So, back in the day, SEO content had two objectives: 1. optimise for search engines; and 2. be interesting to users.

And that was the order of importance.

After all, writing for the search engines meant more people would see your content. So you did everything you needed to so the spiders could understand what your content was about.

But search engines have been adding social media posts to search results, which means the old objectives’ order of importance is shifting.

Now if you want your site to rank well, instead of writing primarily for search engines, you need to write for both search engines and users, so that no matter how someone tries to find content, you’ll be there.

Then: Writing for spiders

Now: Writing for users

This is not so much a shift in technique as it is a shift in perception.

Long ago, if you wanted to be found by people, you needed to have content that ticked all of the search engines’ boxes in a fairly consistent, predictable way.

Now, you need to do that in a subtle enough way that people don’t get turned off and in an exciting enough way that they actually tell other people.

How do you do this?

Well, start by keeping in mind that you’re writing for people, not for spiders.

You don’t want your information to be inaccessible to spiders, but at the end of the day, SEO is about getting people to your site.

Sure, search engines want to get people to the right content, but people aren’t just relying on Google to help them find what they want anymore. More and more they’re relying on each other to recommend things. So you need to write in a way that encourages or compels people to share.

Find your target audience.

This is not wait-for-people-to-come-to-us SEO. This is proactive. Search Twitter, Facebook, all those things, and see what your target audience likes and shares with each other.

Figure out what they respond to, and do it yourself.

Does your 18-35 year old single male demographic love lists? Do your mums from Manchester like home decorating tips?

Think about how you can do something like that – just make sure it’s relevant to your industry. Put your own spin on it.

Do pretty much whatever it takes to hold on to their fleeting attention spans, and don’t be afraid to a bit controversial, funny or silly.

Which is pretty much what you did when writing linkbait, right? That’s what I mean by a shift in perception. It’s not just about the links; it’s also about the views, the shares, the likes – what people do when they respond to content, rather than what spiders do.

Then: Keyword-focussed content

Now: Sharing-focussed content

Times were, you could just stuff your paragraphs full of one word or the other, and the spiders would realise that you were talking about that word. Then when a customer looked for that word, the search engine would know which pages on the internet were talking about it.

Now, to be visible to customers, you have to create content that is easy to share.

How do you do this?

Make your content easy to scan and digest.

That way users can quickly know whether or not they find your content useful (hint: if they think your content might be hard to read or understand, they will immediately look elsewhere).

Loads of images, for example, keep people scrolling as photos are easy to comprehend quickly, and they are easy to share with other people.

Then let your target audience know it’s out there.

Just don’t be creepy or overly aggressive.

And always keep in mind the share-ability of headlines and opening paragraphs.

Twitter has its character limit, sure, but you don’t see long-winded expositions on Facebook, either. Much.

So be brief, especially in headlines. Headlines should be short, clear and compelling, so that people who retweet can add a comment without changing your headline.

Then: Repetitive content

Now: Varied content

My grandpappy told me of an era when content needed to stay fairly consistent (read: repetitive) so search engines would know what you were all about. Those were simpler, more innocent times.

Now, of course, people get bored by repetition, and bored users do not return to sites. Search engines have of course gotten much more sophisticated, and they can tell when users act like your content is useless. They do this by measuring things like bounce rates.

So you need to write content that is so attention grabbing that users want to come back.

How do you do this?

You do want to be relevant to your industry, but you need to be unique.

No one cares about a window cleaning company’s take on the US presidential elections, right?

But maybe that window cleaning company can demonstrate a bizarre connection, like showing that window sales soar right before a Republican is elected. That is interesting and totally shareable.

And also made-up, but you get the idea.

But it also proves another point:

Your content can deviate from what your business strictly does.

So a post that shows a correlation between clean windows and elections has little to do with the day-to-day aspects of cleaning windows, but it gets people clicking on your site. And telling other people. And coming back later.

 

If you put up this interesting, shareable content regularly, and you should rank in normal search results and in real-time, Twitter and Facebook searches. Which means you’re everywhere people look for information online. And even the people who didn’t know they were looking for you will find you.

