Hi, my name is Tim...and I'm an SEO.

I’ve been working for a small web marketing company for a few weeks now. I had a fair bit of writing experience before I got this job, but the world of online marketing and SEO is totally new to me.

It’s a steep learning curve. I’ve been stuffing my head as fast as I can since I started working here, but I feel like I’ve only just scratched the surface. To this end, I’ve decided to start blogging every few weeks, just to note down a few of the things that I’ve learnt. To the old guard, of course, this will likely seem to be the most basic of basics, but you never know – sometimes a fresh set of eyes can remind people of stuff they forgot about years before.

So,  without further ado, here are a few things I've noticed in my first few weeks on the job...

Every SEO is a servant to two masters

Human users and Google bots, man and machine – the good SEO must learn to please them both. Quite often, you can serve them both at the same time; having a vaguely coherent navigation system is good for everyone involved. Using the phrase “cheap ferries to Dublin” six times on the same page is perhaps more useful for the search engines than it is for the guy who reads the page. But then again, that chap has to actually find the page in the first place, and if it is higher up in the results page…It’s complicated – you want them to actually find what you’ve got to offer, but the content has to sell to them once they get there.

Every SEO must choose a hat

Whitehat or Blackhat, lightside or darkside…Are you going to have to boost rankings in ways that have the Matt Cutts seal of approval, or via more nefarious methods? Of course, as with any preference, SEO or sexual, some people like to go both ways…

Right now, everything I’m learning is strictly whitehat, but who knows – some day perhaps the lure of the dark side may just grow too strong for me. After all, blackhat stuff has such cool names. Concealed text, invisible divs, cloaking, bait and switch…so edgy, so naughty, so tempting…    

Search engines are simultaneously very clever and seriously stupid

As my boss told me on my first day, a computer can only say 1 or 0, yes or no, to each question you put to it. What you can do with this basic principle if you apply it to enough calculations can be pretty astonishing – take the Google search algorithm, for example. But it is important not to give them too much credit. Giving the web spiders what they want is sometimes like playing chess with a grandmaster, sometimes like spoon feeding a child.

Wordtracker is a comedy goldmine

 A simple search involving “money” brought up results that were moderately racist…

scottish new year traditions money and whisky

…incredibly convoluted…

which actress is getting paid big money to appear in emmerdale as a new queen of nastiness like patsy kensit

…and poignantly philosophical…

Does money give happy ness?

KEC makes you hate your clients

KEC can be fun. No, really. I like crosswords, so I like puzzles with words and that’s what KEC ultimately boils down to. But after I’ve slogged away for days on a page that’s trying to sell me cheap holidays in Algarve, I can promise you that I have no desire to take them up on their offers. And no matter how good the results are for the KEC I’ve recently done for one of our insurance clients, you can be damn sure I’m getting my insurance from their bitterest rivals. Win some, lose some – for the dozen or hundred clients you pull in with good KEC, you lose one SEO copywriter who just can’t stand to look at your website anymore.

Redoing copy because you didn’t check that your keywords were relevant is not fun…

 …and you only have yourself to blame. One of the classic rookie mistakes, I suppose, is to assume that your keywords are kosher and plough on ahead before you realise that you’ve completely got the wrong end of the stick. Six pages of content later…“Yes, these are great keywords for this website. But not for these pages.” Back to the drawing board (or rather, the Wordtracker KEI results page.)

There’s plenty of technical stuff that you have to do to get good rankings…

…and my head is now swollen like an overstuffed meta tag with KEC, KEI, consistent root domains, embedded links, viral content, and the evils of dropdown menus that are unsupported by HTML links… 

…but the way to get the best results is to produce the best content 

This is actually quite nice to discover. In Google, inbound links from relevant pages and high traffic websites are the best way to boost your rankings. There’s plenty of ways of trying to achieve this – viral articles, press releases, widgits, videos, and so on. But your content has got to be good, useful, funny, in some way noticeable. You can bring a horse to water, but you cannot make him drink. In the same way, you can’t make thousands of people link to your site; you’ve got to be good enough to draw them in.