My name’s Ed Fry, I’m 16 years old and I’ve had the opportunity to spend two weeks in the Distilled office in Cannon Street, working with the SEO team. Besides learning more advanced search optimization skills, just commuting across London at rush hour was a mission in itself – I ended up hopelessly off-course on my first day – oh, and mastering underground etiquette was another new and alien experience.

Anyways, this post is a lil’ documentary of what I did and learnt.

Day 1 in the Distilled Office: “Lost in London”

Late, sweaty and slightly lost, I arrive at 72 Cannon Street and press the buzzer. A click announces the door hath been opened and I made my way up the stairs. Lynsey, who handles most of the HR at Distilled, meets me in the stairwell and welcomes me with a smile.

Walking through the doorway, the SEO team are sat on the sofa’s brainstorming this weeks blog posts. Distilled spend some of their time creating content for the Distilled blog but also for SEOmoz blog and recently Search Engine Land. Tom Critchlow, Head of Search is first to jump up and introduces himself, with the rest quick to follow.

The Distilled folks have an awesome office. As you walk in, there’s the sofas with an array of web-related magazines. To the right lies the boardroom and to the left, the main office space. Going round the corner, you pass the web dev team and enter the kitchen – when plentiful supplies of tea, coffee and fruit can be found.

 

 

Next, I get shown to my desk (yeah, my own desk!). Basking in the morning sunlight lay a souped-up dual-screen computer – my home away from home for the next two weeks. Meanwhile, a glass of water and stationary appears on my desk. So far, not too bad right?

Later that first morning, after setting up dozens of Google apps Distilled use, we got a two-hour ‘SEO training for n00bs’ from Tom. I say ‘we’ – Distilled had taken on two trainees, Mark and David who were learning SEO from scratch, and they were starting on the same date as me. So we bunkered down in the boardroom to learn how to do SEO, and how Distilled do SEO – yes there is a difference.

The afternoon brought about a talk in the boardroom with Duncan, where he sort of asked me what sort of stuff I had done before and what I wanted to get out of the two weeks. It was then also I asked about SEOmoz PRO membership. Moments later, I was staring at the SEOmoz PRO dashboard on my own account. If you’ve read about SEOmoz PRO before, you can see why I was excited about this.

So I sat around and played with the Moz toys (I love the juicy link finder)… until Tom approached me. He was planning an SEOmoz blog post on conversion rate optimization for newspaper paywalls and he needed to enlist some help in acquiring data to make an interesting and awesome post. Paywalls are a hot topic right now, especially since The Times Online has only just started charging for content here in the UK.

Finally, before I left on that last day, Lynsey comes up to and very politely suggested I take Exit 8 at Bank in future. Thank you! (more…)

In our effort to continue to make Distilled a great and productive place to work, we have decided to trial a summer hours scheme. The summer hours scheme is a form of flexible working time that is currently offered at a number of agencies and large corporations across the UK and the US. For example, Kellogg’s have run a similar scheme for more than 6 years and have seen a great success from it.

Distilled has decided to try out our first summer hours scheme for 8 weeks, from 9 July to 27 August.

The basic equation:

An extra 45 min of work Monday – Thursday =

½ day on Friday (afternoons off)

 

What this means to clients:

We’ll still be working the same numbers of hours each week, and we are still as dedicated as ever to meeting all deadlines and project objectives. The summer hours scheme is optional, is a privilege for our team and will not get in the way of our service or dedication to our clients.

The only real difference will be that our offices will be shut from 1pm on Fridays.

 

What this Means to Distilled:

We strongly believe in a work-life balance, and we feel that this will help us to keep up office morale, encourage strong time management and lead to an overall decrease in stress across the team. We are giving everyone the choice to opt in or out of the scheme, and we have made it very clear that this is just a trial to see how things work.

 

All in all, we are very excited about the possibilities that come with flexible working hours. We will carefully manage its effect on our utilisation of resources, and we expect some very positive returns.

We welcome all feedback from clients, and we would be more than happy to discuss this with you further should you have any questions or concerns.

