Personal: New Job, A Week On.

So how did my first week as a professional search engine placement engineer go?

Well, technically the job title on my contract (yep, I have a proper signed contract – first time in years!) is “Search Engine Optimiser” but since we guarantee to place our customers sites in the top 30, 20 or 10 (depending on how much they pay), I like the “SE placement engineer” title better 🙂 No, don’t ask how we do it (as I’m not going to tell), but when I started I thought I already knew every single “trick” in the book, however it seems I only knew around 75% of them. Of course, if you want your site promoting just drop me a line (leaving a comment will do) and I’ll send you the links. I’m not going to change my blog into an advertisement medium and I do want to keep my personal and professional life separate, but I also want the company to do even better than it is so I get a massive bonus so I can make my own hollowed out volcano *mwahhh*. Drat. Did I write the last bit out? Ooops… 🙂

My job’s at a company an “inconvenient” distance away – it’s too close to catch a taxi cab (1.8miles) – but it is practically on a direct bus route from the bottom of my road. However, the buses only seem to come once every 20 minutes and in that time I could have walked it there. So, of course like the fool I am, I’ve been walking to work and back again every single day. Previously I was used to catching a cab to the train station, going into Birmingham, having a mad 5 minute dash across the city centre to discover my next train had just left and then having a 2 minute walk to my old works front door.

So, of course, my legs weren’t/aren’t used to this amount of work. By Thursday my legs were knackered, and on Friday I didn’t think I’d actually be able to get to work – every 40ft of so the pain in my lower legs just got to much and I had to stop. I’m a wuss I know 🙁 It did give me strange dreams about running the London Marathon in record time and then running from Lands End to John O’Groats for the sake of it – I’m not even going to “go there” with the part of the dream where I ran across the Atlantic Ocean in a plastic “hamster ball”…

I know I was thinking that I wouldn’t have time to update this ‘ere blog type thing, but looking at the edit logs for last week shows it’s been my 3rd highest posting week. Admittedly, most of the posts haven’t been “that interesting”, but when I got home I just wanted to do something to relax and typing in “simple” posts is quite relaxing for me. The “Personal” ones are hard because I need to think what I want to say, what I want to leave out, what I can’t say etc – “Books” posts are hard because I just get through too many books at a time and don’t have the time to do a “proper” review, “Techy” posts are more time consuming in the research (the Techy: GeoURL and GeoTagging post took me around 3 days to finish off) and some of the Meme’s are challenging (I’m still working on one from Friday and I’m not even half-done). I’m finding running the “Guess That Movie” competition (sorry, at the moment it’s a quiz…) quite fun, but it’s just trying to find a picture that will be recognisable but not straight away – personally I think the Ghostbusters one has been my best so far. I’ve even found a few minutes to make a few “technological improvements” to the blog – you probably have just noticed the slight layout tweaks (mainly to improve loading speed), but there’s quite a bit more going on in the background!

Anyway – where was I. I’ve deviated from the subject haven’t I? This entry is meant to be about my new job and I’ve only mentioned how far away it is so far. Oompa Lumpa diddly dum, if you stay on topic you can go far, if you can blog just as well as we can do, then you can Oompa Lumpa diddly blog (diddly blog)…

Blarg! I’ve found my marbles now.

The workload is quite variable – I’ve finished practically everyday by just running out of work at finish time (although I had a longish email to a customer to send tonight so I stayed around 30 minutes extra just to clear it out), but by the time I get in in the morning I’ve got a whole heap of stuff to do. I’ve got my own “customer base” (yep, I’m part “account manager”) which has involved me learning a bit about each customer, which package they are on, where their account details are held (I only discovered the main invoicing/billing system yesterday!) etc etc.

I’m enjoying the SEO/SEP side of things, finding it quite interesting (occasionally a little frustrating as you are optimising the umpteenth page of the same site) and I hardly ever get a twing of ethics. Yep, I know some people think that SEO is a bad business and, yes, it can be. I’ve seen some sites in the past that have tried various spam techniques and down right illegal and annoying ones.

An example of “bad SEO” practice is using someone elses name to try and “steal visitors”. At the moment, I can search on Google for the name of a site I operate “beebware” and get back results such as: “bessie’s ropes frame her fat aXX and pXXy, beebware, cXX suckin movies” or the “amateur overload beebware hot sunbathing american girl”!

The company I work for has the good idea. They/we concentrate on getting targeted visitors to a site – it’s all well and good being “number one” on Google and getting 50,000 visitors a day: but if they are looking for porn and you are selling kitchen fridges, you aren’t likely to get much ROI (return on investment) and sell any fridges…

We do do small things that some search engines may not like, but we try not to overdo them too much and ensure that even if the search engines were to disregard that section of the optimisation, the site would still be highly ranked for the appropriate key words. Oh – we don’t just do the “one off” offer either – most of our SEO/SEP packages are a year-long and come with “no placement – no fee” guarantee – therefore if we don’t do a good job, not only do we lose customers but we also lose a lot of money: therefore, we have got to be good! Let’s face it, the company I work for now is one of the few SEO’s I’ve come across that _hasn’t_ spammed ODP – most of them have no idea what they are doing and just was their clients money, whereas the company I work for ensures any submissions to directories are correct and accurate and try and conform to any guidelines.

