What is your Life’s SEO Strategy

This came up during my discussion with Sujata the other day on how being introverts we are trying very hard to increase our circle of close friends and network. During the discussion we realized, that our life is very similar to a website, and like every website has a SEO strategy, we too need one in our life. Have you ever thought what has been your SEO strategy.. what has worked and what has not.. This blog is just trying to draw a parallel between the two worlds. There are no solutions here because everybody needs to have their own strategy. What works for somebody might not work for another.

For the ignorant about SEO (Search Engine Optimization), as per Wikipedia: SEO is the process of affecting the visibility of a website or a web page in a search engine’s “natural” or un-paid search results.

By Life’s SEO Strategy, I mean, how do you make yourself visible at work, with friends or family. What happens when any of these are looking for help or wisdom. Where do you come up when they search in their list of known names?? What have you done to be on the first page or even the first name in that list.. how can you repeat it with others…what haven’t you done if you are not on the first page…

Lets see how a typical SEO strategy looks like:

Crawling & Indexing: Search engines have softwares (crawlers, spider, autobots, etc) searching the internet for new content and keep indexing them under various search keywords.

As human beings, we have an inbuilt constant search engine trying to find people who we can trust and build a relationship with. We keep meeting new people as and when we get into a new environment like a new office, a party, networking events, conferences, etc..In every place, our immediate job is to start categorizing (indexing) people into various keywords (talkative, beautiful, intelligent, chirpy, etc.) and store them in our database (mind). So when next time you are thinking of intelligent people, the name of that person pops up along with several others you have met in the past. The same person can have multiple keywords attached to them.

Similarly, others do this for you as well. They categorize you based on what you are projecting about you to others. You might decide to project yourself differently at different places or to different people. The question is: are you aware of what you are projecting at any point of time. Have you ever sat down and thought about who I am and what would I want to be known as. It is not what other perceive about you but what you project.

Page Ranking: When you search any keyword using a search engine then it displays thousands of results found in its database. A page ranking is measured by the position of web pages displayed in the search engine results. If Search engine is putting your web page on first position then your web page rank will be number 1.

Lets say you have a difficult situation in our office with regards to a team member and you have tried various methods to solve the issue. You will retrieve the list of people who can potentially solve your problem from your mind and the first name that pops up will be the person whom your mind has ranked as no 1 in that list. How many people will have your name on the top of their list and for what? Make a list of both the names of those people and for what your name will pop up in their minds.

SEO is the method of getting your page listed at the top of the result set for a search. Now lets see how to get up there:

Visibility: You need to be visible at as many places as possible. For a website that would mean creating ads, using social networks and publishing them across already popular websites. In your case, that would mean, going to as many events, parties, being on multiple social/professional sites like Facebook, twitter, LinkedIn, etc. and posting regularly. Calling up friends on their birthdays instead of posting on their FB page, making a habit of meeting friends when they come to your town…

Content: For a website, it is about how original it’s content is. For you, it’s about what knowledge & expertise do you have and share with others. How often do you bring original ideas or thoughts in a discussion.

Links: For a website, how many sites link to your website. In our case, it is about how many people refer us to their friends, knowing that we will be able to help them. This is the most important as more and more people take your help, the more impact you make in this world.

Views vs. Visits: For a website, views means how many pages did a single person see when they visited the website. Visits are the number of unique visitors on the website. The parallel to this in life would be how many times the same friends visit your house (views) and how many new friends come to your house (visits). This also depends on how many unique friends you visit.

As of now me and Sujata are experimenting with all the areas in parallel. My getting into INSEAD, taking up chapter responsibility for IIT Bombay Bangalore or even getting into Coaching are just some ways. As coaches we intend to make an impact and help people and that is the main keyword we want people to remember when they think of us. I am not saying that we are doing everything perfect but we are definitely trying :).

I leave you with these three important questions you need to ask yourself:

• Who am I and what I want people to perceive me as?
• Who are the people who will have me at the top of their list (not how many are at the top of my list)?
• When do people call me and for what?

Build your own SEO Strategy for life and you will see definitely see the impact!!!

PS: For all the SEO experts, I apologize for any incorrect usage of terms. Please look at the intent and not the words 🙂

Images from FreeDigitalPhotos.net