Little Miss Muffet's No Fear SEO Tips

The nursery rhyme goes:

"Little Miss Muffet sat on a tuffet. Eating her curds and whey, Along came a spider, Who sat down beside her. And frightened Miss Muffet away"

In the marketing world, "spiders" are Google's algorithms that connect what someone is searching for with what is available from all of the millions upon millions of websites on the internet. When a word or term is "Googled"(I believe Google is a verb!) the spiders "crawl the web" with the number one goal of presenting the most relevant results. A marketer's number one goal is to be found within the top of those search results.

Have no fear, the modern Little Miss Muffet is armed with Search Engine Optimization (SEO) knowledge when Google's spiders come to crawl her website. Here are a few tips to get you on your "whey":

Google+ freaks me out, but I like it!

I've been playing with Google's new shiny toy, Google+, more and more since learning more about it at PodCamp Nashville 2012 and from the Google team themselves at the #G4eNashville event.

Just like any emerging social network, I see a little buzz around it, so I sign up for it to see what all the fuss is about.

Personally, I like connecting with people and ideas that inspire me and love sharing resources and ideas with others. As a marketer, I'm always looking for examples of how brands are using technology to reach and engage audiences and create communication channels for customer service and brand advocates.

What I've discovered I like about Google+:

Circles of organization: I've been collecting people, brands, and topics I'm interested in and putting them into categories of "circles" - I love organizing, so this is helpful- and it is another way to brand myself by the categories and people I follow.

Google me- how search & social media have changed relationships

I was just chatting with a friend when the topic of "Google Me" came up. We joked for a minute, before admitting we had each "Googled" each other. That made me wonder, what does my searchable profile tell people about me? What content is public? Social Media and search have changed the "first impression" for most people.

I am often curious before meeting a new business associate or when interviewing for a job, for example. I even Google as a screening effort for potential dates. So if I am using search to learn about people, I would only assume that others are doing it as well. And why not? The more social media sites out there, the larger a person's digital footprint.

Your digital footprint is kinda like how much real estate you have on the web. Every time you create a profile on a website, that info can be traced and is searchable. That is why there are so many privacy setting options on social sites such as Facebook.