• Anger
  • They assume I’m the one who has knocked their precious website to #2 in Google
• Confusion
  • They don’t understand and when the next person asks, chips in with “He makes websites”
• Ok”
  • They understand what it is and leave it there or want to know a bit more..

Its completey obvious me to 90% of them they didn’t understand what I do…whilst some people were engaging and asked questions, other dismissed the work I do off hand and marked me as a blackhat spammer stating

“Google has a whole bunch of programmers to stop what you do”

…. not so much? or else these pages on Google’s site wouldn’t exist, let me pull a quite out from one of these.

“However, a few unethical SEOs have given the industry a black eye through their overly aggressive marketing efforts and their attempts to unfairly manipulate search engine results.” #

and these few are the ones that people hear about, but search IS important, I was talking to someone last night who was spending £200 a day on PPC but nothing on SEO, using the outdated but still used Yahoo Keyword Tool, we could see his term had 40,000 searches a month on Yahoo UK online in Janurary 2007.. if he was in the top ten and got just 10% of that traffic, that would mean 4000 clicks a month on one term alone, with an average CPC of £0.30.

4000 x 0.30 = £1200 a month in free clicks on one term alone..

if we take my podcast network, we recently had an upserge in downloads and we are looking at around 10,000 downloads per week, I really like looking at stats and use a mixture of Heatmaps tracking, server side tracking and Google analytics, you’d expect a podcast network to get most of its traffic from directories and referring sites…. not this one!

55% of all traffic comes from organic search… on longtail terms, sure we are number one for magic the gathering podcast and mtg podcast but those arn’t the terms that bring us the most traffic, its 4, 5 and 6 word keyphrases that do it..

I’m not going to belittle you by explaining the longtail theory but with search and certain niches it really works.. I’m working on a project right now that will prove it because its such a niche area that it’s main market will be.. long tail searches..

SEO has a bad rap at the moment because in the early day’s it was all about “keyword stuffing” and “hidden text”, however the game has changed, the engines have evolved and so has the optimisation, last year I could have posted that SEO is all about TLC

• Titles
  • Make sure your titles are optimised and short
• Links
  • Get good links onto your pages and also have a good linking matrix within your site
• Content
  • Get some good original content, optmised and something that would want to be read by your readers

However now there are just so many other things to consider

• Social Media
• Universal Search
• Local Search
• Competitors sites using blackhat

It’s a funny ol’ game this SEO lark…

Monday, the MELD launch event, which arrived and went with mixed reaction, a lot of people were disapointed at been asked to make posters as a “MELDING” event, but the concepts and the ideas discussed were worth the crappy drawings :), I like MELD as a concept though I think the implementation of it at the moment is too broad and lacks focus, not to mention you had to apply for a place to come to the event and a lot of people were put off by the “invitation only” status..

Tuesday, the Apple launch event at Old Broadcasting House, I feel I will be blogging a lot more about this place over the coming months, not only because Linda is constantly bugging me to join, but also because thats were we Barcamp Leeds will be, but more on that later

Wednesday, Good old Geekup, upstairs this time in a more intimate environment,  good presentations and good company, I may be presenting next time.. IF I can get my skillz in order

Thursday, Work Night Out… nuff said!

Friday, Spent the evening playing Magic, something I havn’t done for a couple of months, which is Ironic considering I run a magic the gathering podcast network

and somewhere inbetween that we announced the date for Barcamp Leeds… which looks to be an awesome event..

I was giving out “The Hodge” cards, which people either thought they were weird or loved (either reaction is fine by me), anyway I realised I hadn’t posted since the last GeekUp, a lot has happened since then

• I Survived the Great North Run
  • (Dressed As Mario!)
• I Finally started my start up (not legally but thats next)
• The podcast network gained another 1000 listeners a week (average)
• I’m pregnant

Ok one of those is a lie……. I didn’t start the start up..

But seriously there seems to be a lot of energy at the moment about Leeds and northen developers and entrpuners, its a really good time to be here, and if we pull our finger out and get to work on .North and BarCamp Leeds eh Imran  mabey that will help the community a bit more…

anyway I will be blogging a bit more now I’m a bit more organized…. Ok i’m not kidding anyone I’m never organized!