David Leigh

In this Search Engine Marketing 101 I’ll be writing a series of articles walking you through the steps to help you get your own site to rank well in the search engines.

I once read an articles in the Chartered Institute of Marketing’s magazine in which the author said something about website marketing which was along the lines of ’once you’ve launched your website  make sure it ranks well in the search engines”.

Well sure, but it’s easy enough to design a website with a little know how, or have it designed for you, but do you know how to make sure it ranks well? Because, believe it or not, the site design is the easy bit. The bit that will take months is to get it on the first page of Google and to do that you need to know what you are doing and you need to be really committed.

And really the approach to getting a website to rank well is no different to any other type of marketing, and basically consists of the following steps:

1. Do the research
2. Decide objectives
3. Decide what needs to be done to meet those objectives
4. Do it
5. Measure progress and decide appropriate actions
6. Repeat

Now that doesn’t sound too hard does it? What I’ll do in the rest of the series is break down those steps and look at what to do in detail to get your site to rank well.

I recently read about a leading climateologist who run a climate simulation on thousands of PCs across the world. The first stage of the process was to run multiple climate models on decades worth of historical data to find the models that worked best. The second stage was to run these selected models into the future and find out what the climate is likely to do.

The bad news is that we have just five years to stabilise atmospheric carbon dioxide, after that the natural CO2 sinks, such as the Amazon, fail and instead of removing CO2 from the atmosphere they contribute to it. If the computer models are correct it’s a pretty bleak situation.

I then started thinking about when I was at primary school, more than 30 years ago. In those days they used to talk about a coming ice age, which if it happened I seem to have missed. I don’t know what evidence they had then, but we certainly have more powerful computers, but it just shows how scientific opinion can suddenly flip.

After that I was thinking about the cold war years (and Ronnie Raygun) and the side effects of a nuclear war. Obviously most people get wiped out and the ones who survive lose their hair. But one of the predicted outcomes is a so-called nuclear winter, where the debris thrown into the atmosphere by all the giga-tonnes of warheads means that the sunlight can’t get through and so dramatically cools and we have permanent winter for decades.

And so it finally dawned on me that I’ve been underestimating George W Bush for all these years. He can continue to helm one of the world’s biggest polluters and carry on raising CO2. And he can wipe out the Iranians, the Koreans, the Chinese and Europe, completely offsetting the damage to the climate, solving planetary overpopulation and wiping out all US competition. While we’re at it, better target the Japanese too so the American car industry can pick up again.

This surely demonstrates that it really does pay to see the big picture in politics with a clear, strategic approach to all the world’s problems.

On Saturday it finally happened - I had to reinstall Win XP on my PC. Once reinstalled I then couldn’t get Outlook to work so suffered a bad tempered Sunday. All back to normal now and most of my regular software is back and functioning, and some of it works better than it did before. For example, I always had a problem with Nokia Suite when connecting my mobile phone to synchronise and backup data and now it works perfectly. Not something I’d choose to go through though, but at least no data was lost.

Imagine this; you’re going about your own business walking your dogs in a forest. The only other person around is 300 metres away in a 4X4. At the end of your walk you find a note on your car windscreen in semi-literate Spanish telling you that your dogs should be wearing a muzzle. And you find that your rear tyres have both been slashed.

That’s what happened to my parents yesterday evening and they’re pretty upset. I’ll also add that dad is 75 and suffers from high blood pressure and is bothered by the aftermath of two hernia operations.

What kind of vermin behaves like this?

The other day I talked how bad RENFE’s website is when I was trying to find a train to Valls, near Tarragona.

My reason for going was as close to a pilgrimage as I think I’ll ever get; the annual calçotada, which this year was on Sunday 28th January. A calçotada is simply a feast of specially grown spring onion called calçots, which are cooked over vines and then devoured with a sauce. Usually grilled meats accompany the calçots too.

I first came across calçots maybe 20 years ago in Meson del Conde in l’Escala on the Costa Brava. It was a cold February and many of the locals were served with a red brick roof tile containing some very charred looking vegetation of some kind. As I wanted to find out what it was they had I also ordered what turned out to be called “calçots”. I loved them and the presentation and that day marks the beginning of my obsession with calçots.

As we coundn’t find a train to Valls I decided to drive instead, and it turned out to be a good choice as Valls is around 75 minutes from Barcelona. Of course parking was a little more difficult, but once we were on foot we found that although Valls isn’t particularly pretty is is small. Armed with a map of the town provided by the organisers, complete with a timetable of events, we made our way to one square where they were demonstrating how to make the sauce. Since they were also giving away the sauce on pieces of bread there was a major scrum too, but I did managed to get two pieces for us.

After that we found the square where they were burning the fires to cook the calçots, and they even had a section available so that you could take along your own meat and cook it yourself and even though it was Sunday, all the butcher shops were open - next time we go I’ll take along some meat too I think. After watching the calçots being cooked we found a queue where we could buy a ticket to get the real purpose of our visit - to eat calçots.

Once we had our tickets we went back to the square where they were cooking the calçots and joined another queue, but after a few minutes I had in my hand what the pilgrimage was about - a bag containing 12 calçots, a half bottle of wine, a slice of bread, a pot of sauce and an official calçotada bib (I didn’t say how messy calçots are, did I?), all for just €6!

Anyway, there were a number of squares with benches set out for you to devour your feast and so once we had found our spot we laid out our food and drink and tucked in.