 

Photo credits:

Google lego by manfry on Flickr

Cheerleader by Rick Scully on Flickr

Man decorating tree by meemal on Flickr

Cutest fight ever by Sarah_Jones on Flickr

Window cleaners by pmorgan on Flickr

You just spent a hearty amount of time with consultants, at a conference, or in front of your computer screen learning about linkbuilding. The plan is perfect and the execution is going just as well. Rankings are going up, traffic is sky rocketing, and your boss loves you.

Then you notice a competitor is climbing the rankings one day. You do some research to identify what they are doing (hey, you might learn something new!) and alas, they are copying all the links you have built. Every good directory you found, the content you built, and the tactics you are using are being copied.

No Fair! Right?

Copying is Common

Think back to any good SEO training and you will see a part on competitive analysis, the same goes for link building training. Experts tell you to utilize tools like SEOmoz’s Open Site Explorer and Linkscape, Raven’s Site Finder, and so many more to identify those good links that you can duplicate.  It’s a great tactic, until someone does it to you. So how do you deal when someone does it to you?

Get links they can’t duplicate easily!

The trick here is to get the good links, the golden ticket links … editorial based links that only come from consumers. And how do you get them? Well that’s the no so easy and non-duplicable part.

Go Unique

You have to have a site/company/idea that is truly unique and demanded by the public. Think about the wins in this world. They were the companies that started it. They had the “idea” and pushed for it. Think about Snuggies. That could have been a massive failure, but now is a complete win. It was a novel idea and they pushed it hard.

Go Viral

Brainstorm a great idea for a contest, an infographic, something that people will link to. Remember the snuggie. That went viral because people thought the idea was so ridiculous that they had Pub Crawls in Snuggies. And now, they make them for your dog. They are hits at every Christmas party.

Yes, I know it is easier said than done to go viral, but you have to work at this so that you beat your competitors out in the end.

Go Social

Then you have to be there when your customers need you. Being a good company that responds to customers, in good times and in bad, are the ones that will get the link. Be that company that changes a bad post from an irate customer into a great post about how you went out of your way to help them.

In the end, the best way to deal with copycats is to be unique. Don’t go after the directories. Don’t do what is easy. Don’t use a company to link build, use your idea/product/service to do it for you. That is what will spell success now and in the future.

One of the features of Google Analytics is the ability to view the $index value of a certain page, but do you know what it means and how to use it?

How $index is calculated

$index is calculated by looking at which pages are viewed on the way to a person making a purchase or completing a goal.  The more unique views a page gets on the way to a purchase or goal, the higher its $index will be.  I’d advise that you take a look at the definition from Google as it is more in depth and includes some nice visuals to help you understand it.  Here is one of the visuals which is very useful:

Ecommerce Revenue + Total Goal Value
Number of Unique Pageviews for Given Page

Remember, it doesn’t tell you exactly how much revenue a page earned, it just gives you a rough idea of how valuable that page is in your conversion funnel.

You must have two things setup in your Analytics profile for this data to be reported -

• Goals tracking
• The goals must have a value assigned to them

Limitations of the $ index metric

One of the problems with the $ index metric is that it can be skewed very easily, so you need to make sure that you filter the data accordingly to take into account any pages that can do this.  Here are a few examples of pages that you may wish to filter out -

• Checkout process steps on an ecommerce website
• Thank you pages
• Pages with less than x number of pageviews (relative to the size of your site)

I’ll show you how to filter out this unwanted data below.

Also, as with all metrics, you should not focus on this as a single metric to define the success of a page or website.  You need to take into account all of the available metrics when deciding what action to take to improve your website.

Actionable ways to use the $index metric

See which pages are most valuable

1. Go to Content > Top  Content

2. Sort by the $index column

3. Filter out pageviews below a certain amount, this depends on the size of your site but essentially you just want to get rid of any pages with very low views

4. If you have an ecommerce site, you will also want to filter out any pages related to the checkout process as these can skew the figures

You now have a list of which pages people most commonly visit on the way to your conversion page.