 

Photo credits:

Brockwell Lido on http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Brockwell_Lido_1938.jpg

Closed Sign by  www.flickr.com/photos/lwr/144004119/

Cat Photo: flickr.com/photos/ryanjunell/763835380/

 

There are a bunch of online apps and services that make running Distilled much much easier, and I wanted to share these with you. This is mostly written from my perspective at Distilled LLC (our new American office) – as I wanted to give some idea of how we function as a small, flexible company. I also didn’t feel it was fair to keep some of these tools to myself – as they might help you be more focused, productive or cost-efficient.

The ‘Must Haves’

These are the apps which literally keep our business running; everybody uses them, and they’re working well for us.

Dropbox*

The ’shiny new toy’ of the webapp world; Dropbox provides an incredible service; at its most basic, you can sync a folder across multiple computers and backup the files on their servers. Their basic package is free, but you get more space on a premium account.

For Distilled, each staff member has an account, and we share our project files on it – allowing each person to have access to all necessary files from their desktop, without us having to run any kinds of classic shared drives or network storage devices.

 

 

If you’re not on Dropbox already, it’s definitely worth giving it a try – even if only as a way to make sure your most important folders are backed up in the cloud. And if you do want to give it a go, use this link to:

get an extra 250MB of free space

when you sign up. (* I get some extra space as well when you use these links.)

Skype

When we first launched Distilled in America, it was anticipated that we would outgrow our office within the first year. (In fact, three months later, we’re already about to move, and the new office has had to have been extended before we even moved in.) I didn’t want to sign up to a long term telephone contract, or have the difficulty of porting numbers between buildings when we move.

Using Skype lets us have a Seattle phone number that calls our computers for about $6/month. (Adding phone numbers in other cities or countries costs about the same, and means that people can call you from abroad without it costing them overseas rates.) We can receive calls wherever we are logged in – so being at conferences, airports or in our UK office doesn’t mean I’m unavailable.

For $3/month per person, each staff member has unlimited calls to anywhere in the US and Canada – that price is only $14/month for unlimited worldwide calls.

 

 

 

Of course, all this relies on you having an internet connection in your office (I’m assuming you do) and there can be a little bit of fiddling to get the audio levels right on each computer, but all together, I’d highly recommend it for any small business that needs  a flexible phone system.

Google Apps

In contrast to Dropbox – a solid service that does just one thing well – Google Apps is a massive heavyweight that fulfills a huge number of roles. We primarily use it for email and calendars (all our Distilled email in the UK and US runs through the system) – and although you could just use it as an email POP server, the Gmail interface is my favorite user experience of any webmail service or desktop mail client. The calendar ‘just works’.

Also part of the bundle is Google Docs, most useful for its spreadsheet application which is fairly limited in terms of functions, but brilliant for collaborative data capture, editing, etc. For example: there are a bunch of internal files (blog post ideas and schedules, holiday calendars, link building resources, financial information) that we store there, and the user permissions allow us to restrict files to particular people or teams.

We also use the ‘Google Sites’ application; like a private ‘wiki’, it’s a collaborative site building tool, and we use it to power our private intranet. It also includes a local version of Google Wave – the less we say about that the better.

For businesses, Google Apps costs $50 per-user-per-year, which is a reasonable cost, even if just to save the hassle of managing mail servers.

 

The Blue Ribbon Apps

There are a variety of apps that we also use at Distilled, which aren’t as ‘mission critical’ but having tested out the alternatives, we’ve settled on these.

Toggl.com

Distilled has always taken a fairly relaxed view to internal management practices such as time tracking. We believe that the real value is to help you identify which projects and task-types are efficient or profitable, and which areas need looking at more closely. We don’t use it as a tool to keep tabs on what our staff are doing for each minute of the day, and I’ve always believed that time tracking should be very painless and take very little time out of the day.

There are a few tools that focus on time tracking, but we’ve just started using Toggl for our teams in the UK and the US.

 

 

From a management perspective, it has a web interface that lets me get to project and task data, and allows me to export exactly the kind of reports I need. Perhaps more importantly from a user’s perspective, they can input time using the website, a desktop app or an iPhone app. The app even lets you select the task/project you’re working on, and then hit a timer button to record time while you’re working, so there’s no need to log anything later on. Hopefully, the easier it gets to log time, the more useful data we’ll collect as a team.

MailChimp

Distilled has a mailing list of around 1,000 subscribers, who receive information about our SEO conference calls. Mailchimp handles the subscriptions and the sending with ease, and serves up friendly stats to help you grow your list and manage your campaigns.

