Car Parts and SEO

I just finished doing an SEO “Learning Lunch” to people at Network Solutions. We have these events about every two weeks or so, and it was my turn to present.

So, how to present SEO to an audience with VERY mixed skill sets in a way that helps all of them – oh, and you have 30 minutes.

Right. Ok.

So here’s what I did:

“What’s under the hood in SEO”

Keywords – tires. This is where the rubber hits the road. What keywords do people use to get to content or services that you offer?

Content – fuel. Without fuel (content) the website isn’t going anywhere. I also talked about using keywords in content – but it’s probably not a good idea to drive through fuel… Ok.. metaphor is coming unhinged there.

Then talked about freshness of content. I didn’t related freshness to fuel, but there is a tie. Most people don’t think about fuel freshness, but my first house had a VERY old gas tank underground (think rural setting). I had it pulled out of the ground, and what was left in the tank was some really scary stuff. Former gasoline – condensed. In retrospect, I have to tip my hat to a very brave (or foolish) backhoe driver for pulling that tank out of the ground!

But, I digress.

Site structure – the car’s frame. It has to be sound, all of the right braces firmly welded to all of the right places, etc. Clean coding (welds), good information architecture, clean URLs… Again, the metaphor broke down a bit there.

Links – passengers. I could have had a lot more fun with quality over quantity, link juice, authority, etc. But by this time, I was already at about 35 minutes of my 30 minute allocation.

Social media – getting applause from the crowd. Ok. So I slipped from an auto metaphor to a NASCAR metaphor (complete with picture). Eeeek. I don’t even LIKE NASCAR!

All in all, it seemed to go pretty well, even with some mixed metaphors.