What you can use this data for

Compare and contrast high value vs low value pages

There is a really easy way to compare which pages are performing well against the site average and which ones are not doing well.  After you have completed the process above, just look for this option:

When you have clicked on this, select $ index from the drop down menu, then you will see something like this:

This is very actionable data, the example above clearly highlights which pages are performing well below the site average.  So we can take a look at those pages and try to work out why this is the case.  Sometimes there is a logical explanation for pages having a very low $ index value, which you need to take into account.  However you can still get some great insights into your content by using this simple method.

Finding which sections or categories contribute most to conversions

You can drill further into this data and filter out certain sections of your site, for example you could choose just to view a certain category of content or certain category of products.  Here is the process for finding the value of sections of your website:

1. Go to Content > Content Drilldown:

2. Its now just a case of clicking on the sections of content that you want to drill deeper into

3. Once you are in the section of content you want to analyse, click on the Comparison option:

4. Select $ index from the drop down menu

5. You can now see a graph of how sections of content compare to each other in terms of $ index

Checking if a page is above or below the site average $ index

If you navigate to either a single page or a section of content using the methods above, you will see this on the right hand side:

This gives you a quick indicator of how a specific page or section performs in relation to the rest of the site.  We’d advise a little caution here though as we’re not sure how the site average figure is calculated.  We’re not convinced that $ index numbers can be averaged, so we’d advise caution on this point.

Other Uses of the $ index Metric

If I’m being honest, I have always struggled a little to come up with unique and meaningful uses of the $ index metric.  Most of the data it reveals are generally available through other parts of analytics.  So if you have any other uses for this metric, feel free to leave a comment below.

Imagine my surprise as I was sitting in the Philly airport, reading a copy of Lucky Magazine, that I should come across something I love. It’s an advertisement from Bing. Yes, I said love. It’s a blatant advertisement, and it’s from Bing (stop groaning, they are getting better!).

The total win is that they are using the community (aka Blogger Jen Lula) to reach online shoppers. Magazine readers like me who go online to find the products we like in magazines. Priceless.

 

Here is what Bing is doing right (and wrong) and what you might think about in your social and link building plans.

Mix Your Style in with the Medium

Bing’s Play: The ad looks just like any other section of the magazine with specific articles of clothing and accessories, cost and designer. It’s well integrated with the magazine’s feel, but also has a blatent “Presented by Bing” at the top.

If you are doing a campaign with Facebook, Twitter, Lucky, or Men’s Health, match your campaign to your company and the medium. You want to be transparent in the fact that you are advertising, but also want to keep the continuity of the publication. Think about adding a blog into your site using wordpress. The best theme is going to be your own site. You want a seamless transition between your site and wordpress. In a magazine, having an ad look something like a page from the magazine with good content is awesome. But make it plain as day that it’s you, not the magazine editors. No hiding things.

Involve the Community

Bing’s Play: The social part of this is that the advertisement included a shout out to a fashion blogger and included some fashion ideas for readers.

Including a member of the community is a sure fire way to get in with the crowd. But more than that, it opens up the playing field for that community leader. In this ad, Jen will surely add more readers to her blog from this exposure and I am sure will become a Bing user for some time. It’s a win-win situation for everyone involved, including the brand. Remember karma is a real thing in business. Show the love, and the love will be returned.

Give them a Reason to Visit

Bing’s Play: Included in the ad is a giveaway integration with Bing, Style, and Jen.

Be one of the first 75 readers to upload a photo of your favorite Bing fashion find to StyleSpotter.LuckyMag.com and win a studded cluth from Lucky. Visit StyleSpotter.LuckyMag.com for expert shopping advice from Jen.

You can’t get much better than a push to purchase from a Bing search and then throw in consumer generated content to Style, and reference the expert level advice from Jen. This promotion has it all within 2 sentences. When pushing a social media/link bait promotion, don’t make it all about you, and give people a good reason to visit and link to your site. The more it’s about them, the better your campaign will do.

Include New, Fun Technology

Bing’s Play: In a final knock out punch, they included a mobile tag to be read by Microsoft Tag on the user’s mobile device.

