[Discuss] BLU's SEO

[willrico at gmail.com (Will Rico)]

Looks like I'm late to the party on this thread, but as the organizer for
the desktop SIG and someone who does SEO professionally, I should probably
chime in.

There is nothing intrinsically ethical or non-ethical about SEO.  Google
isn't the arbiter of ethics and deciding whether or not to comply with
Google's Webmaster guidelines isn't really an ethical decision.

That being said, the two most important things are:
1.  Defining goals as Eric, Tom, Joseph and others have mentioned.
2.  Doing what's best for the user, which could be an ethical decision.

If we do what's best for the user and don't shoot ourselves in the foot
with regards to index-ability, SEO pretty much takes care of itself for
almost any goal I can think our organization might have.

If the goal is to bring in new users, we have 310 members of the desktop
SIG, which is a subsidiary-community for desktop users as well newer users
of GNU/Linux, and those interested in free software advocacy.
http://www.meetup.com/desktop-linux-users-group

Meetup.com has been a fantastic way to find new people.  I cross-post
mainline BLU meetings when they fall into one of the categories listed
above, and I always list all BLU meetings in our "More Events and
Announcements" section.

If the goal is to bring in more users, the lowest hanging fruit is to
integrate our SIG (meetup) community more with the main BLU community via
this mailing list as well as encouraging more cross-attendance of events.

I want to do a better job of getting people who join via Meetup.com, to
subscribe to this list and become integrated into the broader community.
Meetup.com is a proprietary system and I think it's fine to meet people
there, but it would be good for the users to bring them into an open/free
system, which this list better represents.

For in-person meetings, I'd love to do more Installfests and/or project
nights.  One limitation I have is that I consider myself an intermediate
user and I'm not confident I can address the myriad of issues that come up
during Installfests and project nights.  I'd organize more of these if
there is interest in participation from some of the more experienced users
on this list in attending and assisting.

I think that would be good for users and achieve the goal of growing our
community.

It would also be great for users if we post more videos, photos, slides,
notes, etc. from meetings.  John Abreau does a better job of this with
mainline BLU meetings than I do.

Both the in person activities and the increased posting of content will
improve SEO as a side effect and that will be a good thing for everyone in
terms of increased awareness and high quality information for the public at
large.

Please note, any assistance and collaboration from interested parties will
be appreciated and may even result in free as in beer.

Will


On Sun, Oct 20, 2013 at 4:37 PM, Martin Owens <doctormo at gmail.com> wrote:

> On Sun, 2013-10-20 at 11:21 -0700, Joseph Guarino wrote:
> > Proper SEO efforts are all about taking content
> > and making it findable/indexable.
>
> Understanding of SEO is already installed in this human unit ;-)
>
> Drop the corpnym 'SEO'. If it's just improving the sites meta data with
> a view to improve access to the content without a specific targeted case
> against any existing indexing mechanism... then you can have your cake.
>
> Once you target your indexer specifically, that's where things go into a
> veritable bog. And you get nothing!
>
> Martin,
>
> _______________________________________________
> Discuss mailing list
> Discuss at blu.org
> http://lists.blu.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
>