 Hello everyone. So today will be more of an unedited version of the video that I'm going to make because today I'm going to talk about my experience at the ATA the American Translator Association Conference in DC that we had just last weekend and I wanted to Talk through it a bit. I'm gonna go through the sessions that I attended and then give you my feel about the conference in general And I'm not exactly sure how to divide this, but I think I'll divide it I attended So here's how it works. Basically, they have it they have it for four days I only attended the week at the the Saturday, which is I guess the main thing and it's all full of sessions And so they have all these sessions going on which as you can see, you know, they have a schedule here That says Saturday 8 30 to 9 30 And then and then it follows here. I don't know if you can see that well but 8 30 to 9 30 they have a bunch of different sessions and And here just to get an idea because I'm pretty sure this is how it works every year Each session has a different Thing with a color and they all stand for something something specific. So the first session is n Which means Nordic languages? I don't know if you can read that here, but then the sec, you know this one is V various trm which stands for Terminology etc. etc. Now most of these time slots have something I see which stands for independent contractor That's us us freelance freelance translators. We're the independent contractors So most of the sessions I attended were independent contractor sessions not all of them I attended for total and we'll get to this and In fact while I was there I was talking to someone she said she was able to so she would go to half this session and then Between 8 30 9 30 so at 9 a.m. She would Leave the session and go to another one so she could attend double the amount of sessions I I mean, I don't know. I would feel too embarrassed to leave halfway through Also, you never know if you miss something, but anyway So if you do and I'm saying this for people who weren't able to attend obviously But also if you're thinking of attending in the future just to give you a feel of what it's like So I'm gonna go through the what my notes from the sessions from these first two sessions at least and then Later on I'm gonna talk about my my feelings overall about the conference and and what I thought about it. So Let's start off my first session was once again the independent consulting session This one was called beating the digital competition. How to boost your website's organic traffic now This is so basically it's about Marketing your website. It's about SEO and stuff like that and it was and there was a lot of good information There I'm going to go through this information and share it with you and then I'm gonna tell you why I don't really think you need it And then after that we'll talk about the second session, which was called Where is it? making the most of Twitter marketing and networking in a hundred forty characters or less and That one was very good. And so anyway, I'll go through both of these and discuss them a bit and Give you my two cents. So hopefully you can find this useful and again depending on how long it takes But we're already more than three minutes in so I might divide it up. But for now at least I'll at least talk about these two sessions. So Now this organic search Session was taught by a guy this guy Matthew kushinka from redline LS calm And once again, he had a lot of smart and useful tips So first of all, he was saying that all freelancers should have blogs not even just translators all freelancers should have them because When he's talking about SEO when he's talking about Google finding you if people are searching for a translator from this to that language If you have a website with a blog it continuously gets updated and Google definitely Keeps track of that if there's a website that hasn't been updated in a long time It's gonna fall down in the rankings But one that's updated continuously gets pushed up And so that's why he's saying all freelancers should have blogs because that's the best way to update them He also says that the site speed is important. It should load very quickly. He says less than three seconds is What you're shooting for he gave some examples like there's a website I think a government website in Cameroon that was extremely slow to to load up and but other ones are very quick You want yours to be quick. You also want to use secure protocol That's them when you see it written in the URL HTTPS so as long as you have that s that secure protocol and that became a ranking signal He said a year and a half ago. So Google started keeping track of this and started Basically rating the websites that have the secure protocol higher than the other ones So your website you wanted to have that HTTPS Then you also wanted to be mobile friendly. I think we know that We want it to be mobile responsive no matter which website you use and most websites now offer that as a at least as an option You many backlinks that are preferably related These are backlinks means Links on other people websites that link back to yours People don't necessarily even have to click on them or click on them that often but as long as they exist and Preferably, they're related website. So it's not some random website about I don't know something completely different And it links back to yours, but if they have to do with translation with freelancing and they link back to yours Then it's a good thing Then what else he talks about keyword density? You don't want it to be unnaturally high a lot of people They try to rank higher in Google by putting a lot of keywords in them like, you know freelance translator we translate for freelance freelance for you understand and blah blah blah blah and He said it shouldn't be a natural high. It should be less than 2.5 percent of the total He said to even go for 1% and and that you can and Google uses LSI something Called LSI latent semantic indexing so similar words work instead of Freelancer you can say independent contractor or entrepreneur I guess I don't know something along those lines and Google you can usually pick up on them to me it seems like as long as you as long as you're if you're keeping a blog and It's naturally talking about what the blog is about freelance translation your Language pair or languages in general something like that Then it should be fine and don't try to game the system because it seems like Google is pretty good at figuring it out He says it should be easy to read 9th grade reading level is usually what you want to shoot for online apparently More than 60 on a flesh reading ease. I'm not sure what that is But he said the flesh reading needs should be above 60 flesh is F L E S C H So if that means something to you if you are keeping a blog then you want to keep it above that He also said a lot of page content. The average result on Google has 2,000 words So he's saying to have more than a thousand words for each blog post that you have up anytime you do a blog post write a lot and At least or more than 1,000 words. Sorry and so yeah write a lot Internal links and external links are both important So if you have links that link back to your website like I mentioned before or links from your website that link to somewhere else in your website that those also help and So you want those types of links at least one image on each page. I was told that before as well if You are for each blog post basically you put at least one image as well because Google ranked that higher Then if you link out he's saying he