Pheasant, and the SEO Dark Arts

A pheasant awaits me in the kitchen.

Mum and Dad, bless them, arrived to take Cecily out into town for some new t-shirts that she could get on around her sling, and some new school shoes to wear with a skirt rather than winter trousers, although ironically the weather has turned somewhat wintery again! But wintery is fine, since the pheasant they brought with them and which has been residing in the freezer since Dad shot it and plucked it some months ago, is accompanied by a couple of bags of homegrown black currents. Already my mind is racing to create a yummy combination for this weekend’s Saturday feast.

The other major theme for the day so far has been pretty much total immersion in the dark arts of SEO.

Since launching funkyangel.co.uk five years ago, the visitor rating has been steadily growing, mostly by word of mouth and direct links it would appear from the analytics. In contrast our organic search ranking is rubbish, we’ve some how dropped back to page 3 from being on page 1 a year ago and since I am on the verge of launching a new site that is sweeter and easier to use and update, which can take external coding without needing nursemaiding, etetc, it behoves me that we can get the traffic it the site that it deserves.

To that end I am doing my usual of reading and researching everything I can get my hands on! I think the problems with Funky and it’s lack of organic searches are muti-faceted – firstly I haven’t ever seo’d every page individually, then it’s a very large site so the seo has had to be varied from area to area, as if it was individual sites, and this is so time consuming it has come to be a huge dark cloud in my head and it seems most seo companies feel the same way!! And thirdly I’ve been lazy about getting inbound links, even the ones that approach me usually get stuffed in a file and sat on for a while until I get round to it. I guess it’s really been one of the perils of being a single mum working more than fulltime and then running Funky on the fringes. Add to that the catastrophe that was 2007, with four house moves in 10 months etc etc, and perhaps I shouldn’t be too hard on myself, but still, it’s annoying!

So I am resolved to address it now – if you are a business mum or start up company and are in the same position, I’ll be addressing the issue more fully in the next entry and pulling together some useful tips, which I’ll add to Funky Angel.