Talking to the younger generation is all about what else their mobile phone can do. This little tag stands out on the page (differentiation, think 1998 when magazine ads didn’t always include a URL) and makes the user use a Microsoft service.

Downside: the link goes to mobile Bing only. Now how cool would it have been to include in that tag a link to all the products on the page and where they can be purchased? #justsayin

One Note to Bing

You have search boxes to the products on the page, but they are VERY general searches. How about for a month or so having a one-box type of thing displaying that product for that very general search? Or at least hand coding those glasses into a search for “oliver peoples eyeglasses” because that frame just would not show up for me. Minor fail there guys.

Howdy folks! This week I’m taking a look at how to make the most of existing communities and what you need to focus on if you decide to create your own all with hopes of increasing links and improving your SEO strategy.

 

1. Plan ahead!

It really is a shame when a campaign goes hot and no attention has been paid to the potential SEO benefits. Linking the campaign back to the site is absolutely essential here. If you have a great idea there is almost always a way to ensure when it spreads like wildfire, you will still get all the benefits.

I have seen so many great campaigns on Facebook that do nothing to tie the information back to the main site and take advantage of the potential links. Most of the campaigns that take place on Facebook could just as easily be embedded into the main site and create a serious SEO impact.

If, for example, Ikea had created a page on the Malmo website with a countdown before a “major announcement to win free Ikea furniture” before revealing the link from the Ikea site the campaign could have captured a shed-load of links. Instead, by virtue of running the entirity of the competition on the Facebook page, this ingenious marketing plan may have gained a great deal of exposure, but will have gained very few links.

 

2.    Get Others to Work for You

As the title suggests, sometimes the easiest short term solution is to tap into existing networks. We’re not talking about blog spamming someone else’s niche blog, but rather tapping into existing communities and offering something that is of interest to them, and no one has done this better than Pepsi.

I’m not trying to say what Pepsi is doing here is bad or dishonest, on the contrary they have made the most of existing communities by engaging them in their most recent campaign by rewarding them.  As part of their “refresh” campaign Pepsi pits charities against each other and the most number of votes wins. The contest starts over monthly and with all of the widgets and social media options built into these campaigns it should be no surprise that these pages can rack up a good number of links and can help with brand recognition as well. It might have been smart for Pepsi to have built this as a section on the existing homepage but I imagine they get enough links as it is.

Image from: Pepsi Refresh

We don’t all have $250k to give away to charity each month, but there are always creative ways to tap into existing communities (charities in this case) and get them to spread the word for you.

 

3.    Provide Valuable/Interesting Information

I know, I know we’ve all heard this one before but it’s true. Everyone has something to offer and some data that within their very own company that can tell an interesting story. And it won’t just be of interest to your country if it’s done right, but in fact to your entire industry.

Sometimes doing research isn’t all that much fun. But, with that said, it can be a pretty darned effective way to get links. While this may not seem the most obvious of techniques, it certainly is one of the most effective. If your brand is an industry leader and you have an existing community why not share information with others in the industry?

The age-old example of this technique is OKCupid. Their information may not always be the most “valuable” (I guess that depends how hard-up you are for a date) but it certainly is interesting and entertaining.

Perhaps the most valuable lesson for this technique is: make it accessible. It doesn’t take that much extra effort to make a nice infographic, table or chart to spice up your information… and it makes users a whole lot more willing to link.

And finally, once you’ve got this fancy infographic or lovely chart make it easy for the user to share it on their blog, in their social network, etc. A little embed code won’t be that hard to add in and you may be surprised how much it will help spread the love. Which brings us to our next point…

 

4.    Make it Easy

If your site is going to have loads of videos, recipes, etc. Invest in the dev work to make this information more easily shared. It’s great (and very easy) to use YouTube and Vimeo to embed files into your site without hosting it yourself. However, having control over this content and control over the links associated with the content when shared can come in pretty handy. It may be worth building your own video player, MP3 player or other multimedia share agent (as Today’s Big Thing demonstrates below).

