web sites related to the subject of this book. This site is updated regularly. Please use this link to access the list: http://www.rosenlinks.com/DCB/SEOT

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Bolles, Richard N. What Color Is Your Parachute? 2013: A Practical Manual for Job-Hunters and CareerChangers. Berkeley, CA: Ten Speed Press, 2012. Doeden, Matt. Conflict Resolution Smarts: How to Communicate, Negotiate, Compromise, and More. Minneapolis, MN: Twenty-First Century Books, 2012. Donovan, Sandy. Job Smarts: How to Find Work or Start a Business, Manage Earnings, and More. Minneapolis, MN: Twenty-First Century Books, 2012. Donovan, Sandy. Scheduling Smarts: How to Get Organized, Prioritize, Manage Your Time, and More. Minneapolis, MN: Twenty-First Century Books, 2012. Freedman, Jeri. Careers in Computer Science and Programming. New York, NY: Rosen Publishing, 2011. Grappone, Jennifer, and Gradiva Couzin. Search Engine Optimization (SEO): An Hour a Day. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley, 2011. Handley, Ann, and C. C. Chapman. Content Rules: How to Create Killer Blogs, Podcasts, Videos, Ebooks, Webinars (and More) That Engage Customers and Ignite Your Business. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley, 2012. Harmon, Daniel E. Internship & Volunteer Opportunities for Science and Math Wizards. New York, NY: Rosen Publishing, 2013. Kabani, Shama. The Zen of Social Media Marketing: An Easier Way to Build Credibility, Generate Buzz, and Increase Revenue. Dallas, TX: BenBella Books, 2013.

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Kahaner, Ellen. Great Communication Skills. New York, NY: Rosen Publishing, 2008. Kent, Peter. Search Engine Optimization for Dummies. 5th ed. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley, 2012. Kerpen, Dave. Likeable Social Media: How to Delight Your Customers, Create an Irresistible Brand, and Be Generally Amazing on Facebook (and Other Social Networks). Columbus, OH: McGraw-Hill, 2011. La Bella, Laura. Careers in Web Development. New York, NY: Rosen Publishing, 2011. Odden, Lee. Optimize: How to Attract and Engage More Customers by Integrating SEO, Social Media, and Content Marketing. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley, 2012. Roza, Greg. Great Networking Skills. New York, NY: Rosen Publishing, 2008. Safko, Lon. The Social Media Bible: Tactics, Tools, and Strategies for Business Success. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley, 2012. Scott, David Meerman. The New Rules of Marketing & PR: How to Use Social Media, Online Video, Mobile Applications, Blogs, News Releases, and Viral Marketing to Reach Buyers Directly. 3rd ed. Wiley, 2011. Suen, Anastasia. Internship & Volunteer Opportunities for People Who Love All Things Digital. New York, NY: Rosen Publishing, 2013. Ward, Eric, and Garrett French. Ultimate Guide to Link Building: How to Build Backlinks, Authority and Credibility for Your Website, and Increase Click Traffic and Search Ranking. Irvine, CA: Entrepreneur Press, 2013.

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FOR FURTHER READING

Weinick, Suzanne. Increasing Your Tweets, Likes, and Ratings: Marketing Your Digital Business. New York, NY: Rosen Publishing, 2013. Wilkinson, Colin. Going Live: Launching Your Digital Business. New York, NY: Rosen Publishing, 2013. Wilkinson, Colin. Growing Your Digital Business: Expanding Your Social Web. New York, NY: Rosen Publishing, 2013. Wuebben, Jon. Content Is Currency: Developing Powerful Content for Web and Mobile. Boston, MA: Nicholas Brealey Publishing, 2012.

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Agate, James. “The 6 Month Link Building Plan for an Established Website.” SEOmoz, July 25, 2012. Retrieved March 9, 2013 (http://www.seomoz.org /blog/the-6-month-link-building-plan-for-an -established-website). Brin, Sergey, and Lawrence Page. “The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine.” Retrieved March 9, 2013 (http://infolab.stanford.edu /~backrub/google.html). Carlson, Nicolas. “The Secret Lives of Teenagers Online: A Full Report from Business Insider.” Business Insider, July 13, 2012. Retrieved January 11, 2013 (http:// businessinsider.com/the-secret-lives-of-teenagersonline-a-full-report-from-business-insider-2012-7). Ehlert, Justin. “Justin Ehlert, Author at Globe Runner SEO.” Globe Runner SEO. Retrieved March 17, 2013 (http://globerunnerseo.com/author/justin). Fry, Ed. “Growing Up in the SEO Ninjahood.” SEOmoz, July 22, 2010. Retrieved March 13, 2013 (http:// www.seomoz.org/ugc/growing-up-in-the-seo -ninjahood). Fry, Ed. “Lessons Learned from Two Weeks at Distilled.” Distilled, July 28, 2010. Retrieved March 13, 2013 (http://www.distilled.net/blog/distilled/lessonslearned-from-two-weeks-at-distilled). Fry, Ed. “Welcome to Your Teen Business!” Retrieved January 11, 2013 (http://www.yourteen business.com).

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BIBLIOGRAPHY

Google. “Our History in Depth – Company – Google.” 1995–2012. Retrieved March 4, 2013 (https:// www.google.com/about/company/history). Gray, Matthew. “Measuring the Growth of the Web.” MIT, 1995. Retrieved March 5, 2013 (http://www.mit.edu /people/mkgray/growth). KoMarketing Associates, LLC. “Job Description: SEO/SMO Analyst.” Retrieved March 15, 2013 (http://www.komarketingassociates.com/about/seo -analyst). Level343 Team. “Do You Have to Go to College to Be an SEO?” Level343 Team, August 11, 2011. Retrieved March 16, 2013 (http://level343.com/article _archive/2011/08/11/college-and-seo). Rewired State. “What Is a Hack Day?” Retrieved March 15, 2013 (http://rewiredstate.org). Schwartz, Barry. “What Type of Degree Is Best for an SEO or SEM?” Search Engine Roundtable, October 28, 2008. Retrieved March 16, 2013 (http://www. seroundtable.com/archives/018552.html). Search Engine History. “History of Search Engines: From 1945 to Google Today.” Retrieved March 5, 2013 (http://www.searchenginehistory.com). Search Engine Land. “The Periodic Table of SEO Ranking Factors.” Retrieved January 6, 2013 (http:// searchengineland.com/seotable). Sonnenreich, Wes. “A History of Search Engines.” 1997. Retrieved March 5, 2013 (http://www.wiley.com /legacy/compbooks/sonnenreich/history.html). Spencer, Chloe. “Blogger Stories: Chloe Spencer.” Blogger Stories, August 10, 2006. Retrieved March 12, 2013

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(http://www.bloggerstories.com/2006/08/blogger_s tories_5.html). Spencer, Stephan. “Forget Babysitting and Paper Routes, Teen Turns to SEO.” CNET News, August 1, 2007. Retrieved January 21, 2013 (http://news.cnet.com /8301-13530_3-9753204-28.html). Toledo, Rob. “The Anatomy of a Link Building Hack Day.” SEOmoz, October 1, 2012. Retrieved March 9, 2013 (http://www.seomoz.org/blog/the-anatomy-ofa-link-building-hack-day). Travareli, Cassiano. “Why You Don’t Need a Degree in Rocket Science to Master SEO.” SEO Marketing World, May 13, 2009. Retrieved March 16, 2013 (http://www.seomarketingworld.com/blog/ business-tactics/why-you-dont-need-a-degree-in -rocket-science-to-master-seo).

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A advertising, 6, 13, 23, 25, 36 Agate, James, 20–21, 22 algorithms, 6, 17, 22, 28, 34 AOL, 18 Archie, 16 architecture, 8, 9 archives, 16 Ask, 18 authority, 11–12, 47

B BackRub, 14–15 Baidu, 20 bandwidth, 15 benchmarking, 32 Bing, 7, 17, 18, 28 Bingbots, 7 black hat SEO, 42, 43 blogs, 8, 17, 22, 23, 25–26, 27, 28, 36, 47 bots, 4, 6, 7, 16 Brin, Sergey, 14–15, 16, 17

C college, what to study in, 46 computer languages, 42 computer science, 14, 16, 42, 43, 46, 47 conferences, 47–49 consulting, 18–24, 32, 42–43

crawlers, 7 CSS, 42

D Daum, 20 diagnostics, 32–33 Distilled, 31, 32, 39 Dogpile, 19 domain names, 16, 25

E Ehlert, Justin, 47 e-mail, 10 Emtage, Alan, 16 e-portfolios, 36

F Facebook, 10 Flickr, 18 footers, 9 freelancing, 37 Fry, Ed, 31–32

G Google, 7, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 22, 25, 27, 33, 34, 37 Googlebots, 7 Gray, Matthew, 16

