This summer, SENSE is offering a brand-new series of online workshops to hone your skills as an English-language professional. David Garcia Ruiz had the honour of starting off the series on 10 June with his interesting workshop on search engine optimization (SEO).
David could tell us everything we wanted to know about SEO, as he has been working on it since 2015 and even teaches an SEO course at a Spanish training centre for translators (AulaSIC). He explained the basics of SEO and where the SEO translator comes in. Moreover, he put theory into practice right away with hands-on exercises for the attendees. Throughout the workshop, attendees asked good questions and received expert answers from David, making it a truly interactive and engaging workshop.
SEO in a nutshell
The purpose of SEO is to end up high in the search results when potential customers look online for the products or services you offer. Search engines want to provide their users with the most relevant webpages as quickly as possible; an SEO specialist aims to convince the search engine’s algorithm that their webpages are the place to be. Unfortunately, experts estimate over 200 factors are taken into account by these constantly evolving algorithms. Surprisingly, SEO is not hard science – what works today may be outdated next week. Experts also don’t always agree on what works best.
What does an SEO translator do?
From these 200 SEO factors, SEO translators and copywriters alike work on on-page SEO, which involves optimizing the actual content on the webpage. Thankfully, the days when this involved stuffing the text with the same keywords over and over are long past, and can even backfire today. Successful SEO is about knowing what a search engine looks for, where it looks and within which character limits. Typical services SEO translators offer are keyword research, keyword localization, SEO translation, meta data generation and content optimization. Each of these comes with their own challenges and requirements.
What does it take to be an SEO translator?
On-page SEO is not rocket science and doesn’t require high-level coding or other technical skills. Instead, it’s about knowing the rules of the game and applying them while using your common sense. For example, there is no use in adding highly popular keywords that have nothing to do with your products, just to boost site traffic. However, you will need to invest time and money in getting the right tools, developing skills and keeping your knowledge up to date.
To sum up, the workshop was interesting, informative and contained plenty of practical value. I feel much more knowledgeable about what SEO is – and what it isn’t. David’s enthusiasm about the subject has surely inspired me to try my hand at it!
This article is not SEO-optimized, in case you were wondering.