Me MoosheeMooshee, Flickr Creative Commons
I woke up this morning and my windows were covered with frost. I could barely see the shape of the building that rises on the opposite side of the street, and light was very diffused. I knew instantly what that meant – hypothermia-inducing freezing cold weather (and indeed it was – about minus 30 degrees celsius with wind factor! I did reach the office with all my limbs still attached).
I was enjoying the warmth of my flat this morning while looking at the first data that got registered in Mint (since I installed it yesterday). Of course there isn’t anything in particular to report yet, at this time this blog hasn’t even been crawled by Google. It’s going to be interesting to see if Mint’s data will be similar to those of Google Analytics as the former are coming from server data while the latter are gathered through Javascript. It was advocated on a few SEO posts I read that a thorough examination of the server log files was important to get a detailed analysis of a project. I haven’t gotten to that yet, and to be honest it sounds kind of scary. Could Mint be an alternate solution to going through pages and pages of log files?
My first challenge in getting myself trained was knowing where to start with this knowledge I’m acquiring. There is so much information available out there on the blogs and forums that it can get overwhelming very fast. I was reading about conversational maps, editorial calendar, google trends, listening to communities, keyword competitivity, link juice and all the likes while trying to make sense of it all. When I did, I was faced with a puzzle. I had started sorting out the pieces, but didn’t know which bits to assemble first.
I read this post by Rand on seoMOZ two weeks ago that sums up the SEO process quite nicely. It goes like this:
1. Make pages accessible
2. Target with keywords that searchers employ
3. Build content that users will find useful and valuable
4. Earn editorial links from good sources
I felt quite relieved after reading that post. It gave me a direction to head towards too, but it also felt very organic to me. Come to think of it, Social Media and link building makes sense, literally. You grow communities through friendships and sharing, you do the same for links. Ultimately, you must never forget that you’re dealing with people, not machines.