 

 

 

GoToMeeting

With clients all over the world, we often need to arrange conference calls with groups of people in different locations. Go To Meeting allows each meeting participant to ‘call in’ using their phone or computer – and it supports sharing of the meeting coordinator’s desktop.

 

 

The company also makes GoToWebinar which we’ve used in the past for our free SEO training conference calls. (Did I mention you should sign up to find out when the next one will be?)

 

The Others

There are some tools that individuals prefer to use for different parts of their job.

Rescue Time

I heard about this tool from Alexis Ohanian, who claimed it was making him a ninja with his time. It sits quietly on your computer, recording every application and website you use. It returns reports to you, specifying the percentage of your time spent on productive tasks, and doing things that might have just been time wasting.

 

 

 

I’ve not been in the office a lot since I started using it, so have’t collected a lot of data, but it’s definitely starting to be interesting already. I’d definitely recommend some manual tweaking though – lots of my clients’ websites are registered as being ‘distracting’, so my efficiency stats were dreadful at first. Give it a go, but be prepared for some surprises.

Oh – and the ‘Get Focused’ mode will block any distracting websites for an hour, to force you to get on with some work.

Remember the Milk

Distilled employees use a variety of systems for their ‘task management’ – from lo-tech wirebound notebooks to hi-tech online systems. Some ‘Distillers’ recommend Remember the Milk – an app which allows you to input tasks and read your to-do list online or on your mobile.

Evernote

This tool lets you capture thoughts, ideas and notes very quickly – and find them again more easily that other similar systems might allow. In particular, people who follow the ‘Getting Things Done’ method of task management will find it a useful place to start the process by capturing anything that needs to be processed later on.

Twhirl and Tweetdeck

I’ve always been happy to read and post to Twitter via the website, but some people definitely prefer a desktop app – particularly if they want to watch the tweets from a smaller group of their friends.

I’m tempted to take another look at these now – I think Tweetdeck might be up my street – but take your pick if you’re looking to graduate up from the ‘plain vanilla’ website.

 

 

 

 

 

 

SEOmoz

I’m not going to give SEOmoz a plug here just  because we’re associates of theirs, but because for small and medium sized businesses without a dedicated search team, their Pro membership is an invaluable tool to help manage your SEO marketing. Plus, they’re currently really busy on a product launch that will (and I don’t say this lightly) change the way some organizations do SEO – check this out and keep an eye on their site for more info.

 

 

 

 

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!

Its been less than two months since we announced that we were to open Distilled Consulting, our American wing.

Our new office is now open, and Rob has moved to Seattle where he’s been busy with some great clients and with recruiting an expert SEO team. We’re proud to announce our first new member: Kate Morris has joined the Distilled team as an SEO Consultant.

Kate joins us after a year on her own as an independent search marketing consultant. Kate is a speaker on the conference circuit with shows like PubCon, SMX London / East, and Affiliate Summit East / West under her belt. She brings with her a wealth of experience, bags of enthusiasm, and a sense of humour (humor!), all of which are incredibly important at Distilled.

We are super excited that Kate is joining our team, and look forward to the impact she will have on our clients. Kate shares many of our fundamental beliefs about how to define and execute online strategies and is already embedded in the SEOmoz way of life which saves us a job.

Kate had the following welcome to add.

Its only been a couple of weeks since we announced that we were opening an office in Seattle. The last couple of weeks have been a hive of activity and there is a definite buzz in the air at Distilled HQ.

Over the next week or so I’ll be posting a handful of new jobs at Distilled. If you have always wanted to work with us, then now is a great opportunity to join.

The first person we are looking for is an experienced SEO Consultant to join the team in our London office. Incidentally, we also have a couple of roles in our new Seattle office.

We have ambitious plans for growth, so if you want to be a part of that, I suggest that you check out the roles available and apply.

If there isn’t a suitable role at the moment, you should follow @duncanmorris or @distilled on twitter, to ensure you hear about any new roles we post.

The message in the length of a tweet: Distilled is opening an office in Seattle and taking over SEOmoz’s consulting business.

This might be the single biggest step we have ever taken. In some ways, it’s bigger than when Duncan and I first started the company. When we started, we had very little – no contacts, few assets, no clients and no employees. Personally, we were both unmarried and renting. Over the last (nearly) 5 years, we have grown a ~£1m business that employs 16 people, both got married, bought flats, sold flats and bought houses.