It’s nice of YouTube and Vimeo to offer the common web user the opportunity to create, embed and share video easily, but at the end of the day these sites will be the ones getting most (if not all) of the SEO benefit when your hilarious video goes viral.

*Before you go crazy on pre-loading these videos with valuable anchor text links be sure to read this post from seoMOZ on Widgetbait Gone Wild.

 

5.    Awards

Everyone loves to be recognised. So, what better way to get a link from a community member than to shower them with praise and award them with incentive to link back to you!?

Sometimes these may not be particularly meaningful in the grander scheme of things and there may be some much more “important” industry awareds, but that doesn’t mean they will be any less important or motivating to the recipient.

From: The Dress Barn

Perhaps it is a “contributor of the month” badge. Or an “Outstanding Local Business Award”. The size and importance of the award will vary depending upon the size of the awarding body (i.e. your brand). If you run a business employing 2 staff and give your local pub an “Outstanding Local Business Award” it’s unlikely that they will post this on their website or hang it up on the wall. However, some of your smaller local businesses may be over the moon and happily link out, show your badge and mount a plaque. There is no way to know until you ask- and everyone loves to feel special.

 

6.    When all else fails, create your own community.

In the interest of transparency it is worth pointing out that this post was inspired by my father’s recent work in building a community for the food industry and a place where his clients can create their own space and direct traffic to the site. He asked for some advice in building this up and I was super proud that he was interested in how SEO could benefit not only him, but also all of the clients who signed up to participate.

This route takes considerably longer to see through. Building an active and engaged community will not happen overnight (and has been the feature of a number of other blog posts). but the benefit of creating your own is that you can make the community work for you in the most SEO friendly way from the get go. Done properly, building a community around your brand can save you tons of man hours on outreach and linkbuilding campaigns. Completely changing your brand and brand positioning can be a daunting and difficult task. Creating a new community as part of this process alleviates some of the tension around this task and will hopefully save you from uncomfortable transformations in the future. Just like with information architecture when building a website: if you get it right in the first place it will make everything run so much more smoothly and effectively in the long run.

Image from: 27B/6 (Probably NSFW)

It’s probably unrealistic to think you’ll create the “next Facebook” or “next Twitter” (though you never know!) but that doesn’t mean that smaller niche communities are not valuable resources. These communities, when executed properly, tend to be much more engaged and thereby more likely to generate the right kind of buzz and drive the right kind of traffic… even if they don’t drive the massive amounts of traffic you may have been hoping for.

Message boards may be old-school from a technology perspective but you’d be surprised how many people still use them and the willingness of people to give you the shirts off their back in the most engaged of communities.

If it comes to creating your own community you might want to check out Rich Millington’s blog about online communities. In addition to his how-to start a new community, you might want to read “Why Most Organizations Shouldn’t Try to Create an Online Community.” Rich suggests you only need to create a community “when your audience has a desire to talk to each other and when there is a benefit to the audience from talking to each other.” Rich also suggests that this will only be the case about 10% of the time so be wary about using this method unless you’ve done your research!

As you may have realised by now, creating a community should not be the first choice here. If there aren’t any existing communities that you can put to work for you, or you are building a new site then this may be a great adventure but it will take lots of work and has to be done right. If the platform already exists put it to work, if it doesn’t… be the platform, or prepare to groan and moan when someone else creates the next Twitter.

The background: in 2009, Google Analytics added a feature – Multiple Custom Variables – which allows you to store additional data in Google Analytics – specifically name/value pairs at a visitor, visit or pageview level. You can then segment and report based on these custom variables (CVs), to discover new things about your visitors that would not have previously been possible.

The implementation: there’s information about actually storing information in a CV on the Google Help pages, and there’s a very readable post on the Actual Metrics blog.

So what are the 6 Cool Things?

Well, I’ve been thinking a lot recently about new things to do with the CVs, so this list is a variety of ideas for things that YOU might be able to implement on YOUR website, and start discovering new insights TODAY.

1 – User Type

Many sites have users who are there for different reasons – our friends at Rated People have visitors who are either tradesmen, or home owners looking for a tradesman, and Care.com has users who are child carers (nannies, babysitters, etc) and others who are in need of child care services.