As well as doing search engine promotion/placement services (for an extremely large client base with a number of “brand named” clients), we also do server hosting – and that’s a whole barrel of laughs…

I’m the main technical support guy in the smallish office, so I get straddled with all the customer technical queries. Have you ever tried to give technical support to people and you haven’t had a clue a) who the h*ll they are and b) how the h*ll something works? I’ve been put in this position before this job (luckily or unluckily depending on how you see it) and I’ve developed an ability to “wing it” for a few minutes whilst I find the information – I, in fact, had a query today which involved me cradling the phone on my shoulder whilst making notes in my left hand (I’m right handed) whilst my right hand was bring up details of each server, the account management stuff and various DNS record lookups to try and find out what was going wrong.

Today was also the day of the relaunch of our premium rate telephone support line. And guess which muggins is on the end of the phone? Yep. Moi. Since I had already dealt with a number of customer enquiries to our sales line and had an idea what to expect, I made a very brief “crib list” for the most frequently asked question so when someone called up and was paying 60p a minute for the privilege of talking to yours truly I could just run down the list simply and quickly (as I’m worth a lot more than 60p a minute – at least that’s what I keep telling myself 😉 ). The technical support line rang once today. And it was a complicated query that I hadn’t been asked yet. We’ve got a £5 maximum call charge on the phone line (in line with the ICSTIS premium rate regulations), so I can only talk to people for just over 8 minutes before I have to cut them off. I also don’t like the idea of someone paying for a telephone call when they could have simply logged a fault on our online helpdesk system free of charge and we would have helped them just as much. I ended up getting a brief overview of the problem and their email address and then spent the next 5 minutes writing an email to them. I’ll have to work on that bit of things I think – otherwise I think my customer handling is going quite well – I haven’t listened to a single complaint yet 😉

Most of our customers do sound quite relieved and sometimes over eager to speak to me which I take as an encouragement – but somethings make you smile and laugh and joke with them when (after lots and lots of prompting) they check something you’ve been telling them to check for the past ten minutes – I smile and joke with them until the call is terminated and then I bang my head on the desk cursing them. Oh well, such is life!

The people I work with are alright – all roughly in my age range (AFAIK: I haven’t asked 🙂 ) and we get on with each other okay. However, we do seem to be a bit quiet. We (the non-bosses) have even been told to put a radio or music on as it is too quiet! I guess my co-workers are a bit like me, once we drop into “the zone” and concentrate on what we are doing whilst thinking what else needs doing we pay no attention to external events. I’ve already been shocked at one point when a hand has reached over and took a phone and I never even knew that person had arrived!

One little thing I’m not too happy about is the server administration. The software they run for administrating the boxes is web based (good, nice and easy), but it doesn’t allow you the functionality I like. I like to be able to edit the configuration files if I want to (say if I was adding a new domain alias for a customer), but the admin system wants to do it all for you… It’s probably just me and the geek in me coming out but that’s just about the only possible thing I don’t like. The web based server administration software I run on “my” boxes does automate some functions, but if you want to ignore it and edit the files directly then you can. I’m sure I’ll cope though – but let’s face it, I haven’t had a chance to even install the UNIX emulation patch and stuff on my desktop machine there (I’m running Win2k Professional at home at the moment, but if I drop into the command line I can type “cd .. , ls -al, mv x y, pwd, chmod” etc and they will operate as if I was on a UNIX box: it saves memorising multiple sets of command line switches).

I’m enjoying the new job so far, it’s challenging in its own way, interesting in others and the customer support bit, I have to admit, can be a bit of a laugh – but I think I really do need to consider getting a bicycle: my legs are knackered every night. On second thoughts, I live on the side of a steep hill so whilst it’ll be easy going to work (get on bike, remove feet from ground, go zooming directly at a roundabout on the main ring road and hope the brakes work – on the previous bike I had, both brakes failed when going down the hill: I needed new shoes a couple of days later), so I may be even more tired and worn out when I get home… Hmm, I’ll have to think about that.

Oh – I haven’t been “out on the town” at all this year. I was planning on going down the pub to celebrate getting a new job, but I didn’t. I also normally go down on Mondays for Karaoke, but I haven’t… I’ve also haven’t spoken much to my GESF – we are both back at work and are both totally tired out most of the time, but I did have a brief conversation with her last night, but I think we were both too tired to put much effort or enthusiasm into it. I’m going to hopefully give her another call later in the week, but I’m just wondering if things are as good as I thought they were pre-Christmas between us or if we really are just good friends.