It turns out that this isn’t enough. We are still shooting for 2010 to be a bigger year personally and professionally. Not only are we both starting families in 2010, but we are also taking the Distilled family to the US of A.

As many of you will know, over the last couple of years, we have worked very closely with SEOmoz:

• in 2007, we started informally working together and receiving referrals from the recommended list (including some big name brands that we are still working with today)
• in mid-2008, we teamed up more formally as global associates to work together on consulting projects and contribute to Q&A and the main blog
• in October last year, we collaborated on the London PRO SEO training seminar that brought together a couple of hundred expert SEOs (and aspiring expert SEOs) for two days of fantastic learning and networking

The Global Associates deal has worked well for both sides. We have worked together for some great clients (including Microsoft, Real Networks’ Film.com, Scribd.com, etsy and others) and I think we’ve written some pretty cool stuff:

• A linkbuilding method so effective I can’t believe it’s not blackhat (by Tom)
• The 3 cornerstones of SEO (one of my favourites of Duncan’s posts – maybe because he nicked the diagram from me)
• 7 ways to use the web developer toolbar for SEO (by Rob)
• How to find out what search engine users are really asking (by Rich)

I’m also told that the accent works well for Whiteboard Friday (I joined some early ones, ran some myself and am going to be appearing in a few over the next few weeks after Rand and I recorded five on my recent trip to Seattle (so far, Scott has published kill the head or chase the tail? and making clients happy).

For a variety of reasons (which I’ll let Rand elaborate on in his post on the subject – I’ll update this with a link when that’s live), SEOmoz has been moving further away from consulting over the time we have worked together (and this formed a large part of the evolving goal of the global associates relationship). In summary, though, they want to focus on growing their awesome products and community and consulting is both a distraction (especially a time-sink on Rand personally) and a potentially confusing message for agencies considering using Linkscape and paying for PRO membership. For some time, Rand, the rest of the SEOmoz management and their board have wanted to move away from this, and now the time has come to make that leap as their PRO community goes from strength to strength.

At the same time, it seems crazy to throw away such a powerful legacy of branding, success and relationships. We are focussing 100% on making our client services as good as they can possibly be and are excited about reaching ever more clients in more places.

For those skipping to the punchline, here’s the low-down:

• Distilled Limited now has a wholly-owned subsidiary, Distilled LLC registered in WA
• There isn’t much of a US web presence yet, but you can still check out distilledconsulting.com
• Rob Ousbey, one of the lead SEOs at Distilled here in London is heading West to brave the frontier and begin the process of establishing our US office
• We are opening up office in Seattle
• A relationship very similar to the ‘global associate’ deal outlined above will continue – with our staff writing for SEOmoz, answering Q&A and contributing to product decisions and testing (in exchange for which we will get loads of access to powerful tools, data and expertise)
• We will manage the SEO consulting page on the SEOmoz website and handle bespoke consulting needs for any of the SEOmoz community who would like to work with us. Rand, Scott, Gillian et al. will also continue to pass people who enquire directly to them on to us (for which we will be paying a small commission)
• We will all continue to refer to the recommended list where appropriate
• We are now hiring in the UK and the US: if you are a talented SEO or great marketing administrator, please check out our jobs pages
• Yes, we are also wondering if we did this just to make ourselves into a case study in international domain strategy.

We are already working with a number of US (and especially West-coast) companies and are hoping to announce new deals in the upcoming weeks. If you are based in the US and always really wanted to work with Distilled, but thought we only worked with UK companies, think again – now is a great time to get in touch.

To celebrate Burns Night, we ran a little competition on Twitter to give away a bottle of whisky (Ardbeg to be precise) along with a Distilled hoodie.

All people had to do in order to enter was follow @distilled or tweet the hashtag #distilledwhisky.

We had well over 100 entrants (including a few people trying to enter more than once – but more on that later).