usually prefers to link out on a new window So if you have an external link where you click and it goes to another website he likes to have it on a new window because then they don't necessarily have to leave your page which makes sense and So and you can usually easy do easily do that They usually have options to do that no matter which website you use And then blah blah blah. Oh and install Google analytics He said everyone should install Google analytics Which they should if you have your own website you should it's free and it tracks a whole lot of stuff traffic demographics traffic sources Who links to your site? You can you can also submit your pages to Google Google does its crawling thing where it picks up on your pages But especially if you're a smaller website You they might not pick it up right away You know it might take them a week or whatever and so you can submit your pages to Google and Google allows you to Do this on their website if you have Google analytics and all that you can go through it and see all these options then He mentioned a couple other websites. Oh, yeah, just to make sure that your website is is Professional and it's well done. There are a couple things you can check ping them.com is one P. I. N. G. D. O. M. Dot com apparently is a good GT M Oh GT metrics with an X so GT M E T R I X GT metrics is something else that also looks at all your metrics and then Google mobile friendly test Google has a test and a thing to see if your website is mobile responsive or not and you can look all those up and you'll find them and you should include content in a foreign language a because you're a translator be because Google actually that also does help with Google obviously don't use machine translation. I don't think you had to mention that to us translators and And also he recommends if you're going to get your own website He recommends WordPress over something like wix or square space Which I do too because especially wix anytime you see a wix website. It says it at the bottom This is a wix website. So it kind of just looks amateurish and And that was that's all I have from that From that particular session Now I kind of raced through them and the reason I did so is because I actually don't think any of those are all That useful for people like us I've mentioned this before and you can disagree with me In fact, there are certain situations where you will disagree with me and and this will be very useful but For me, I'd prefer to have my main website to be something like an about.me website, which is what I have or a you know the pros.com profile or Any one of those link even your LinkedIn profile quite frankly or if you're an author You know get an amazon.com profile author page and use that because all of these No matter how much you work on your website and apply all of this that he said You're never gonna have as good SEO as these websites and they will always rank higher than yours And to me it seems a lot better to piggyback off of these other websites than to start anything from scratch now the the only Basically the only exception I would make is if you Plan on keeping a blog anyway if you like keeping blogs then then yeah by all means set up a blog and Unfortunately, these other places don't let you do blogs. You can link to your blog on LinkedIn and but You shouldn't host it there I would I think it's better to keep it separate and then just link link To it there and there various ways to do it. It's it's quite easy LinkedIn makes it quite easy, but at least then it's available in two places and you do have a website But I mean this is a lot of work Okay, so and this is in addition to whatever you're doing as a freelancer and also marketing your whereas and no matter How good you are at this? I'm assuming you're a translator and this isn't your main thing like this takes away from that and you're not Gonna be super good at it right away so if you do want to keep a blog by all means follow all of this because it's so definitely help but if You don't plan on keeping a blog or if you're not sure if you can maintain a blog and keep writing and keep updating it all the time then quite frankly, I think it's best just to Use something else and every now and then if you do have something to post as a blog Post or something along those lines. Just put it up on LinkedIn, you know or somewhere else, but I wouldn't I wouldn't This is just a lot of work and it takes away from other things you could be doing that I think could benefit you a lot more and And so that's why I don't recommend this usually for most people so I hope you didn't find that a total waste of time and there are very actually very good things to keep in the back of your mind No matter what platform you're using how either either way and I am glad that I went because it's good to know how this How Google works and how it's tracking everything and just quickly I wanted to mention some things from the Twitter The Twitter presentation. I found it. Well, first of all, it was presented by a lady named Judy Jenner Which you should definitely look her up Judy J E N N E R and she's very active on Twitter and she she talks about translation all the time so if you're a translator look her up and and you know follow her on Twitter and and You can get ideas from her then she says if you do use Twitter if you do use Instagram There are a couple hashtags. You should always use one is hashtag XL eight. That's for translate Another one is hashtag one NT. That's for interpreters and so if you have any Any update that has to do with translation do hashtag XL eight and Likewise for interpreters do hashtag one NT because people will find it more easily people search using hashtags And you know hashtags are a way that people keep a lot of people keep a whole You know, they they see anything that has a certain hashtag So a lot more people will find it if you use those hashtags then You're profile should link to to whatever your main thing is if your main if you're a freelance translator and your main website is once again Your pros comm website or your LinkedIn or something. That's the link you want in your bio And you want your profile bio to link to that so that people can see it right away Then then she was just talking about how Twitter is a good place to keep up with language developments And and once again, she mentions it has better SEO than a personal website. So even there I think Twitter is a better option than making your own website from scratch quite frankly You do have a limit of 140 characters, which a lot of people have an issue with understandably so But that's why I I think it's interesting. They're uh, I mean, that's why it can make life interesting, but also it's a good website to have That was actually basically it I don't have many notes from her session because a lot of it was anecdotal and she was very talkative She's austrian-mexican now living in the states and so she was talking about Her life, which was very interesting and stuff in general Just a couple more things You should follow her. There are some other people that I think you should follow one is Esther Navarro Hall If you're on twitter follow Esther Navarro Hall and Hopefully you can read those You know what? I'll write them in the description because you probably can't read my handwriting And uh, and that's about it. I'm going to end it here because this video is already pretty long And then I'll use the other video to talk about Uh, briefly about the other sessions and then about my impressions of the conference as a whole So I'll talk to you the next video. Thanks. Bye