Breakthrough Point - World Cup & SEO
Saturday, July 8th, 2006I had a few moments to myself today to do some thinking about the future of Southbourne Internet and where we are going and where we started. Several years ago Alan and I were working for a much larger web firm that housed some very big projects, unfortunately due to lack of funding and anyone to guide real direction, the whole company went bust.
I think in any company how big or small you need direction and a long term plan. By putting glass ceilings or caps on aspects of your companies’ future you are limiting yourself from going the few extra steps at each checkpoint of your companies goals. A lesson well learnt when we left.
Southbourne Internet started with a couple of old computers and two guys with a fair amount of knowledge and willing to gleam as much knowledge as we could from the web and its future. The early days were real tough, it was desperately hand-to-mouth and a lot of pressure. Thankfully we are dreamers with a little extra important factor - we both know we had to get out there if we wanted to make any of those dreams a reality. We did not want to make the mistakes of the previous firm we worked with. Knowing back then that it was more than simply building ‘pretty websites’ these websites had to work for the client and provide return on investment (ROI). Too many web companies were (and still are) building sites that look absolutely fantastic, and that is where it ends. No real solution or ongoing plan for the websites future.
In my case, I had already experience in optimising and marketing websites and I took toit like a duck to water. I spent a good year pushing the boat out on several sites and experimenting with the technology and the sciences that surround search engine optimisation (SEO). I read almost everything and most I disagreed with. Spent time hanging around a few forums which for the most part I hated as it was always the same old whining and bitchiness about sites not ranking in Google and webmasters throwing tons of bad or off-topic links at their websites. I soon got bored and then met a few individuals worth reading. I started to listen. Coupled with my own ideas, I put it all to use. Yes, there were mistakes, and we soon overcame most of them. Then the famous Google ‘Florida update’ happened and a whole load of websites started dropping out of the top spots for Google. I was fortunate we didn’t get burned. Was it some kind of coincidence! No, it was due in part to studying the algorithm of Google and making a lot of educated best guesses as to the future of SEO. At that point we had just started to build websites in a tableless environment and were making attempts at validating our work to W3C checkpoints. It was not easy coming from the old school of directing attractive sites with standard mark-up that didn’t validate. We were also researching our clients markets and using the appropriate key-phrases without over-stuffing them. Meta-Data was well researched throughout and the publishing on these sites of useful and readable content bought the links in naturally. Yeah, there were quite a few trades and some purchases, but it was all relevant and an even balance. it was then we started our first small growth after a couple years of footwork. We did everything to market ourselves outside of selling our souls. Many times we had offers to build spammy sites for the darker side of the industry, we never took them and instead opted to hand out flyers locally to advertise ourselves, which incidentally never worked, we optimised our own site to be at the top locally, this bought some good work in and from that point we started going more national and concentrating on UK and Europe. We were then able to afford another staff member and better equipment. A real down came when the company was totally abused by this new staff member. I had wanted to spend my time dong the research and nitty gritty of the SEO work and be on the road bringing in new clients, this meant long trips to Belgium and other places in Europe, real tiring stuff. Alan needed to concentrate on existing clients, this meant project management and one of our services developing content management systems (CMS). The new guy we made feel really welcome, made sure he was fed, took him to lunch, paid him gave him a ton of breaks, he started abusing us by not turning up to work always with excuses and on and on it went. Then he refused to work alone in the studio, then he would be caught working on his own stuff in our time. We then found out there were many mistakes in his work which he covered up, and he was generally lazy. A lot of this can be attributed for needing staff desperately and not following through in checking backgrounds. He had to go and glad we were. It was another set back and money wasted. Thankfully we had clients who understood and we were soon back-on-track.
I am a firm believer in making future plans without restrictive ceilings and going through the checkpoints to achieve these plans. Our next steps at Southbourne is to concentrate more on project authoring of portals and also to provide full scale services to industry SME’s. I think the next work breakthrough will come in a year or less when we grow again. I am convinced that if you keep pushing at something you will eventually get there. It really is a case of not giving up. I saw a game on TV a few nights ago during the world cup soccer; It was Sweden V. England. The Swedes were hammering away at England’s defence and would not stop, I knew it then it was only going to be a matter of time when Sweden put a goal in. It had to come, sheer perseverance and work paid off with a goal. Same principle in your job. It all comes through eventually.
On a lighter note - we had a good article written for us about link building basics by Aaron Wall. It really is an overview of how it should be done. Aaron has written it with businesses in mind looking to understand how they can promote their sites on the web. It’s not bad actually and worth a read. We have had quite a few sites submit to the Search and Go Directory recently and quite a few from the cosmetics and interior design industry a lot of them being SME’s or individuals who would benefit from reading some of these articles.
Talking of articles we have now started a gallery section that would allow a photographer or artist to submit their work and write a little something about it. We had our first submission a couple of days ago from Jun Alday an interior designer who has written some very good books. He has submitted a piece on Architectural Flower Arrangements named Fleur East Collection. It’s a brief piece about using flowers in interior design work.