It’s often possible to categorize a user based on the pages they visit or the actions they take. By storing their user type in a CV, you can discover more about the effectiveness of traffic sources and content on different user types. It can also shed light on the traffic arriving through generic sources.

For example: if Rated People saw a spike in traffic arriving through searches for their brand name, they could investigate the traffic, to see if it was an influx of tradespeople or homeowners – and could then find out what drove the traffic spike.

Likewise, Care.com could look at the people who arrived using a search term such as “babysitter listings” to see if it was babysitter or parents who used that term, and alter the content on that landing page appropriately.

2 – Cumulative actions

You could create a CV called ‘Comments Posted’ on a per-visitor basis, and increment the number each time a user posts a comment on your site. You could then use this, or similar metrics, as a measure of engagement – this might be something that you use directly as a conversion measure (eg: commenting on 3 or more posts is a conversion) or you could use it to segment your audience (eg: finding the conversion rate of users who performed three or more site searches, versus those who did not.)

There may well be issues of cause/effect vs correlation, but if you discovered that users who watched two or more product demo videos were significantly more likely to buy a product, then you might want to consider making such videos more accessible.

3 – User specific info

To step away from data which is useful in aggregate, this is useful only on the level of each individual: simply create a CV called ‘username’ and store the name of each logged in user here. This then allows you to use GA to quickly see the content viewed by a particular user – which might be helpful from a sales or a customer service perspective.

(I was worried that this might break GA”s terms of service, but I asked the team about it recently, and they had no problem with it.)

4 - Testing the impact of your social profiles

Do you wish you knew more about what happens after people interact with you on social networking sites? Or would you like to demonstrate to a cynic that all that time your team spend on Facebook has some bottom line impact? Here’s the answer you were looking for:

Wherever you have a social media profile, fan page, etc: check to see if you can include Google Analytics there, either by directly using the Javascript, by iframing in a secret page (eg: example.com/OurFacebookFanpage) , or by hacking it with a fake img tag. (Webdigi’s most popular post ever explained exactly how to do this.)

You should then make sure that the name of the social site visited is stored in a CV. You could then segment your visitors by those who ever visited your Facebook fan page, or by those who discovered you through a social media profile, etc.

5 – Categorize your content

You can use CVs on a pageview level to bundle together different types of page. For example, a site like Nileguide might tag pages as being either country, city, attraction, bar, resturant or hotel, etcetera. They’d then be able to very quickly see how different page types perform from an SEO perspective, an engagement perspective, a conversion perspective, etc.

6 - What didn’t they buy?

If you have an ecommerce site where users add items to a basket before checking out, try creating a CV along the lines of ‘removed from basket’, and each time an item is removed, don’t throw away that information, but add it to the CV. You may want to complement this with a variable containing the items the user did evenutally buy.

Comparison of the two would be interesting on a micro level, but absolutely facinating on an aggregate level.

Bonus - First Touch Tracking

Lest we forget, Distilled has a great post about tracking how visitors first discovered your site, rather than how they most recently discovered your site – for more info read Will’s post about first touch tracking in Google Analytics.

Go forth and conquer your Analytics.

You might be able to tell that I’m encouraging you to go and try some of this stuff (or better still, any ideas you came up with whilst reading the post) as soon as possible. If you have any other ideas, or you’ve tried something similar and would like to share your epiphanies, please do so in the comments!

Howdy Distilled fans – this is just a short post. We’re looking to try out a new format for blog posts in the near future where we either do a video or screencast to go through some more practical examples and problems that websites face. We want to make sure our advice is dealing with real issues that people face so to help us do that I’ve created this handy little form to allow anyone to ask us a question!

So, if you have an SEO problem that you’d like to see discussed just drop us a question via this form. Please note the following important disclaimers:

1. Only submit questions that you don’t mind us discussing publicly
2. We won’t answer every single question, we’ll only select a few to answer on the blog. If you want to make sure you get a response either contact us or submit an SEOmoz Q&A
3. Make it interesting!

