Meet your SEO: Aleyda Solis

Wohoo! Amazing SEOs in this series.  It’s been a blast till now, really. It’s like living a dream (maybe now I’m exaggerating).

You know what? I like the idea I had. Yeah, I know you are thinking: “well, everyone is doing interview nowadays”. And you’re right, it’s not the idea itself that is awesome. What is awesome it’s all that is happening right after I click on publish. People talking about it, comments, tweets, plusone’s, shares, feedbacks. I mean, isn’t this truly awesome?

I dream that two SEOs are going to meet for the very first time (let’s say in Philly). And they know already a little bit more about the each other because they read these interviews. Cool, uh? (disclaimer: it’s not that I really dream this thing, I tend to dream about being in the first row at one Nine Inch Nails’ concert).

Ok, enough talking.

Ladies and gentlemen, today I have the pleasure to talk with Aleyda Solis. Aleyda is the global SEO manager at Forex Club and consultant for Orainti, a search marketing agency. She knows tons of thing about international and local SEO, web analytics and social media. I mean, she is the one you want to have in your team 🙂 . You can read more about her thoughts on her blog.

Since she is from Nicaragua…. listo para conocer un poco más sobre ella y SEO? (<< this is spanish, I don’t know if it’s right…blame Google Translate)

Aleyda Solis

When did you enter the SEO world, and why ?

I was a front-end developer for some years but I wanted to do something more creative and also business related so I went to study an E-commerce master at the University of Salamanca.

When I was studying it in 2007 I found a job at a small online marketing agency named Internet Advantage as the web manager of a network of travel sites. I was in charge to optimize, design, develop, create the content and monetize the sites. It was a great learning process and I found SEO to be the activity that I really loved. It had the perfect mix of activities I liked, it gave me the opportunity to be creative and help to achieve the site business goals while analyzing its technical, content and promotional aspects.

The SEO department of the company started to grow and I had the chance to switch fully as an SEO consultant for clients after some time and since then I have been doing SEO.

A great tip about onpage optimization?

When optimizing a page always ask yourself: Is this relevant, attractive and provides what my target market is looking for? Am I fulfilling my potential users search needs with this? Am I also achieving my site conversion goals? If the answer is yes then you have the fundamentals to start optimizing.

The most stupid thing people believe about onpage optimization?

Unfortunately there are many misinterpretations about on page optimization that come to my mind at once but there is one that for some reason makes me feel especially uncomfortable (maybe because for me is a matter of common sense): The thought that you can rank for all of your keyword with one page, usually the home page, thus try to optimize the home page for everything and develop a huge, never-ending scrolling page, without a proper site architecture. Horrible!

A great tip on how you build links?

Identify how you can align the already ongoing product, marketing, communication and content strategies of your client with the SEO process and integrate your link building efforts with these.

Make it as smooth as possible, a non-intrusive process, so it doesn’t seem you’re “creating extra work” but only optimizing and maximizing the visibility of the activities that were already being developed. You will face far less resistance and faster results like this.

The most stupid thing you heard about linkbuilding?

That you can develop a consistent, long term, effective, quality link building campaign without any interaction, help, support, feedback from the client. It seems that because links need to be built “off the page” some people think site owners don’t need to do anything.

The ability to build sustainable links is intrinsically related to your client’s product / service / content / offer and its audience. You need to understand these to enhance your client’s site attractiveness to effectively get links, references, citations, likes, etc.

So you cannot do it well without any client interaction in the long-term.

If you have to explain what you do at a 10 year-old kid , what are you gonna say?

I help businesses to be easily found by their potential clients in Google.

What do you drink when seoing?

A lot of coffee. I love coffee!

What do you think about SEO community?

It is a great community! I have had the chance to meet amazing people that started as colleagues and now I can call friends. I thought I would never find people who will share so many of my “geek” (sometimes not so common) interests and view of things.

This is also a relatively small community and we know each other but unfortunately we need to be better understood from outside. That’s the reason why I’m organizing with other SEO friends a free SEO event / meetup in Madrid of SEOs with other professionals named “SEO+You”.

Make yourself a question and give an answer: Why developers should take SEO into consideration?

Because SEO should be understood as a non-functional requirement in a Web development process. Accessibility, performance, usability, scalability, portability (among others) are all non-functional requirements of a software system. SEO has to do with all of these.

Making sure your site is search engine friendly before launching will mean that your work will be ready to improve its visibility and reach a broader audience in the future.

Who is your biggest SEO influence?

SEOmoz. The information and community they have built is impressive. I remember when I was learning about SEO how it helped me to advance with the information they shared through their posts and guides.

If you weren’t an SEO, what would you like to do?

Besides doing SEO for others I’m looking to develop my own projects / online business –and since I’m an SEO now, I’m doing it from an SEO perspective- so if it I wasn’t an SEO I would probably be doing the same but as a front-end developer, which was my first profession.