WritersUA's Joe Welinske teaches search engine optimization

How often do you Google something? In today's technological world Google is the number one search engine for just about anything you're looking for on the Internet.

On Tuesday evening in the Pegasus Ballroom, Joe Welinske from WritersUA presented "Optimizing the Googability of Your Content," a seminar pertaining to maximizing the popularity of your website on Google.

UCF's Future Technical Communicators and the Orlando Chapter of the Society of Technical Communication teamed up at their annual joint meeting to hear Welinske give helpful tips on becoming "a higher hit" on Google's search results page.

"We chose this seminar because we knew it would be something that could apply to students of multiple majors," said Bethany Bowles, vice president of FTC and a junior majoring in English and technical communication at UCF.

Welinske spoke about "embracing the beast," referencing Microsoft Help's initial reluctance toward Google because their users were turning to Google for help on utilizing Microsoft's software.

"You can allow yourself to get pushed into a box where people go in order to continue doing the things they're used to or you can push your way out of that box to find out that technical communication can help you do all kinds of things," he said.

Organizations, businesses, and individuals aiming to increase their website's views on Google learned how to make their content "fresh" and "real" so that Google can more readily recognize them --"fresh" meaning the site is new, popular, and updated frequently and "real" meaning Google users find the website to be successful.

"He [Welinske] has presented at our national conferences in the past and it's always a seminar about how to take information and making it more appealing," said STC Vice President Debra Johnson.

Welinske does just that by informing audience members that when registering their website to Google to use descriptions tags between 25 and 35 words in length in order to describe the information on their site's content; this is because users will be uninterested in tags that are too short or too long.

Welinske also showed seminar-goers how Hypertext Markup Language websites are more easily processed on Google than Portable Document Formats.

For those looking for more privacy than publicity, Welinske gave instructions on how to make their sites less viewable by Google users by placing certain security settings on Google and implementing a firewall to block specific pages.

"It was all very informative and enlightening," said electrical engineering major Pierre Quinata who attended the seminar.

Welinske encourages the UCF community to embrace Google's popularity and says that learning how to make your website a top hit is the best way to get your information accessible to the public.

For more information about "Optimizing the Googleability of Your Content" or Welinske's other seminars visit www.writersua.com.