Ecstatic Gaucho

There was no blog post last week as I was away, but now I’m back from the dead. Well, not the dead exactly. I’ve been in India – a more lively place you’re unlikely to find. I was gone for just four days. The reason I’ve returned so early is that I’m starting a new job.

At least I think I am. The job means working for friends (which can be tricky). I’ve already been there for two days and the chap who hired me still hasn’t turned up yet – I’m told he’s off at a conference. That’s ok of course, as long as he really does turn up. So tomorrow, when he rolls in, I’ll have to finalise pay etc. I won’t quite believe I’m no longer unemployed until my wage packet is agreed on.

The company I’m working for does SEO. I’ve had to explain this to people, at least those over the age of 40, that this means Search Engine Optimisation – roughly, how to get your website to the top of Google. The nearer your site is to the top of Google’s results, the more people will click on your site and the more money you should make.

I was talking to an elderly chap about it today, and he asked what this ‘SEO’ business was. A brief answer should do it, I thought – “It’s to do with the Internet”. To which he replied “Ah, Tibet!”.  Good idea.

As optimising websites for search engines is a slightly unfamiliar field, so I’ve been scouring SEO books and websites. I have learnt quite a lot already, including the importance of metadata and meta tags for your site. These hidden tags explain your site’s function to search engines, which improves their ranking. Bruce Clay, SEO guru, shows how we can see if our site has the right meta data and keywords by using the Keyword Density Analyser on SEO Toolset. I ran the test on EcstaticGaucho.com and found it was completely lacking in meta tags. Oops.

Emily Benet has blog that is so successful that it’s being published as a book. That’s what one of the lecturers at my Birkbeck journalism course told us last night. In a couple of weeks she is going to come into the class to tell us what she’s learnt about blogging and whatnot. Her ShopGirl blog tells stories of working in her mum’s London chandelier shop. It’s well-written stuff: funny and touching.

As I was trying to get to the bottom of all this meta-tag nonsense this afternoon, I thought I’d put her blog into the Keyword Density Analyser too. Surely a successful blog would be properly optimised. Strangely, this was not the case, she’s also missing her metadata. But as people seem to be reading the blog, I suppose this must be another approach to website success – write good content!

Tags: Birkbeck, Bruce Clay, Emily Benet, meta data, meta tags, SEO, Shop Girl

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 2nd, 2009 at 11:03 pm and is filed under Dr Blogenstein, job hunt. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.