Mathew Browne

Being busy and having lots of work to do for clients has obvious benefits, but what are the drawbacks? In my line of work, there’s one big drawback…

You see, I’ve been so busy over the last 6 months that I have left myself no time to work on my own websites. No fresh content and few new incoming links has meant I’ve slipped a few places for various key phrases on Google. At this point in time, it’s a blessing in disguise - between the house move and several high-value contracts on the table I’m not in a great position to take any more on. However, if I wasn’t so busy I’d have cause for concern and this is something I’m now setting aside time to work on each week. Slipping from page 1 to page 2 for the phrase “web design” on Google.com led to a 70% reduction in traffic coming from Google.com for that phrase.

The lesson to be learnt here is that SEO is ongoing, and that resting on your laurels once you’ve achieved your target is a policy that will cause you problems in the medium to long-term.

I haven’t blogged in over a month - a symptom of being busy, I’m afraid.

In 5 days I leave London for the relative calm of South Wales, so my time is consumed by box-packing and wrapping up those websites I’ve got left over from the past few weeks. At perhaps the worst possible time, I decided to revamp my MB Web Design website and this one concurrently. The latest Wordpress release has largely fuelled this change, it really is fantastic by the way.

I’m starting a web design blog via MB Web Design and letting this one be my personal venting place.  A side effect of being linked to from my business site is that this blog got a pretty large pagerank very quickly, and resultantly has been a big attraction for commenters. Sifting through the hundreds of comments to moderate is rather a drain on my time, so I’m going to relax the emphasis on this site for the time being. (And also plug the Pagerank leak from the business site*)

* For the smart arses: Pagerank doesn’t mean anything, blah blah blah. Tell that to the 440 commenters in the last week or so.

My fiancee finished her final exam yesterday, with fingers crossed I say that in a month or so she will officially be a doctor. When business success goes to my head she will always be there to remind me that I just sit at a desk all day, and that no matter how much money I make, my job doesn’t save lives. (There is a rant about people not appreciating the hard work of doctors, but that can wait for another day.)

I’ll check back in a couple of days to report on the move.