H hack days, 37–39 HTML, 8–9, 42

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I

R

indexing, 4, 9, 14, 17, 29 instant messaging (IM), 10 Internet marketing, 33 internships, 32, 36, 47

résumés, 34

K keywords, 5, 8, 17, 18, 20, 25, 27, 28, 29, 30, 35, 43

L Leung, Stuart, 22

M menu bars, 9 meta description tags, 8 metasearches, 19–20

N Naver, 20 Neopets, 25, 26 networking, 46, 49

O online habits, teens’, 10 Open Site Explorer, 22 opportunity mapping, 21–22

P Page, Larry, 14–15, 16, 17 passwords, 26 persuasive writing, 33 PHP, 42 portfolios, 36

62

S scammers, 26 screenshots, 29, 30 Scribd, 18 Search Engine Land, 48 search engine marketing (SEM), 33, 47 search engine optimization (SEO) black hat vs. white hat, 42, 43 careers in, 40–49 consulting, 18–24, 32, 42–43 overview of, 4–22 skills for, 31–39 social media and, 11, 22 your use of, 23–30 search engine results page (SERP), 8 search engines, kinds of, 17–18 SearchFest, 49 Search Marketing Expo (SMX), 48–49 “Secret Lives of Teenagers Online, The,” 10 SEOBook, 28, 37 SEOmoz, 31, 32, 48 SEO positions analysts, 43–44 consultants, 18–24, 32, 42–43 copywriters, 40–42 SES Conference and Expo, 49

INDEX

Silverstein, Craig, 17 sitemaps, 9 Skyrocket SEO, 20 social media, 10, 11, 22 spam, 42, 43 Spencer, Chloe, 25–26 StatCounter, 30

T technical site reviews, 32 text messaging, 10 Toledo, Rob, 39 Topsy, 17 Travareli, Cassiano, 40 tutorials, 6 Twitter, 17

V volunteering, 35–36

W white hat SEO, 42, 43 Wikimedia Commons, 18 Wojcicki, Susan, 17 WordPress, 25 WorldWideWebSize.com, 17 World Wide Web Wanderer, 16

Y Yahoo!, 7, 9, 17, 18, 19, 28 Yandex, 19, 20 Your Teen Business, 31 YouTube, 18

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About the Author Anastasia Suen is the author of more than 150 books for children and adults. She has taught kindergarten to college and worked as a children’s literature consultant for many years. She has been optimizing her Web site and blogs since 2000. Suen lives with her family in Plano, Texas.

Photo Credits Cover, p. 1 (tablet) © iStockphoto.com/teekid; cover, pp. 1, 4, 14, 23, 31, 40 (laptop) © iStockphoto.com/Lisa Thornberg; cover, p. 1(laptop screen) © iStockphoto.com/matspersson0; cover, p. 1 (globe) © iStockphoto.com/alexsl; cover, interior pages (mouse) © iStockphoto.com/abu; p. 4 (inset) © iStockphoto.com/cienpies; p. 5 Jupiterimages/Creatas/ Thinkstock; p. 7 Newscast/AP Images; p. 12 Justin Sullivan/Getty Images; p. 14 (inset) © iStockphoto.com /Tarik Kizilkaya; pp. 15, 35 © AP Images; p. 19 Bloomberg /Getty Images; p. 21 staticnak/Shutterstock.com; p. 23 (inset) iStockphoto.com/kemalbas; p. 24 Google and the Google logo are registered trademarks of Google Inc., used with permission; p. 26 Nam Y. Huh/KRT/Newscom; p. 28 Chris Jackson/Getty Images; p. 31 (inset) © iStockphoto.com /alengo; p. 33 SpiffyJ/E+/Getty Images; p. 38 © Mark Bialek/ZUMA Press; p. 40 (inset) © iStockphoto.com/nano; p. 41 © Brendan Fitterer/Tampa Bay Times/ZUMA Press; p. 44 Christian Science Monitor/Getty Images; p. 45 © Sacramento Bee/ZUMA Press; p. 48 iStockphoto.com /asiseeit; cover and interior pages background patterns and graphics © iStockphoto.com/Ali Mazraie Shadi, © iStockphoto.com/MISHA, © iStockphoto.com/Paul Hill, © iStockphoto.com/Charles Taylor, © iStockphoto.com/Daniel Halvorson, © iStockphoto.com/Jeffrey Sheldon. Designer: Nicole Russo; Editor: Bethany Bryan; Photo Researcher: Amy Feinberg 64

CAREER BUILDING THROUGH CREATING MOBILE APPS CAREER BUILDING THROUGH USING DIGITAL DESIGN TOOLS CAREER BUILDING THROUGH USING DIGITAL PUBLISHING TOOLS CAREER BUILDING THROUGH USING DIGITAL STORY TOOLS CAREER BUILDING THROUGH USING MULTIMEDIA ART AND ANIMATION TOOLS CAREER BUILDING THROUGH USING SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION TECHNIQUES