SEO – Live Work Digital

Ok folks, it has taken a bit of time to update everyone with this post, “How not to make a podcast.” As we mentioned, this journey is all about learning and developing the concept as we go. With the actual subject completed at University that resulted in this project, Lisa and I are now focused on the next subject(s) of our respective degrees and our own personal lives. It is now a balance to maintain and continue both the blog and the podcast.

Lisa is going gangbusters with her E-Learning business so that is her priority. For me, I continue to drive as the country comes out of lockdown. It has become busier in some regards, but it is still a bit of treading water with Taxi drivers back on the road and more ride share drivers as well. Along with this, I am also working out my next move as I need to start thinking about what happens next after I complete the degree in November.

As much as we have slowed up a bit and reflect on our progress, it was also time to take stock of where to go with Live Work Digital.

These are the sort of things we are now assessing at this point of the journey:

Should we upgrade our WordPress blog site from the free version?
What is working with our Instagram?
What is the impact of LinkedIn?
Do we need to change our feel or branding?
Do we need to focus on branding at all?
How do we promote our podcast further?
Do we need to continue to reach out to people to get more content?

Currently we are about to launch our 5th episode and still have 2 more in the wings ready to be edited and already have another 2 or 3 potential as well which essentially covers our initial target of having a 10 episode season.

There is also the opportunity for Lisa and myself to use this platform also for our own businesses and opportunity by recording specific content that we could release. This is something that we have kept in mind throughout the journey.

As we move forward with our episodes, we will continue to find our brand and share our experiences. Our focus has been on ensuring the episodes continue on and we are organised with that area.

The purpose of the blog and the posts are to ensure that we are building our SEO presence and we continue to learn more about this area of digital marketing. Testing our presence through my personal browsers and the words Live Work and Digital, we seem to have a reasonable online presence, especially when the search is on the words with no spaces. (liveworkdigital)

Photo by Edho Pratama on Unsplash

Our images that are tagged on social media appear regularly on searches. This is because we have made the effort to ensure our images are embedded with information through the Alt Text html coding sequence. (Which we learnt from Jason Borg, our SEO Guru)

Presumably the hashtags we use are also having an impact on search results. This is also another area which requires a bit of focus. We are continuing to play around with this aspect of SEO on Instagram and LinkedIn specifically.

Photo by Jon Tyson on Unsplash

Also on search results for Live Work Digital, our videos on YouTube appear. Yes, we have a Live Work Digital YouTube Channel. It’s not a big focus, but it is there. We thought that in the long term it will obviously build our ongoing presence. More to come on that one at a later date.

The whole SEO thing has got me thinking as I have been focused on the Key Words as a starting point. The question I ask myself currently is:

Who would search for us?
What questions would be put to Google that would lead people to us?
What is the more important? The Blog or the Podcast?

As an extension on using Key Words in our blog posts (Which we do sparingly and try not to overdo it!) we want to focus on short statements at the beginning and at the end of the posts which relate to the Blog Post Heading. This is something I learnt on a podcast recently so hopefully this will add to our searchability. Which makes sense as these statements are potentially matching the questions that people potentially be entering on their Google Search for answers. For example, “How not to make a Podcast!”

We want our blog to be a portal of information to the concept of “Living and Working in the Digital World.” We want to inspire people through our podcasts by listening too and having conversations with ordinary people that are living it and doing it. Maybe we can educate people along the way and encourage them to open doors.

Anyway, My next step is now to check out and analyse how our website ranks on Google and there are some free tools that we can use. I purposefully haven’t looked at these up until this point because I want to see what impact the website has based on the things we have done on the blog. (With no clear knowledge or direction apart from actioning some things that we have learnt along the way). There will of course be a whole blog topic on this area in the future.

It has got me thinking though as to how our domain name impacts on the whole thing. This is the domain name that we started with:

https://liveworkdigital.wordpress.com/

We then captured the domain liveworkdigital.com. At the moment, people can find us on here, but they will be directed to the WordPress domain name. We had to upgrade the site from the free version to the next level so that we were able to map the domain name to WordPress.

Photo by Stephen Phillips – Hostreviews.co.uk on Unsplash

So I hope to update everyone next time on what impact this has on SEO rankings of the site. I purchased the domain name from a separate provider not attached to WordPress. My guess is that we may need to transfer the name but who knows!

We are just making this whole thing up as we go along right?!

Then there is the question as to how we promote the Podcast! But you will all need to read the next blog post to find out our progress there. As you follow and watch us, you will inevitably see the subtle changes in what we are creating.

Until next time,

Live Work Digital……..Luki

For Episode 3 we have a bit of a change in pace. Today we would like to introduce to. You Jason Borg, our new resident SEO expert. Now he probably would say that he isn’t an expert, but in mine and Lisa’s books, he definitely is. For the uninitiated SEO stands for Search Engine Optimisation. What does it really mean though you ask? Well, listen on and hopefully you can learn a thing or two. Both Lisa and I did.

Jason is also studying at Curtin University and Lisa has crossed paths with him before whilst doing other subjects. Technically, he is a Digital Analyst by trade and he currently works with Beyond Blue in the digital team there.

In short the reason why SEO is so important for your website is that people need to find it. With websites, beacons need to be built which guides traffic through the doors. If you are willing to play the long game, then these traffic lights will always lead people there. Through our interview with him, he attempts to de-mystify the hocus pocus that is SEO and gets us down to the nitty gritty basics without the technical woo hah explanations. Sometimes known as a dark art, SEO is often left on the too hard basket. At times, it can look like everything is ok on the surface, but are all the pieces of the puzzle connected and linked together? This is the reality of SEO.

Photo by Lester Hine on Unsplash

SEO is a massive concept, but today we will give you the basics of what we have learnt and we hope the information is useful for anyone that listens to the episode. It would take a long time to master this dark art. What we can do however, is learn the basics and continuously improve and learn the mechanics along the way. If you need to know how and where to start, then this is the episode to get you at the starting line.

We will be implementing some of the concepts that we have learnt through Jason’s teachings. Along with other learnings that we have come across. We will document our journey and share it with everyone in up coming blog posts. It is hoped that through this, we will learn and continue on this journey into a Digital Lifestyle.