There are a number of different elements to online marketing and as I may have mentioned before, one techniques I have been utilizing quite a bit is called Search Engine Optimization or SEO.  SEO is the buzz topic of internet marketing at the moment and involves finding ways to make your website rank highly on search engines.  If you did a Google search for ‘London’ for example, it’s not simply luck that the results you see there have been placed at the top of the list.  Search engines such as Google carefully guard the algorithm that ranks results so that marketers and web site owners can’t take advantage of it and artificially rank more highly but there are a couple of factors that go into causing a website to rank highly for a particular search and that has created the practice of SEO.

The first and most important part of ranking highly is keyword and text optimization.  You could never expect to rank for the search ‘London’ if you don’t have the word London on your webpage.  Additionally, if you have the word London displayed in such a way that the search engine crawlers that automatically view, catalog and rank your webpage can’t see it (such as in an image or movie instead of in text) the search engine doesn’t recognize that your page has relevant keywords.  On the other hand, a popular SEO strategy used to involve “keyword stuffing” which meant adding high numbers of popular search keywords, or the same word repeated many times, penalizes the site as search engines have developed advanced ways of determining if the text is relevant and contextual or not.

The trick in writing SEO text is to compose paragraphs that involve the most popular keywords, in the format they might appear when someone types a search phrase into Google, yet making those keywords sound natural contextually.  The higher up on the page, and in your body text, the keywords appear the better.  Like a topic sentence in an academic essay which outlines the rest of the content of your writing, text in the first paragraph or even sentence of an article, blog post or web page lets search engine robots know what the content of your page is about.  For example, look at the first sentence of this post:

There are a number of different elements to online marketing and as I may have mentioned before, one techniques I have been utilizing quite a bit is called Search Engine Optimization or SEO.

This is a great SEO sentence.  It doesn’t sound like I’ve stuffed keywords in to trick a search engine but I’ve managed to include three key search phrases, ‘online marketing,’ ‘search engine optimization’ and ‘SEO’ in the first few lines of my post.  Here is an example of how I could have written my first paragraph that would have meant the same thing to my human readers but might have caused search engine robots to view my post as less relevant to people looking for online marketing and SEO information:

There are many different elements to my marketing job, all related to driving more traffic to the Spoonfed website.  One of the most important parts involves finding ways for Spoonfed to rank highly on popular web search results.

In that case, I didn’t use any key search phrases, and I probably wouldn’t find a way to fit those key words in until much farther down in my post, causing the robots to believe those subjects are less relevant to my post over all.

This has been a longwinded and fairly technical way to get to my main point which has been nagging me ever since I began to learn about SEO.  As the pressure increases to rank highly in search engines, bring traffic to websites and create pages that Google and the other leading search engines can recognize and rank, how much will this change web writing? While of course talented writers will always find a way to incorporate keywords naturally, the need to be understood by artificial Google robots can easily lead to a stilted and unnatural writing style – just look at the top ranking results on some Google searches.  As print authors are more and more turning to the web, and web authors are more and more looking towards SEO strategies to bring traffic to their site, what happens when those authors find themselves not writing for a human audience but for a robotic one?

I find it unlikely that such a writing style would ever be more appealing than natural, well-crafted prose. In what is possibly a unrealistic and utopian vision of the SEO future, some sort of AI English teacher-style robot will troll the web, knocking the web crap out of the rankings no matter how many keywords they work in.  One can only hope.


One of the things I like about Twitter is that I can choose to follow and read the updates of people with similar interests that I might otherwise never come across.  When they make updates, sharing ideas, news and links, sometimes I find incredibly valuable information for myself.  This happened today when one of my Twitter friends posted a link to a young entrepreneur’s scholarship hosted by the blog I Will Teach You to be Rich.  The scholarship is decribed:

The I Will Teach You To Be Rich Scholarship for Social Innovation is an annual $2,500 award for anyone in their twenties who has demonstrated entrepreneurial excellence and is planning a socially innovative project. The award can be used for a special project, service initiative, founding a company, creating a community organization, or any other entrepreneurial venture that scales to help others.

I’ve decided to apply even though I’m sure there will be some stiff competition given the buzz I’ve heard about the scholarship.  The application is due in a few days and it’s been interesting to consider my answers to the questions “what are your milestones for success” and “how will you get others interested in your business”. This is also an excellent opportunity for me to spend some more time developing an idea I had during the holidays for a new company based upon a number of my interests and that I think might appeal to the nature of the scholarship.  Wish me luck, the semi-finalists are announced Feb 2nd so I’ll keep you updated.


