Work: Slow, bad and then Extremely Good

Well today was an interesting day at work. First hour or so was quite quiet (mainly responding to any technical helpdesk enquiries that were logged over the weekend and just following up on a few things), but then things started to get just a little bit busier… Then one of our main servers failed 🙁 It’s the one we’ve been having a few problems with. We hoped that the RAM swap-out would have sorted the issue, but it died big time again today and we were without it for an hour or so. Proactive action is being taken though – we (more technically, me) are moving the critical files off that server on to one of our spares (the helpdesk and client system) and I’m planning on getting some really severe logging systems running on the server. By really severe, I mean regular system snapshots to let us know exactly what is happening, monitors running in case pre-determined levels are exceeded yadda yadda yadda. I was hoping it wouldn’t be necessary, but we do need to find the cause of this fault ASAP. Yes, our customers don’t pay a lot to be hosted on the server (it’s one of the cheapest hosting plans available to my knowledge) and we don’t offer a SLA (Service Level Agreement) so technically we can just let the box “die” and be done with it – but that’s not good for our customers and since our major form of advertising is “word of mouth” – downtime ain’t good for us!

After the server came back up (and we got full email capabilities back) I had loads of work come in. I had sent out emails on Thursday, Friday and this morning saying “I need approval on this/I need these details” for a number of our search engine optimisation customers and they all decided to get back to me in the same time frame. Grrr. Combine that with ‘standard’ customer side of things I’m involved with (I seem to be getting “respond to this potential customer with your standard marketing gumff” style emails from my boss) and I was overloaded!

I don’t particularly like marketing (in fact, I think it’s the spawn of Satan), but for some strange inalienable reason I seem to be extremely good at it. I haven’t (yet 😉 ) failed to convert a customer enquiry to a sale yet. Plus I seem to be able to easily “up-sell” customers to more packages: I’ve even caught myself selling our top end “reseller hosting package” to an unemployed webmaster who did a clients site “on the cheap” – he even sounded really interested! My boss, in fact, remarked on Friday that perhaps I should consider a future career in marketing… I know my “techy career” only has a limited life span, but I was seriously considering going into teaching or education afterwards (as I really like helping people as well – from explaining how to do something, why to do it and why not to do it another way), but at least my options are open 🙂

Ok – where was I before I went off on a tangent? Erm… Oh yes – near 4pmish I got a message from one of my bosses (we are only a small company but we’re split into around 4 divisions but we all work for each division – the boss in question at this moment is in charge of the ‘lower-end’ SEO program) asking me to do a “position ranking analysis” on a site I optimised around 2 weeks ago. She said it was unlikely it would be anywhere in the search engine rankings yet (as it had only just been optimised), but not to worry too much because our money-back guarantee doesn’t kick in until the twelfth week.

So I get the PRA running – an hour later and it’s analysed around 30 search engines with the dozen or so targeted keywords for the site in question. I look at the report: “Hmm, 4 listings in the top ten – not too bad, we are a quarter of the way to the customers chosen guarantee and it’s only been a fortnight”. Then I realise that’s just for the first keyword… Baring in mind this is a site that’s only been “live” a few months, was optimised just a fortnight ago and is NOT listed in the Open Directory Project (many people reading this probably think it _is_ necessary to be listed in the ODP for good search engine placement results)…

I tallied up the rankings for each keyword and nearly fell off my chair. 283 results in the top 10 for the chosen keywords and over 28 “Top 1st positions” in the search engines. Whaaattt?!? That’s over 18 times the guaranteed positions we made to the customer and it’s still only been a fortnight! I’m not 100% sure what the h–lll I did to ensure it had so good rankings across the board (even a couple of ‘top positions’ in Google), but I’m going keep on doing it 🙂

Oh – and before you ask, no, these keywords weren’t “easy to optimise” ones such as “flibbleflobble” and “renrutlien” which no one in their right mind would search for: they were all targeted to the customer’s market, were relevant and were all approved by the customer for suitability before hand.

Unfortunately, at that point I had to finish work (as the clock had already gone). I’ve got 6 sites to work on tomorrow already…

I think I’m doing all right so far in this ‘ere job don’t you? 🙂