Cooler than that, though, we had two companies contact us offering to chip in with additional prizes:

• Jura whisky offered a bottle of their whisky (and told us about their own competition on Facebook and their twitter account). They also told us about a charitable endeavour by Whyte & Mackay and Jura: auctions for Haiti
• Master of Malt chipped in a cask strength single cask 19 year old Tomatin . You can also follow them on Twitter (though I suggest buying some whisky from them would make them even happier)

To say thank you for this amazing generosity, we are sending each of them a copy of Seth Godin’s book Tribes. (Incidentally, why is his new book, Linchpin not available in the UK yet, nor on Kindle? – I’m surprised by Seth on that).

Since we ended up with such a range of prizes, we decided it would be silly to send all of it to one person, so in addition to the original prize (the Ardbeg and hoodie) which remains randomly chosen from all entrants, we have two additional winners:

• New entrants
• Special mention

But first, the main element of the competition:

The winner of the hoodie and Ardbeg

Randomly chosen from all entrants, Mat Clayton of MixCloud is the winner of the hoodie and Ardbeg. Congratulations, Mat. Please see the instructions at the bottom of the post to sort out claiming your prize.

New entrant

Since we didn’t only enter new followers into the main prize draw, there was every chance that the winner would be someone who hadn’t even heard about the competition. To balance this out a little bit (and to make sure that the awesome cask strength single cask 19 year old Tomatin went to someone who likes whisky!), we decided to do a second draw taken just from the people who specifically entered the competition.

The winner of this “surprise prize” is @jmorell. Congratulations – that is one superb whisky you’re getting there (and yes, we’ll throw in a hoodie as well as long as we still have one in your size). Please see the instructions at the bottom of the post to sort out claiming your prize.

Special mention

This chart tells a story – although we only allowed one entry per person in the random draw above, one entrant still went above and beyond and dwarfed the competition:

To re-iterate, we only counted one entry per person for the random draw. However, we have wept along with Stephen as he has failed to win macbooks on multiple occasions and we wanted him to be able to say he had finally won a Twitter competition (please Stephen, you can stop now!). So the bottle of Jura is going to Stephen. Well done

As above, we’ll also throw in a hoodie as well as long as we still have one in your size. Please see the instructions at the bottom of the post to sort out claiming your prize.

Best tweet

I also thought it worth throwing out some special mentions for innovative entries. Sorry there isn’t more whisky (or hoodies, in fact!) to go around guys, but thanks for keeping us amused – we’ll buy you a beer next time we see you at a meet-up:

• Jaamit
• Simon Barber
• Rhys Wynne

Collecting your prizes

Can you email lynsey.little@distilled.co.uk with your postal address and preferred hoodie size and we’ll get it all coordinated? We don’t have that many hoodies left so while Mat gets his choice of size from S to XL (as the winner of the original competition), the others will have to choose from our remaining stock of sizes. We’ll coordinate to sort everyone out as well as we can.

Oh, and some small print we forgot to mention in the original post – we’d love to see some pictures of you guys drinking your #distilledwhisky wearing your hoodies!

Update: This competition is now closed. Thanks to everyone who entered. You can read about the winners here

We try really hard (OK, not that hard) to hide our love of whisky and any possible influences it might have had in the naming of our company. But there is one night of the year when we don’t even pretend. January 25th is Burns Night (shouldn’t that be “Burn’s night”? Apparently not, according to the BBC). The supper to celebrate Robert Burns, eat haggis and drink whisky competes with the best national holidays around the world including Tomatina and the Superbowl (and since I’m now part-Scottish by marriage, I figure I can claim it as my own).

To celebrate Burns Night, not only will we be raising a glass, we will also be giving away a bottle of Ardbeg, one of the finest whiskies in the world (you can also follow them on Twitter).

Update: Jura have contributed a bottle of their whisky as well, so now there’s twice the reason to enter! Read more about Jura on their website, or say thank you by following the Jura Twitter account or entering their own Jura competition on Facebook.

Update 2: Well, this is super-cool, those nice folk at Master of Malt have also chipped in with a spectacular addition – a Single cask 19 year old Tomatin (cask strength). You can thank them by following them on Twitter or, you know, buying some whisky from them.

In order to tenuously link it to our company, we are also throwing in a Distilled hoodie. Limited edition (hardly anyone outside the company has one at the moment), they are super-cool, quality hoodies in dark grey with the Distilled logo and web address on them. Thank you to Lucy Watson from our web dev team for modelling the hoodie against our bright green wall.

