Redhill

In which I attempt to boost my Google ranking through devious means

I was trying to explain to a non-journalist friend what search engine optimisation was, and why it could be important to a freelance journalist in Redhill or a freelance journalist in Surrey.

“Hm,” she said, when I’d finished, “sounds like a load of bollocks”.

Obviously I hadn’t done a very good job at explaining why being search engine optimised could be of interest to a copywriter in Surrey.

But I can see why she might have thought so. I mean come on, it does sound massively tedious, doesn’t it. I could almost send myself to sleep talking about it. It doesn’t interest me in the slightest, other than in its potential usefulness to a copywriter in Redhill.

It might be bollocks, I conceded primly, but it’s bollocks you need to know. In other words, BUNK. Rather like how to check your tyre pressure, or how to bleed your radiators. You’d rather not fill your mind with such things but, unless you have someone else to do them for you, you need to have at least a passing acquaintance with the subject.

Anyone who’s still reading might have noticed I’ve been trying to SEO this very article. Yes, those magic phrases freelance journalist Redhill, freelance journalist Surrey, copywriter Redhill and copywriter Surrey are the cheeky ones I need to get SEOd.

I was delighted, when I did that most egotistical of things, Googling myself, to find that the F Words name appears as number 3 on Google. And Sue Fenton (me, not any of the rest of the clan I discussed in a previous blog) comes in at position 2, 3, 6, 7, 8 and 9. An egoist’s dream.

But Google “freelance journalist Surrey” and I don’t show up till page 7 – and of course no-one ever gets that far. As “freelance journalist Redhill” I get one mention on page 2, and nothing else.

For “copywriter Redhill” I’m number 2 on the first page. But “copywriter Surrey” is simply nowhere.

One’s not supposed to post web copy blatantly and irrelevantly repeating phrases like “freelance journalist Surrey”. Apparently Google frowns on such carry-on when it sends its little spiders out to crawl about on the internet.

But I’m fascinated, far more so than the subject warrants, to find out if it works or not.

So, sorry Google, forgive me this little transgression of the SEO rules. I’ll try not to do it again – after all, I’m usually too busy waffling on about steam rooms and cats and things. Which might explain why I show up on Google when people do searches on phrases like “Italian cookware” and “swearing at police”.

I’m not convinced that it’s vital to be near the top on Google if you’re a freelance journalist – in Surrey or anywhere else – I think potential clients are more likely to search on the NUJ or LinkedIn. But it all helps.

And a quick plug for WordPress – I know it’s SEOd, cos a couple of nights ago someone was looking for a blog post I’d just written – and she found it on Google, less than an hour after it was posted. Well done, WordPress.

Pic credit: digitalart, http://www.freedigitalphotos.net/images/view_photog.php?photogid=2280

In which I grind to a halt and have to be pushed out of the way by two nice young men

My plans for tonight – to spend an hour catching up on the latest inane drivel from the boys in the steam room and then to attend a public meeting about the local aerodrome’s plans for a hard runway – went all awry.

The latter has the local community and parish councils up in arms, with its stated aim of doubling the number of flights. The aerodrome’s management has offered to re-orientate the runway, meaning less noise over residential areas during take-off and landing, but my personal beef is that it’s not the take-off and landing that’s the issue, it’s the pointless driving round and round in circles over my house, making a tedious droning noise that drowns out the radio and telephone conversations. If they were actually going somewhere I wouldn’t mind as much – I think what annoys me is the bored rich boys doing pollution-inducing circuits for no apparent reason other than to boast to their friends that they’re training to be “pilots”.

The company is holding out the carrot of dozens of jobs to be created if their plan gets the go-ahead, but since it has already admitted that staffing levels are much the same whether they have to handle one flight or 50, I don’t get the logic.

I would have said as much had I got to the meeting but I missed out on both my little trips tonight thanks to the car juddering to a halt at the end of the road and refusing to start again.

