Google gave me a lava lamp

I have been managing search at bmi now since February (time flies when you’re having fun) and have had a fantastic time so far, I love working in the most competitive search sector (travel) and I love working with our fantastic emarketing team.

Previously I worked agency side for many different clients, actually, I should explain what I mean by that.

Agency side: This is when you work for a digital agency for many clients, you are employed by your agency (e.g. Reading Room – an agency that some of my friends work for) to manage PPC, SEO, or technical projects on behalf of clients (companies that like having agency expertise to maximise their online strategy).

Client side: This is when you work for a company (like me) as part of their online marketing team and only work on your employers online strategy.

So..

While I was working agency side I go to know many clients, lots of industry professionals and lots of sales managers at search engines and social media sites, all of whom were a pleasure to get to know might I add.

Sales managers are the lovely people who help you maximise ad spend/ROI and strategy and also encourage you to spend more money on advertising using the products they represent e.g. Google Adwords. Every sales manager I have met has been great and have definitely been valuable assets to both myself and clients I used to work with.

But.. none of them ever gave me a lamp, until now that is.

In the very recent past I was taken to be introduced to the travel sector team at Google by my boss here at bmi. During our meeting she mentioned that in her five years of working with the travel team at Google she has never had a chance to get her hands on any of that lovely Google branded merchandise, and that she has always wanted a Google lava lamp (personally I’d prefer a peek at their algorithm) to have a constant reminder of her favourite search engine.

The meeting ended and we all went back to work trying to figure out the mysteries of online travel, weeks past as they tend to do and it was time again for us to pop over to the Google offices to catch up on developments and drink some of their wonderful Google coffee (organic of course). We walked into the meeting room and were presented with two lovely Google lava lamps, one blue, one green. After getting back to the bmi offices and being told, “Callum I better not see that on ebay”, we chose our favourite colours and plugged them in.

As you can see from the picture on the right, it’s a lovely addition to my desk and a constant reminder of just how thoughtful Google are.

Thank you Google.

Love,

Callum

How to appear in Google in 18 hours

As you can tell from my previous blog posts I have been blogging on this site (at the time of writing this post) for less than a day, a day in which I set out to have this site indexed by Google. That means I wanted to appear on the Google search engine results page within 24 hours of launching this site.

Well folks….I did it!

Now isn’t that a pretty picture?

So, to save me from gloating for the rest of this post I’m going to tell you how I did it.

I registered the domain name www.idoseo.co.uk with Godaddy on the 20th May (2009) and left it until last night when I activated my hosting and set up the site.

I am using an open source publishing application called Wordpress for this blog and have chosen to use the Wordpress hosting option offered by Godaddy to house the site and can highly recommend both of them if you are interested in setting up a personal website.

I installed Wordpress onto my database on the Godaddy site (a 5 minute process) and went off in search of a theme for my blog.

After searching through loads of articles with titles like, “100 free best amazing Wordpress themes”, I (literally by accident) stumbled across a very clean and concise theme designed and published by a small full service digital agency in Missouri (USA) called Midmodesign (thanks Bryan and Josh).

I downloaded their theme and added it to my directory and then logged into Wordpress to begin the customisation. I added a custom favicon ( That’s the big white “S” beside my site name on your web browser) and tweaked some of the html, I then plugged in all the extra little bits and pieces that are made available to you through the Wordpress admin console.

Now here is where the SEO bit begins.

Five steps I took to be indexed on Google within 18 hours:

• Post content to your website

I know it seems terribly obvious but one of the first things I look at when reviewing SEO is the content being published to the site. Make sure you have relevant, unique content that provides value to your users, it’s as simple as that.

• Install Google Analytics

There is a very good chance that you’re going to want to see who is visiting your site and measure your blogging success with a set of metrics. So why not install Google Analytics , It’s free and it starts the process of getting on Googles radar.

• Set up Google Adwords

Don’t worry, you won’t have to spend a penny. Go to the Google Adwords site and set up an account. Google will guide you through all of the stages necessary to start running a paid search campaign. Once you have put it live, immediately go into your account and pause all of your campaigns. This has put your site on Googles radar again, and it hasn’t cost you a penny.

• Tweet

I know it seems silly but yes, Tweet about your site the day you launch it. If you don’t already have a Twitter account then click through to the site here and sign up. It’s a very elegant sharing tool which is great for SEO and will definitely be in Googles future plans.

• Claim yor blog in Technorati

Technorati is simply a search engine for blogs, to claim your blog all you need to do is click through on the link and select the “Join” option from the navigation, it is a very straightforward process which will also give you an excuse for another blog post see my post: http://idoseo.co.uk/online-marketing/claiming-a-blog-at-technorati/ .

And here endeth the lesson…. ok just kidding, I’ll blab on for a line or two more just to summarise.

I am being entirely honest here, it only took what I have detailed above to be indexed within the Google search engine result pages in 18 hours.  SEO is not some dark and magical art, in fact, the more complicated you try and make it, the more you’ll often find that your SEO results suffer because of it. keep it simple, keep it honest, and you can see SEO results within 18 hours of launching your website.

Try it…. I dare you.

Love,

Callum

Claiming a blog at Technorati

So I decided to claim my blog at Technorati. Part of the process is inserting the following text into a blog post, so here is my new profile for Technorati:
Technorati Profile
Once this has been verified I will have a Technorati presence.. yippeee, shall we see if this effects how quickly Google will index my blog?

Let’s wait and see…

Love,

Callum