 

A few months back was the official 5th Birthday for Distilled (24th March 2010, to be precise) but there was so much going on – you know, the usual stuff: the directors having babies, the opening of our American office… It was a busy time.

Duncan mentioned to me in a meeting that he didn’t want the birthday to go by without a mention, so I set to work devising a plan to celebrate this momentous occasion. After trawling the web a few times, I found a venue, however to their loss they wouldn’t let the bambinos in. So I had to get my thinking cap back on, and eventually found Anexo.

In the beginning…

Event planning is something I know I can do well (everyone has a niche and mine is definitely organising and coordinating a good old shindig). There’s a definite process to follow in party planning – getting a team together is generally a good place to start – and you need likeminded people who are keen and happy to get stuck in. The obvious choices were picked, and we all set to work on our assigned tasks.

Leonie was my official event designer. She calculated that the sum total of work she did on the party was about a whole week’s work (40 hours)! Don’t worry, Duncan it was out of office hours, but she is sending an invoice.

The incredible bunting literally covered the whole of the venue was meticulously made (whenever I assisted there were strict quality control measures in place; she is a serious perfectionist and who can blame her), each piece taking around 8 minutes in total to make from cutting, sewing, ironing and stitching.

The end result can be seen in many of the pictures, and this bunting is going to remain with Distilled for as long as can be, so if you happen to come to another Distilled bash, expect to see it again (thanks Leonie, you are an absolute star).

Sarah ordered some fantastic cupcakes for the party, made by the Little Bird Bakery. There were a few cupcakes left over which were greatly appreciated the day after the night before, for that much needed Friday fix, and there were also a great deal more takeaway coffee cups than usual scattered around the office on Friday morning

The Big Day

The evening went off without a hitch. Guests began arriving around 6pm, and everyone was outside enjoying the sunshine (thank you Mr. Weather Man for your most accurate report), good chat, champagne and our very own Distilled branded cocktails were enjoyed:

I looked around, and a sea of happy faces were smiling back. Now we just needed to await the honouree guests!

Heather and Suzi brought the newest Distilled recruits Rachel and Edward. Though this was their first Distilled party, they were clearly the stars of the show!

Also a special thanks to Duncan and Will’s mums, who both came all the way down from Harrogate to celebrate – we were so happy you could all be there.

The honourees’ arrival

Tom was in charge of making sure Will and Duncan got to the party, and as a decoy he took them to The Distillers pub in Farringdon for a pint first. Finally, around 7pm we could all see the boys walking towards the bar, and Jamie – our photographer for the night (thanks Jamie, by the way, the pictures are fantastic!) – papped away as they got closer, and so the “surprise” was finally revealed.

I say “surprise” in this way because a few months back I had to convince Will and Duncan that giving me a budget to spend would be worthwhile to them, and since then my to-do list each week had included ‘secret stuff’ …. (Thanks guys for bearing with me.)

The food…

Leonie, Sarah and I had previously been for a free tasting lunch of the food that was to be served at the party (thanks to Craig at Anexo),  and the food was just as yummy on the night.

We had a barbecue going with mini kebabs for all, and then as we all made our way upstairs, the tapas buffet was served, and it was delicious. A big thanks has to go to all the staff at Anexo – they were totally on it and made my life very easy (I am not sure I did the same in return, as I can get quite bossy when required! )

… Then Speeches and Presents

Everyone tucked into the tapas, and then it was time for the speeches, which I am sure everyone will agree were fantastic. Duncan and Will expressed so warmly their love for their families, their company and their staff. As far as bosses go, Will and Duncan are a dream to work for, and Distilled really is an awesome place to be!

I just want to say a massive thank you to everyone for attending and making the party such a success, and for those that couldn’t be there, well, you missed out, but perhaps you can come to the 10th!

Last and final thing, a thanks to the SEOmoz crew for sending a special video thank-you message, which sadly could not be shown on the night due to a technical fault (not my speciality), but it ended up being a next-day treat for Will and Duncan.

Here’s to the next 5 years, cheers!