Digital @ MC

SEO Basics

The basics and background reading for learning SEO

Moz’s (Formaly SeoMoz) Beginner’s Guide to SEO

Its been read over a million times as stated on the front page, at the very least you’ll know as much as the competition

The Beginner’s Guide to Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is an in-depth tutorial on how search engines work. This guide covers the fundamental strategies that make your websites search engine–friendly. Download your copy of the world’s most-read guide on SEO!

Moz is also a good tool to start your SEO with.

Google’s Search Engine Optimization Starter Guide

From 2010 so read with this in mind, but its good to get an insight into what Google thinks of SEO

This document first began as an effort to help teams within Google, but we thought it’d be just as useful to webmasters that are new to the topic of search engine optimization and wish to improve their sites’ interaction with both users and search engines. Although this guide won’t tell you any secrets that’ll automatically rank your site first for queries in Google (sorry!), following the best practices outlined below will make it easier for search engines to crawl, index and understand your content.

Quick Sprout’s Guide to SEO

Infographic styled ebook from the co creator of Kissmetrics, Quickegg  – Neil Patel

Hi. I’m Fi - I’m Senior Digital Channels Manager at Marie Curie. In short, I lead the development of the Marie Curie website, working with our (super-awesome) scrum team to deliver new website features and fixes every two weeks. 

But enough about me...Today I wanted to mark an important point in the life of the Marie Curie website. Just over six months ago, we delivered a new website for Marie Curie. We went from this: 

To this: 

Our biggest changes included a new content management system (giving our content team much more flexibility), new look and feel, responsive design and a much improved navigation. Not to mention lots of new content and enhanced user experience.   Six months on feels like a good time to reflect. It’s been pretty non-stop since our December launch. We’ve delivered many a new feature in this time, and more importantly learnt a lot about what we released on day one. 

Analysis and insight has been key - as well as feedback from our stakeholders. Some of the things we thought would work, didn’t. Others worked better than expected. It’s always important to remember that we’re building things based on assumption - it’s not until we get these features out there that we truly know how our users will interact with them. That’s why it’s so important to keep testing, adapting and learning all the time.  Some key lessons the last six months has taught me? 

Make sure you think about your analytics and SEO requirements when you’re creating new features - the last thing you want to do is get stuff out there and not be able to measure it. 

Challenge yourself to be strict when you’re prioritising - although it’s hard, it’s not always about who’s shouting the loudest 

Make sure give people plenty of visibility of what you’re doing. Digital shouldn’t be the ‘cool kids in the corner’ - people will be much happier to wait for a new website feature if they know all the other things you might be working on 

Don’t try and take on too much at once - you end up with a stressed team and could compromise quality (back to point number 2!) 

No matter how hectic things get, or when things go wrong, don’t forget how much you’ve achieved. 

So Agile was the big thing of the last few years, now as we all know its now LEAN ( soon to be my trademarked LaGILE (LEAN + AGILE :))

This is one of my favorite interview questions for a web developer. Searching Google is something we now take for granted, but it  actually relies on a huge amount of technology. This is an comprehensice look at each of those parts.

The key to digital disruption*?

Working in London, we are lucky enough to have a vibrant city right out of our window where there is a huge community of knowledge sharing groups covering just about any topic you can imagine. Shameless plug - I run one  

Our friends at DAM digital decided to take the Digital team out on a date a few weeks back which was very nice of them.

All good first dates involve Bowling, beige food and a good level of friendly competition. Some people though can take things a little seriously..........

A great example of the internet working in a way that nobody intended are meme’s. These viral pockets of creativity and energy spread with such speed and generate engagement levels that would make even the most ambitious marketing manager envious.

Introducing #HipstaCop

http://www.irishexaminer.com/examviral/fun-times/the-hipster-cop-who-went-viral-on-twitter-just-got-his-own-comic-strip-330387.html

And the incredibly cartoon...