This is the embarrassingly over-sized Fentonmobile of which I’ve written previously, the vehicle that became my transportation system after the Great Renault Overhead Camshaft Eruption (QED an earlier post). Until tonight it had lived up to the rave reviews given it by the previous owner, my friend Tom, who reckoned it had given him 12 years of carefree motoring. Perhaps it misses him. Perhaps it doesn’t care for the cavalier treatment it’s had at my hands, notably the fact that some little scrote prised out the wing mirror the other week, leaving me with either a bill for nearly £200 to replace the entire unit or having to do a bodge job with a piece of mirror, some cardboard and some parcel tape (I chose the latter).

The F-Mobile is probably also pissed off about the fact that it’s been going around plastered in industrial cling-film since one of the rear windows fell out and shattered to smithereens on Reigate Hill. A very well-known glass repair company was quick enough to turn up immediately after the event but went away when they found they didn’t have the right part, and haven’t been seen since.

Anyway, two nice motorists came to push me out of the way – perhaps motivated more by wanting to get somewhere than by pure chivalry. After a refreshing rest at the side of the road and mulling things over a bit, the F-Mobile decided to give it another go, and eventually started. I know what it was thinking – it was thinking it would let me get half-way to the health club then conk out again on that windy, narrow, unlit, country lane, just to inconvenience and embarrass me. I know how cars think and I was having none of it. Instead, I drove the bugger straight to Peter the Mechanic’s, down the road. They didn’t look particularly surprised to see me there, having been at the sharp end of my various mechanical failures over the years – more depressed, like.

People who have company cars talk a lot of rot about how hard done by they are – having to drive vehicles that someone else insures and taxes and MOTs and services and that magically get repaired for free in the event of a breakdown. I know company car drivers who don’t even bother checking their tyre pressures – because that’ll get done at the next service. “I pay tax on it, you know,” they say. Yeah, and do I get a tax rebate ‘cos I own a manky old rust-bucket that’s down the garage every second week? No. Shut up.

Anyway, the Toyota’s at the garage and I’m having another cosy night in. Watch this space for more on my exciting transport arrangements.

Pic credit: Graeme Weatherston, http://www.freedigitalphotos.net/images/view_photog.php?photogid=330

Almost-human intelligence in the steam room

There’s not much of an intellectual or cultural ‘scene’ in the town I live in. Indeed, some might argue that ‘culture’ and ‘Redhill’ were a contradiction in terms.

But a lively debate on the issues of the day can often be found in the steam room at my health club, where a little crowd of fellow self-employed odds and sods accumulates around 5pm, seeking out someone to talk to after a day of solitude, ‘water cooler conversation’, as it were.

This gathering of the great minds of the town has become known as the Cheeky Boys’ (most of them are male) After-Work Steam and Sauna Club. While some of their conversations reach a level of almost-human intelligence, others are frankly rather bizarre, so I’ve been keeping notes of the subjects discussed, just to illustrate the sheer breadth of the subject matter that occupies what passes for their minds.

Topics of Steam and Sauna – or TOSS, for short – of the past month have included: bee-keeping, lawn-mower maintenance, capitalism, mothballs, non-iron shirts, volcanoes, insolvency, knees, homosexual dogs and how to cook mutton.

Additionally there is usually speculation about someone or other’s love life, with some outrageous remark being dropped into the conversation to see how long it takes to become accepted fact. This happened only the other day, when one chap glanced at the clock, saw it was 6pm and hurriedly dashed off, muttering that he had to “go to Haslemere”. A discussion followed about why anyone would want to go to Haslemere, especially on a Friday night, which led, via a meandering logic, to the decision that he must have been off to a swingers’ party.

Another day, one chap remarked that he had been for a ‘hand massage’: after he’d left, it quickly passed into historic steam room fact that he’d enjoyed a ‘hand job’.

And it’s widely accepted now that another member washes his dirty drawers in the shower at the club and dries them in the sauna, to save wasting money on using the washer/dryer at home.

One day a hotel guest, an Australian, was in the spa pool on his first visit to the club. He listened for a while to the conversation – it was about what size stick you would need if you got into a fight with a gerbil, or something – then enquired whether we’d all spent too long in the water. “Why d’you say that?” we asked. “Cos it sounds like you’ve been inhaling too many chemicals!” he said.

Fair point. The Cheeky Boys’ conversation might not always be intellectual, but it never fails to amuse.