In the month since I last updated a lot has happened.  There was Christmas, and New Years, I baked about twelve different kinds of cookies, a pie and a cake, I spent 10 hours in an airplane and 10 days getting over jet lag and I have spent as much time as I possibly can with my family.

Busy, you say, but not busy enough to warrent a 1 month hiatus from blogging.  True, although you’d be surprised at how much time decorating Christmas cookies can take.  No, the real reason I’ve been MIA from the blogersphere has been because I’m still in California.  While my original plane ticket had me returning to London on December 29th, the British Home Office had some other opinions and my visa has been delayed due to a massive backlog of other applications.

So there’s nothing for it but to enjoy the sun and warm weather, home cooking with my family, chance to work from home (read: in my pajamas) and appreciate my time here before I head back to London in a few weeks.  In the meantime I’ll be putting in some posts about my work, as that’s what’s consuming most of my time these days.  Happy New Year!


Cold!

Well, back in London for almost a week now after Barcelona and I guess it wasn’t just Spain that was chilly… it’s RIDICULOUSLY cold here.  Most of the country has been getting snow but London just has a sort of gross icy rain.  I had a momentary panic when I woke up this morning and my clock said it was 7am but it looked like it was 2am outside – but it was just the clouds and the fact that we’re approaching the shortest day of the year.

I’m really looking forward to going home for the holidays.  I love being in London but I desperately need a break in California with the family.  The sun is going to be a massive added bonus.  Things have been particularly busy at work as we’re approaching the end of the year and my credit card is getting a work out as I try to sort out any sort of holiday shopping.

Last week, before I left for Barcelona, I brought in a pumpkin pie for the office for Thanksgiving.  I didn’t actually expect many of them to like it – it is a bit of an aquired taste after all – but it seemed to go down quite well.  Here are some snapshots:


Barcelona Recap

Alright, so there are good trips and there are the trips that just manage to fulfill all expectations.  I’ve got to say, Barcelona was an amazingly beautiful city that I had a wonderful time exploring, but overall my trip was not the best I’ve had so far.  To be fair, I was well overdue for my turn at a stressful/hassle-filled/generally difficult trip and at least it happened in a stunning city.

Things got off on the wrong foot with a horredous airport experience from Heathrow to Barcelona.  I was flying Ibera airlines and I highly recommend avoiding them at all costs.  The unprofessionalism of the boarding proceedure (which took about an hour and a half and involved me standing outside for 20 minutes and then about 100 people jammed into a bus waiting outside the plane for another 15), the fact that they didn’t serve any free beverages (including water which you had to pay for!) and the complete lack of communication through the four hours of delay before we finally took off made the beginning of my trip a little shaky.  Finally arrived in Barcelona, however, where I discovered they have the simplest, most intuitive public transport system I’ve ever discovered.  Score one for Barcelona.

I arrived at the hostel which was supposedly “on the outskirts of the city” out of town but was happily only 40 min from the airport and checked in, ready to go to bed as it was already nearly midnight.  Unfortunately the room was so cold I couldn’t get to sleep at all that night! I had on all my layers of clothes but still couldn’t warm up – I was quite annoyed when I finally got up, unrested and freezing, in the morning to discover there was a heater I had missed the night before.

Not ready to let that completely ruin my day, I headed out for a self-guided tour of the city that took me through all of the most important parts of the Old City (also known as the Gothic Quarters) including the Picasso Museum, one of the few places open on a Sunday.  The museum was absolutely amazing and more than worth the 6 euros I paid to get in.  It was housed in a fantastic old Spanish building and arranged over Picasso’s lifetime so there were works from him as a child through his increasingly insane art styles (I’m sorry, is insane the wrong word? I meant “progressive”).  I also attended a church service in the beautiful Santa Maria del Mar cathedral.

Unfortunately by the end of the day I was so cold, tired and achey that I had to call it a night relatively early.  The next day, which was even colder, I did my bike tour of the city with an awesome group called Fat Tire Bike Tours (they operate in a number of European cities).  The tour was fantastic, and it was just me and another Aussie girl with the guide so we had a great time but the freezing weather really put a damper on the whole thing.

From there, I went back to the airport where I had hoped to get on standby for an earlier flight but was told quite emphatically that was impossible (despite there being two flights before mine with empty seats run by the same airlines) and so ended up waiting in the Barcelona airport for 5 hours to get back home just before midnight.

Whew, it was a wonderful city but I am definitely not doing the two-day trip again for a while, unless it’s somewhere that doesn’t require an airplane flight.  Barcelona, I’ll certainly be back.  But I’m waiting for everything to thaw first so don’t expect me until summer.