Wiki Loves Monuments UK competition

Wikimedia UK is supporting the Wiki Loves Monuments competition, where across the globe (and in the UK for the first time this year) in September people take photos of the world's historic monuments and upload them to Wikimedia UK.  Wikimedia UK, if you're not aware, exists to help collect and distribute freely available knowledge, and is linked with Wikipedia.

The competition is really straightforward, on the website they give you a very short guide as to what to do and what monuments they accept photos of, and then you go off, get some decent photos, and upload them with a bit of a description!  Nice and simple.  If you do have a go do read the guide, common photo errors, and the rules, I fell foul of not reading the photo errors before I went out and a lot of the photos I took had a lovely big church sign in it, with lots of phone numbers and information on there which causes problems. Must try harder in future!

My first uploaded picture is available at https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:St_Andrews_Church,_Kirk_Ella.JPG - to get this picture it was a bit tricky, as St Andrews Church in Kirk Ella is surrounded by lovely trees, which are great but get in the way when taking photographs.  The only way I could get a shot was by laying on the path in front of the church, taking the photo there, and breathing in so that my belly didn't get in the way!  (Bit of a subtle hint for myself to get some exercise - which the Pedometer Challenge I'm doing shortly should help with!)

Anyhow, that's my first picture, but I hope to be getting a lot more up before the end of September!  If you're getting involved do let me know what photos you're getting!

SEO and doing it

I've been reading about SEO today.

SEO, for those not in the know, is Search Engine Optimisation.  According to Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Search_engine_optimization) it's "the process of improving the visibility of a website or a web page in a search engine's "natural," or un-paid ("organic" or "algorithmic"), search results."

Basically, when you Google something, you generally look on the first page for what you want, and the further away your result is from the first page, the less likely someone is going to click on it.  When was the last time you went beyond page ten of a Google search, despite it possibly finding millions of results for you?

So it makes sense that you want your page to appear as near to the front as possible, to increase the amount of visitors to your site.

Following the Wikipedia article, there are several ways to do SEO. One is getting indexed - to be found the search engines must visit your site.  Well, I've visited a few of the leading search engines and submitted my site for review, so box ticked for that one. Boom!

Secondly, preventing crawling.  The search engines employ programs called "spiders" to visit sites, and gather key information, and you can tell spiders not to index a certain page if it isn't relevant. (for example the secured payroll website of a company probably doesn't need to show up on Google) Not really a problem for me, I'm happy with everyone seeing any of the pages of my blog.

Five minutes and I've already done two points of SEO. Man, this is easy.

Third - Increasing Prominence. This sounds good. I like to increase my prominence whenever I can.

Writing key words in my documents that people search for will increase the likelihood of being found.

But! These spiders are sneaky, they're like jumpy spiders or something.  If you just post a stream of text like "Cheese nachos yoghurt tablet happy brie" they'll know that you're mean and they won't link you or track you or do whatever it is they do, wrap you in a web and eat you for dinner.

Hmm - I don't want to be eaten for dinner by a digital spider.

Never mind.  Apparently I need to be a white hat, instead of a black hat - tricky, I only have a black hat.

Or a santa hat.

So, the idea struck me, what if I make a story out of the key words for the moment?  That way, it'll look legit, right?

So what are the key words I should use?  I had a little look at a few leading websites to see "what people are searching for right now"

And here's the story.

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Kate Nash sat in Tampa, eating a Mars Curiosity from her Clutch Bag whilst perusing an advert for used cars on her Tablet PC, but she couldn't focus on the offers.  Her thoughts flitted between healthy eating, beerfear, and the Paralympics.
 "If only Victoria Wood was here," she thought aloud, glancing over at the HD television which was showing Celeb Big Brother.  She flicked the channel over to X Factor, and went back to her Tablet PC.

A thought struck her. She shouted for her butler, and within but a moment or two, he arrived.
 "Jeeves! I want to ask you, how big is the moon?" she asked.  Perplexed, he paused, before answering "The diameter of the moon is only 3,474 km across. Madam, may I suggest that you review the progress of the Arenanet Technicians Fixing your Server?"

She fixed him with a steely glare. "Thank you Jeeves, that will be all. Oh Jeeves," she called, as he wheeled around to face the door, "do be a good man and feed Lycos, won't you?"
 "Yes, milady." Jeeves answered, jumping out of the window shouting "Yahoo!" as he fell.
 "Silly man." she said, pressing the lift controls, making them go Bing.

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To the entire world who are now on my blog after I've deployed SEO - welcome to my blog.