Arley McBlain (and by extension “ArleyM”) Googles very well. Thinking to the future when we start having kids, I feel pressure to come up with a unique name for a kid. SEO is so important!

We are a search engine culture. Life is full of questions, and Google has the answers (well, so do many other search engines, but c’mon. Google’s killing it out there!). If I need a phone number I won’t ever go to a phone book. If I want to know some fact I won’t even go to Wikipedia; I’ll let Google find that for me.

How important is search engine optimization? Important enough that a town in France has started the long legal battle to change it’s name from “Eu”; which was competing with the popular acronymn for the European Union.

Marketing, networking and sweat will still make or break your site; but as much as a half of traffic going to most of the sites I monitor on Google Analytics see their traffic from search engines (over direct traffic and referrals).

Yet despite this, I often see 100% Flash sites with no SEO considerations. Daily I see businesses with title images without alt or titles. Google keeps their search algorithm a tightly guarded secret (and rightly so), but there are some obvious things that you simply must be doing to keep your sight as SEO’d as possible.

The Internet is too big to assume that if you build it that the people will come.

Alas, I couldn’t embed this video: Googling with Bing.

There is a lot of documentation on improving your sites SEO; and it is often broken down into a few key practices:

1. Site accessibility
2. Site Content using keywords
3. Absence of black-hat tactics
4. Relevant links

(You can read about these in detail from many sources, this Boag World article is quite succinct).

It seems a great majority of articles I read, and podcasts I hear on the subject focus on the Accessibility, Content, and Best-practices aspects of SEO, and little is said about the links. 

The very thought of “link backs” for me conjures up a notion of some bake-sale trading game, or worse an expensive ad campaign. I have found personally (as opposed to company SEO) that getting relevant links can be a lot easier and less dreadful. 

In short I think the answer is simple: Enjoy the internet. 

The internet has been like a second home to me for the last fifteen years. I’ve been checking out sites and communities and signing up where I thought some involvement / experimenting / playing were warranted. I almost always have used some variation of usernames like arleymcblain or ArleyM. Sites requiring a username often give you the option to link back to your site, and I happily take that offer every time. 

As a result of these years of exploring the web I rank quite well in Google by my name or username arleym. Admittedly, the uniqueness of my name and choice of username have played a great role in this as well.

These accounts and profiles showing up in search engines could be a curse as well as a blessing – this info may become your first impression.

The internet can be a fun place, so I encourage you to enjoy it and get involved (responsibly of course ;). Sign up, read, watch,  make comments, subscribe, rate, and explore.