All you have to do to enter is follow @distilled on Twitter or tweet @distilled with the hash-tag #distilledwhisky. We will be judging the winner randomly from the entrants early afternoon tomorrow GMT (26th January).

The small-print:

• We reserve the right to disqualify entrants for all kinds of manipulative or unfair behaviour (at our sole discretion). Yes, we know all your tricks. It’s for fun, people.
• We will send the prize to you wherever you are in the world, but it is your responsibility to ensure duty is paid if required (outside the UK) and that it is legal for us to send spirits to you!
• The spirit (!) of the competition is to have a bit of fun and give away some nice whisky. Please be nice and spread the word

Incidentally, if you are into whisky, I recommend checking out Connsr – the whisky social network. Here’s me on there: willcritchlow.

So, do you want to win a whisky? Just follow Distilled or tweet:

“Yes, I’d like to win a whisky from @distilled #distilledwhisky. Happy Burns Night.”

Ardbeg photo courtesy of keepwaddling1 on Flickr

Update: This competition is now closed. Thanks to everyone who entered. You can read about the winners here

This week we are going to look at some of the key similarities between those that deny climate change and those that can’t stand SEO. I thought it would be really intelligent to irritate as many people as possible in my very first blog post.

Viewer discretion is advised.

1. Both are short-sighted

This is a fairly simple one. We will consider the costs of being wrong for Me (a climate change and SEO believer) and a hypothetical Challenger (a climate change denier and anti-SEO).

Example A.

I’m wrong on both counts. I have made the client’s website better tailored to their target audience and maybe a bit of taxpayer money has been wasted on upgrades to current industrial practices that are more environmentally friendly, but not entirely necessary to prevent the extinction of the human race.

Example B.

The challenger is wrong on both counts. My client (and everyone else’s for that matter) forced your page out of the rankings after your client got desperate and had to start buying links to try to compete. Rather than take the time required to gain traffic and relevant valuable links your client is forced to take anything he can get and downloads robots to create spammy links and pays off respected sites for a link. In the process your client wastes a fair bit of money, has his page banned by Google, all because at first he didn’t believe. And then once he did, he didn’t follow the rules or take the time to do things right.

Oh yeah… and we all die. Including the cute and cuddly little polar bears.

2. Both tend towards the dramatic

As evidenced in my last point, there is room for the dramatic at both extremes. I’m not saying we should all light a candle, sing sweet tunes with an acoustic guitar, and chain ourselves to trees. I’m also not going to say “we are smarter than nature and can beat everything it throws at us.” I won’t insist that all natural disasters that destroy lives and homes every year are caused by climate change, but I’m also not stupid enough to think that we can outsmart mother nature in light of recent catastrophes. Mama Great Outdoors can stop flexing her guns now, I get it.

Similarly, I would never suggest that SEO is always an honest business. There is some shady stuff that goes on from time to time. I wouldn’t defend all the tactics that SEOs use anymore than I would defend all of Greenpeace’s tactics. However, I also have seen the ways in which SEO can work to increase traffic and conversions and can tell you right now that there a number of helpful, intelligent, and honest SEOs out there.

Will SEO help a good or service that is overpriced for which there is little-to-no demand  become profitable? I have not seen it yet, but it seems unlikely (though I won’t say impossible).

3. Both are usually unclear of what it is they are “against”

Climate what?

One of my favourite conversations to have with a self-proclaimed “climate change denier” usually starts a little something like this.

Me: “Just so I’m clear, do you deny climate change’s existence altogether, or just that man is contributing to global warming”

Challenger: “Oh, no, I don’t know… I don’t believe it is happening at all. Did you notice how cold it was yesterday?”

Now, I’m not saying that scientific consensus constitutes fact. I won’t even go so far as to claim that scientists agree (i.e. there is a consensus) that climate change is caused by man. However, you show me a scientist who says: “the general trend/average temperature has decreased over the last century” and I will show you a liar.

There are (yes I’ll say it) compelling arguments that climate change is cyclical and thus not entirely caused by humans. There are less compelling arguments that suggest climate change is not impacted by human activity. But either way, I can live with these arguments (even if the cost of being wrong could be potentially much worse in the case of the denier).

What I can’t live with is people who do not educate themselves enough to make an opinion and quite frankly spread misinformation.

SEO is cheating!

As with climate change, I am sure most SEOs have had a conversation similar to the following:

Challenger: “SEO is simple. It is also cheating and counterproductive to the work that Google does.”

