Local Learning

By Melanie Brooks

On Wednesday night I attended a Hands On Technology Class given by Downeast Learning Workshops. Nicole Ouellette from Breaking Even Communications and Matthew Baya from Svaha LLC make up the dynamic duo that is Downeast Learning Workshops. These two local consultants gave a great presentation on Search Engine Optimization.

For two hours a small group of us sat in an upstairs room of the Maine Grind building and got the basics of how to help make our websites more accessible to the spiders that crawl the web. SEO isn't an exact science -- but there are many people out there who make it their life's work to figure out why some websites pop up on the first page of Google and some are never found.

I'm no techie (that's for sure) but Matt and Nicole provided some great tips that were easy to understand and made me take a closer look at all of our sites: Bangor Metro, Maine Ahead, and Real Maine Weddings. Technology changes all the time, and while it's sometimes hard to keep up with it, it's important.

Downeast Learning offers workshops in Ellsworth each month. They are a casual and inexpensive way to get info and ask questions as well as meet new people. Totally worth my time and I look forward to seeing what else they can teach me.