The SEO Volunteer: Month One

In pushing on with building on my SEO and digital marketing course from Salford University and SEMPO, I’ve hooked up with two charities as a volunteer to help them with their online presence, and they’re both very different, but the basic issues in terms of online presence are the same.

The first, The Ethical Computer Company, is an IT re-use enterprise in Stoke-on-Trent, taking unwanted or outdated IT from businesses and individuals, refurbishing it and either selling it in the community, sending units on for use in the developing world, or disposing of the waste correctly. From a small charity project started ten years ago bootstrapped themselves to having two shops, diversifying into vegetable oil recycling and operating as a UK Online training centre, with the staff having been previously long-term unemployed.

The second, ICA:UK, is the UK branch of an international charity specialising in facilitation training: the process that enables volunteer and community groups to work together well, make decisions and take action. They offer training courses to charity and community sector clients, and also provide training and support projects for young people and youth groups in and around Manchester.

Traditional SEO advice assumes that you’re working in e-commerce, and that the site you’re aiming to optimise has one focus – selling a specific group of products or services, giving the site an easily-defined overall theme. Very few charities, especially if they function as social enterprises as in the case of these two, will possess such a site. If you’re doing something similar to build your skills with other charities, don’t be quick to criticise your charity for not being single-theme in their web presence: it’s common for charities, especially the smaller ones short on resources, to have a less focussed site, and may have a predetermined CMS-based site that they can’t radically alter.

This is the case with the two charities I’ve been working with, but there’s still plenty that can be done – backlinks can be checked and pursued, alt text added, keywords researched, identified and refined down for effectiveness, and effective tracking of conversions applied via Google Analytics: all, crucially, cost-free except for time, if you’re willing to give it, and see what you can gain from it. So far it’s been a source of sanity as the winding down of my current employer continues, with all the grimness and frustration that brings.

Careering through the web

My stay of execution at Vision+Media will be short-lived: I’m supporting their apprentices until the summer, so in the meantime company research, networking and (ugh) applying for jobs the old-fashioned way continues apace. On the research side I’ve been exploring the crossover between digital and careers advice that my current job has created, and in doing so came across ICEGS, the International Centre for Guidance Studies. In short it’s a research and professional training centre for careers advisors, based at the University of Derby. So far so boring, but one of their publications did catch my eye – Careering Through The Web, a paper looking at how wikis, social networks, RSS and the like are influencing how graduates are sourcing career and vocational information and advice. This tickled my interest given past experience using a skinned Moodle VLE to try and deliver mentoring supporting from one media industry mentor to two separate groups from Vision+Media’s Advanced Media Apprenticeship and the Media Foundation Placement Scheme.  I remember my own barriers in using the Moodle – I had hoped our tech partners would use Ning for this specific solution, but Moodle did have a strong set of standard features and endless plugins, not to mention excellent cross-browser compatibility given its’ maturity.

It’s worth a speed-read if this is an area you’re interested in, however I was  disappointed: it rattles through a number of relatively innovative services for job-seekers, such as Wikijobs, but just categorises these things against three broad models of guidance delivery: one-to-one, one-to-many and many-to-many. It’s main recommendation is that these kind of things are good and should be supported, and that careers advisors should be more digitally literate and competent. I’m not sure a 35-page research piece was needed to tell us this, and if this was a way to foster interest amongst HE careers advisors it’s probably amongst the least effective, in my opinion: a hands-on, interactive workshop where they could get online and try some of these things out for themselves, and, crucially, get into a debate to overcome common objections and concerns about the influence of social tech.

However a research centre’s main aim is usually, uh, research, so it’s too easy a criticism to make. The real problem with this paper is the complete lack of stats: none of the networks and resources identified have been assessed or broken down by user figures, traffic, age, sector or region. So no  insight can be gained on, say, quality versus quantity, and how these tools rack up against established individual advice and guidance delivered in-person, and sometimes guided by nothing more than an A4 pro-forma and some potentially out-of-date knowledge.

The Digital Skills Summit – brokering skills between digital companies, students, and universities

I couldn’t attend the Digital Skills Summit delivered by Manchester Digital and Manchester Knowledge Capital last week. This was a shame: going by the #mcrdig hashtag on Twitter and chatting to a couple of delegates, a lot of the topics discussed are close to my heart at the moment:

• A Skills Broker for the digital sector in Manchester or “The North” was discussed. This gets its own set of bullet points below, you lucky sods.
• MMU’s David Bird stressed the importance of paid internships for students in the digital sector. This makes total sense. Employers are expecting students and recent graduates to be business-ready and entrepreneurial, on top of being technically skilled designers, coders, online marketers and so on. Their expectation to get paid should be part and parcel of this.
• CPD for established digital professionals was a thorny issue, with some dissatisfaction being expressed at the quality of what’s on offer in the region – though it’s unclear if this was aimed at the private sector, the support agencies, or the universities, or all of the above. A tough one, this, and easy to get bogged down in if you lump all these different parts of the skills supply chain into one. I’ve touched on this topic in a previous post, asking  what price should be paid for digital sector training. Price has an immediate impact on quality and I’m concerned that there hasn’t really been a broad enough, meaningful discussion on the quality of training that might be offered to one industry in, by global standards, a pretty small area.

So, this skills broker idea was mentioned – and I wouldn’t blame Manchester Digital for wanting to position themselves for it, though I’m unclear on what’s holding them back. It’s a really good idea: universities and businesses could be doing a lot more together, and not just work-based training, if the relationships were right. A third party with a good overview of wants and needs on both sides could do some real good, and would provide a consistent stage to get top-tier thought leaders in technology, design and training in the 21st century speaking and teaching in the region, without stepping on the toes of Northern Digitals, Econsultancy, or anyone else.

Would a membership-based trade body be the one able to do this? I’d say they’d need to match up against the following attributes:

• Autonomous: they would have to have strong partnerships with HE and industry, but would have to work to its own agenda and have a crystal clear, realistic mission statement. Those two groups are effectively clients, but not necessarily the users: they’re the students, graduates and CPD customers, and if the mix of influence is off-balance their interests could easily be forgotten.
• Knowledgeable about training, and training as a harsh, competitive arena, as much as they might be about digital. One without the other won’t do.
• Nimble and responsive: waiting on committees, steering groups and stakeholder meetings for permission on projects and products they’re not able to assess in detail will just slow things down, and rarely affect the outcome. There are things that could be started literally right now, with no real barriers.
• Open-minded and accessible: the new waves of talent can come from anywhere and there is no archetype of success in such a frequently disrupted industry. This must be visible as more than a lip-service equal opportunities policy.

How you’d fund something like this is tricky, and may only be solved by being as iterative in the approach from the outset as possible, making a virtue out of trial and error. I’d suggest something small, lean and mean which wouldn’t need a physical base to get going: once I’d improved my know-how, I found a decent laptop, phone, connectivity and transport to be the main capital resources whether we’re talking about placements, online training or training events. Constitution-wise I’d be wary of creating a co-op for the reasons above, although the relatively new CIC model may work well in this instance. It may not even be a full-time job for one person to begin with. Revenue-wise I’d say a pay-as-you go system would enable that essential speed, flexibility and JFDI factor. Contracts and SLAs would be a secondary concern, and not a barrier to getting started.