Me:  “And what is SEO in your educated opinion?”

Challenger: “I’m not really sure, I think it’s when people cram a bunch of unrelated words into blog posts, send me spam to their poker sites and play with meta tags to confuse Google.”

While I have heard of people who claim to do SEO recommend some of these tactics, this does not suggest that this is in the remit of what most SEOs do. Similarly, just because Sarah Palin thinks she can see Russia from her bedside window, it does not follow that all people in Alaska are stupid.

4. Both are missing out on a clear opportunity to increase competitiveness

While this is particularly relevant for the UK (where recent legislation means that all companies will be required to reduce their carbon output based on a benchmark/reporting year), those that ignore climate change (and waste time dragging their feet rather than jump on the bandwagon) are missing out on a serious opportunity to make money and will fall behind competitors in the long run.

In addition to the millions of pounds being offered as rewards for innovation, and the opportunities for tax breaks for earth friendly transport, everyone in the UK will be forced to comply with these regulations and there is (as always) a first mover advantage to those that innovate and establish themselves at the forefront.

Similarly, with SEO, there is nothing inherently wrong with optimisation of your website(s),  and there are a number of activities undertaken by all SEOs that quite simply make sense. For example, if your website sells kittens, it doesn’t make any sense for you to use meta tags on your website that say they are about “Paris Hilton’s Latest Wardrobe Malfunction.” It does, however, make sense to make sure that your website is targeting the most relevant terms that are appropriately competitive for your business and your website.

SEO is not about “tricking” people. At the end of the day I might get a little extra traffic to my website by paying for a link with the anchor text “Chocolate Rain Interview”, but this is unlikely to lead to any conversions or meaningful gains for my company or my clients.

In every profession there are “bad apples,” but who ever said all used car salesmen are slimy? (ok, bad example)

Most SEOs are not trying to pull the wool over on the general public, we are trying to make sure our clients get found by the right people. A better, more spiderable site, much like a more energy efficient (read: inexpensive) company offer clear opportunities to increase competitiveness.

5. Both need that which they detest (a bit like Harry Potter and Voldemort)

If you type in “SEO is” in Google the first few definitions it would like to give you are “bullsh…” and “dead” (despite the fact that there at least twice as many results for “worth it” or “easy”). I’m not the first to notice this and it’s not a big deal. However, without SEO there would be no reason to complain, and to be honest, the leading post (link very intentionally excluded) for the query: “SEO is bullsh…” would have no hope of taking the top spot and generating heavy traffic.

And what does Alexa have to say about this?

Hmmmm… so this website clearly does not receive any traffic by way of SEO? Oh, wait. Nevermind.

Also, there is clear evidence of the fact that this website (which offers little more than opinion and is not filled with good content – but rather namedrops it like it’s hot) offers no clear or useful definition of SEO (which one should expect Google to target as the “most relevant” result for “SEO is…”). The existence of this post and its prominence are proof of the existence of SEO, regardless of whether or not it represents the worst possible use of SEO.

If we take the same approach for “climate change” the top result is “…a myth.” First, let me be very clear that this search was run from the UK (one of the only countries with legally binding carbon reductions) and not the US (where more than half of people do not believe in climate change).

Again, this is not the query containing the most results and certainly does not provide any information that is particularly useful. Also, without climate change many of the sites that are returned as top hits would not have any hope of ranking, least of all for a keyphrase searched with any sort of frequency. Below you can see the Alexa info for one such website.

Now ignoring completely my personal opinions on whether or not this information is valid or relevant, there is no way to argue that such sites would gain any traffic at all were they not written about salient issues. Many people probably make their livelihoods off of these websites, and though they may well be dedicated to fighting the “injustice” that is climate change, they should probably bear in mind the age-old teaching: don’t bite the hand that feeds you. Without climate change and thus “the climate change conspiracy” there would be no grounds for such a website to be viewed and no reason for anyone to read what these individuals had to say.

This argument is admittedly a bit circular but it doesn’t change the fact that many deniers would be likely forced to argue about how Barack Obama is setting up death camps instead.

In closing, deny climate change and hate on SEO all you want. In the mean time I’m gonna be helping my clients beat their competitors and ride it (public transport of course) all the way to the bank!