NB: This is a long one.
Let me let you into a reality of running an online business. All the live long day, companies like ours are beset by marketing calls from the murky corners of the Internet world. Some calls offer us a heap of links into our site for a huge amount of money. They offer this because if a lot of good sites link to your site, Google thinks you’re top dog and will send lots of traffic to your site. Ask these people, however, which sites will be linking to yours and invariably they will say something like: ‘We can’t tell you that”. This means that they are very bad sites. So, you get the gist. Whomever it falls upon to pick up these calls at Black has to go for a little lie down afterwards.
So it was that the other day we had one of these calls. This one was from someone who does SEO (search engine optimisation – the practice of getting websites to the top of Google). It was lunchtime and I found myself suddenly alone in the office.
The excoriating exchange is below in transcript:
Man: I notice you have a blog.
Me: * and exhale *
Man: How often do you update it?
Me: When we have something to write about (admittedly this entry is tenuous)
Man: Well you need to be doing it every day.
Me: Even if I have nothing to write about?
Man: Yes.
Me: What happens if one day, in a moment of misdirection or abject tedium someone actually reads this and finds it to be full of self-promotional guff?
Man: What’s more important? The readers or your SEO?
Me: Is that rhetorical?
Man: Eh?
Me: * silence *
Man: You should do what Currys does and blog about its appliances. If they get a new fridge in they will write about it on their blog with a big picture of it. From what I see of your blog, you’re not really writing about products, are you? I’m not sure what you’re writing about. Is it Michael Jackson? California, Coats? Keats?
Me: Have you read an entry?
Man: No.
Conversation ended there. But it did make me 
think (briefly). If someone is on my website at www.black.co.uk, they will see page after page of splendid products. They have a whole website on which to look at things and be told about prices, sizes, colours etc. Surely a blog should provide respite from that exposure. Also I’m not sure I’m the kind of human being who could write straight-faced about fridges.
Saying that, this blog is for you, SEO Man. How’s this for product placement? So many gloves. Buy buy buy buy these gloves. They’re leather and they’re gloves. They will fit on your hand like a glove.
* I’d love to glove is a regular feature of this blog. Do you have someone you’d love to glove and by that what we mean is ‘to put a pair of the relevant gloves (from our collection) onto someone or something that you think would be suitable for a gloving. To clear up an understandable misconception we do not mean ‘to whack someone’.
