I stumbled into the world of SEO and analytics as a natural progression of my job (which I also stumbled into, more or less): working (temporarily, I thought at the time) in an outdoor store while waiting for another position to open, and bored to tears with work on the retail floor, I started taking over the social media and the at the time, not-yet-developed website, just as something to liven up the day.
Breathe. I promise all my sentences won’t be that run-on.
At any rate, what was originally a casual, couple-hours-a-day happy diversion soon turned into a full-time job. By no great virtue of my own other than being reasonably computer literate and having an artistic side, I was tasked with bringing one of the store’s websites, which had been left in development limbo for over a year, into existence.
The point of all that intro, of course, is by no means intended as any form of self-praise. Rather, it should quite accurately portray just how monumentally and totally under-prepared and illiterate I was in terms of website management, social media, and that great bugaboo, SEO.
As any of you can imagine (or sympathise with), I was thrown into the deep end of a swimming pool of unfamiliar terms and notions – CMS, SEO, meta-data, html…and while a lot of it was interesting, it became more and more obvious that the challenge was going to lie in the need for rapid self-education in a field where, it seems, the majority of proficient users have been interested in and dedicated to this field from an early age. So while I very much enjoyed the visual aspects of the web design, or the graphics and content generation involved in the social media, I was floundering whenever I came up against anything with or “directory” or “content generation” in it.
I still flounder.
It turns out, there is a wealth of information out there about how important SEO is (and in case some poor soul similar to myself is reading, that’s “Search-Engine Optimisation”); and quite a reasonable amount of what not to do; but when it came to the actual doing of it; the “right, time to sit down and get this done”, there was nothing more than authoritative-sounding, but nonetheless unhelpful, instructions on how to start.
Fill in your meta data!…but don’t use keywords. Keywords are out. But be relevant!…to search engines as well as humans. Be descriptive!…but try and stay under 150 words. Target your audience with Adwords!…but also, focus mostly on unique content.
And of course, as well all doubtless know, that’s only one aspect of the job – I still had all the “regular” work to do, which, although it wasn’t confusing, was still time consuming.
One day my graphics designer emailed me Google’s “How To” SEO, which was an excellent starting point; but even though it provides a nice overview of what SEO is and why it’s important, I still found it very general when it came down to the practicality of setting things up and understanding the nitty-gritties of it all.
At one point, work sponsored me to attend a Google Analytics and Adwords training seminar for 3 days which, I’ll be honest, was pretty awesome. Put on by a Google-certified training company, their excellent, comprehensive and in-depth grasp of all things SEO (and Google in particular) was eye-opening; and it was bedazzling and intoxicating to see all the possibilities and information which could be found…if you could figure it out. The fact is, after the first couple hours of the seminar, I started to get left behind (in terms of keeping up with what everyone else was clicking on and doing) and just sat there, taking notes on the endless capabilities and wondering if I’d be able to put it all together.
This might seem like an odd saga for a website dedicated to SEO and website improvement, but from the desperate questions and frustrated inquiries I’ve come across on forums, websites, and FAQs, I’ve come to the inescapable conclusion that I mustn’t be the only Webmaster who has been learning everything from scratch on the job – and on the run, and was struggling with it.
A month or two ago, I was thrilled to oversee the launch of our second website (for one of our different companies). My team and I had learned to much from the experience with the first website – everything from design improvements to optimising workflow (the second website was created, from drawing board to launch, in about half the time of the first one). And along the way, I had learned techniques (for example, like image processing) which actually end up being SEO beneficial: for instance, formatting product images through Photoshop not just for size and resolution, but for name; implementing alt-tag spaces into the CMS so that image or product tags could be entered as part of the product creation process…all of these things made the idea of implementing SEO and meta-tagging and all of that cauldron of woe less intimidating than before.
Nevertheless, once it launched, and I started to hand over the day-to-day running to the managers and settled down with a good will to dig into the code-y, webby-manage-y side of things, I found before long that once again I had spent two weeks with thirty to forty tabs open (all with variations on the theme of “what is meta-tagging?” or “what are Google product ideas?” or “how do you data highlight” or “rich snippets???”)
The fact is, the actual analysis of data is, I think, fantastic. A properly set up Analytics account is incredibly informative, logical, and helpful – even if it is just using a few key features, like funnels. But, (and I’ll only say this once at the risk of going on ad nauseum) it all comes back to understanding the (seemingly) increasingly complex world of “setting-up”.
Incidentally, in my forays into Analytics this week, I came across Google’s Data Highlighter which seemed, in the first place, to be an idiot-oriented (in the best possible way!), GUI method of creating Rich Text Snippets. “Brilliant!” thought I, and proceeded to start marking up one of our product pages. I still wasn’t entirely sure what RTS were (I think I kind of, sort of understand it now), but it was certainly being presented as important and necessary for all well-mannered and polite websites. And it certainly is easy to use – well, that is, kind of easy to use. Yes, it’s visual (which, for those of us who only stutter the smallest amount of pidgin HTML, is immensely helpful); but as seems typical, there is an immense gap of information about it. Case in point: since we sell products, I wanted to label the products as products. So I highlight a product, select “product” from the dropdown menu…but then you have to choose: ASIN, EAN, ISBN, JAN….what!? Of course, to any bibliophile, ISBN is obvious – and to those in retail, so is SKU – but that’s fortuitous knowledge, not something which should be assumed. And beyond that? No information! Do we have to pick a product type? Apparently, yes. What do all of the others mean? NO way of finding out (I finally tracked them down on some obscure site which linked through to this, which was as intimidating as it was mostly unhelpful). And even though our products do have SKUs (as all products do), I can’t choose SKU because, of course, the name of the product is not its SKU! And meanwhile, no search results I can turn up offer any information beyond “Tag products as products”.
Well, it turns out after all that that while RTS make your search results display better (at least in Google searches), which in itself might lead to more clicks and conversions, it isn’t in and of itself an improvement to your site’s data (or is it!?). So after that experiment (and I am interested to see how it develops over time, as Google continues to crawl our pages), it’s back to the drawing board of “how to meta-“.
And so, after a long and arduous internet-searches journey, I arrived – quite unexpectedly – at MOZ. I actually found it because of a fantastic interview between Rand Fishkin and Andrew Warner from Mixergy, which you can (and should) read here. Apart from being a fantastic (and entertaining) and inspiring story of failure and success and lessons learned, one thing kept jumping out of the interview: Rand talking about how he wasn’t (or at least, hadn’t been) an SEO expert, how there was a lot of slogging to learn about SEO and its implementation (and his experiences with hiring SEO experts himself, back in the day)…and here he was, CEO (at the time) of a massive SEO type-company.
Were those the sounds of trumpets!?
So I started to explore Moz (and here I am, still exploring)…is it going to be – well, there’s seldom a magic bullet – but the turn of the tide? Of course, one doesn’t expect services for such a specialist field (where one would expect specialists to be being hired) to cater entirely and particularly to sorcerer’s-apprentice-style websters like myself, but it has an air of promise – the type of place where answers and solutions might be found – rather than a Boy’s Club full of cliques and secret handshakes.
Even without having completely configured all our Google Analytics and dashboard gobbledeegoop yet, it looks like Moz has some usable and promising features…and maybe some answers. I look forward to finding out!
