Personal

1. Rob Hughes’ Avatar

   I’ve decided I’ve being feeling a bit left out with my Avatar on all sites just being an old logo I designed for my holding pages that actually made no real impact, etc. and almost all other ones that I remember are because they are either the face of somebody I recognise or a graphic that is funny/stupid therefore memorable for me.

   My logo that I always normally use for my avatars is this:

   

   Although I do like that logo (I obviously have got a lot bigger versions but that is the one most to hand) it doesn’t really feel right anymore for some reason.

   I decided to upload my Skype one to my Twitter for now since it makes me smile and although a lot of people won’t understand why it does make sense to my friends (which ultimately is what matters in my eyes since I don’t monetise anything I do)

   

   I don’t think that is ultimately the logo I want to use so I think I’ll put this new avatar creation at the top of my “Things to do when bored” todo list (everybody should have one of these that they can just pick something up at random in my opinion) and then see what I can come up

2. Time to transfer feeds to Google Reader

   I’ve now decided I’m fed up of using multiple RSS readers and trying to remember to check them all everyday in case I’ve missed anything important!!!

   So, to actually do what was recommended to me by, well, everybody a long time ago I’ve now transferred all my feeds to Google Reader.

   If you can think of anything funny / interesting / feeds I should be following please feel free to share them with me, my reader profile is http://www.google.com/profiles/inverseSEO

   

3. New Design (Thanks to SEOidiot)

   Well, here at Inverse SEO I decided that after my recent move to Posterous that I actually preffered having more flexibility over everything, mainly the benefits of properly working analytics!

   So… with that in mind I contacted Paul Madden to ask him if he would mind me basing my new site design on his current design (from September 2009 according to the CSS).

   Obviously as you can see from the current layout of the site he was nice enough to let me do this, even asking to see the design once it was done which surprised me because I wasn’t expecting an invitation for future communication (even if it just be in this particular case).

   The design isn’t ‘complete’ at the time of posting this, unfortunately I’ve not yet enabled the ability to post or view comments, etc. (so I apologise if you want to comment on this before I have fixed it)

   Hopefully I’ll be able to keep with this design once, and it should encourage me to blog more!

   I’m hoping to get some detailed tutorials or basic experiments I’ve recently completed

   ***EDIT***

   Thought I’d post up this link here since people can’t see my comments or trackbacks at the minute!

   Great when people ask…Post by Paul Madden – SEOidiot

   Proves that it’s definitely worth that extra bit of effort to fire a quick email away rather than just doing your own thing!

   ***EDIT 2***

   I’ve now enabled comments and trackbacks on the site properly… users with over 3 comments (I think I’ve set it at 3 comments) get dofollow links, as long as I think it’s a trustworthy link

4. (Rob Hughes) Brand Management

   Ranking for Rob Hughes

   One thing that quite annoys me really about having websites and ‘sometimes’ updating them is the fact none of them seem to rank highly for my name, Rob Hughes.

   Although this does annoy me I strangely don’t actually ever do anything about it – considering I work in SEO, and similarly to pretty much every Search Engine Optimiser out there, I spend my time reading about it and testing things, etc.

   Even though I spend all this time doing this I never actually seem to bother writing any decent blog posts or spend any time optimising or link building for my personal website (probably mainly because I’ve got a habit of changing URLs every few months even though I really shouldn’t).

    

   I’ve read quite a few posts recently by people like Will Critchlow at Distilled who keep mentioning brand management, which although it isn’t the same thing makes me think of exactly this topic.

   Additionaly, it doesn’t help that my boss, Phill Midwinter – Head of SEO at Summit Media constantly decided he is going to announce how well he ranks for this or that (strangely the terms always seem to include the words ‘semantics’ or ‘Google’ in them).

    

   Well I know this post isn’t going to go anywhere near repairing the damage I’ve probably already caused my situation by not even considering what I post about or posting with a totally irregular pattern, etc. and there is also a lot of competition within search for Rob Hughes so that does make it additionally difficult!

   To make a start today (that I’ll probably have forgotten about tomorrow and won’t even bother trying to continue this task I’ve set myself) I’ve decided to start creating some more social media profiles with URLs that I can try and optimise, so here they are:

   • Facebook profile for Rob Hughes
   • Rob Hughes on Twitter
   • Newly created Linkedin profile for Rob Hughes
   • My Personal blog: Rob Hughes at Inverse SEO

   I think that’s all of the ones at the moment – that’s all the ones I can think of anyway so I shall leave it at this and see what happens

    

5. Fresh Start

   Ok, so now (following on from my previous post New Domain) I’ve decided that rather than just shifting the site, as a whole, straight onto the new domain I’d create myself a new template and try and re-brand myself.

   My thoughts really are, why do I spend all my time at work (and a lot of time out of work) thinking, reading, learning, talking about SEO and yet the one place that I really put my thoughts down on “paper” I rarely discuss any of this I also don’t actual practice SEO on my own site at all!!

   So… with this new template I’m going to attempt (I use the word attempt as I know how I usually drop my personal projects midway through unfortunately) to make my site SEO friendly and actually think about what I’m posting up.

   I’m also pledging to myself that I’m going to post at least one decent post a week to at least get some rhythm and consistency into the website even if I don’t really consider too much the semantics of my post.

   I’m ALSO going to use the blog to learn how to improve my copy-writing, this is a factor of SEO I know I struggle the most with and probably a very important factor when I’m writing my strategies.

   Ok, so this post is my resolution of what I’m now planning to try and do with my blog – if all goes well hopefully this post might be read by somebody in the future?

   Well for anybody reading this, feel free to leave a comment if I’ve actually stuck to the tasks I’ve set myself and my blog actual has some decent content now!

   So, my new site is now going to be on the domain http://www.inverseSEO.com/ and here is a first draft at what I’m thinking of for my layout: