Of all the things I’ve been learning as part of my time between formal jobs, SEO is likely the one I’m most excited about.  I’ve been doing copywriting as a side part of so many jobs and projects for so long that the time has definitely come to re-establish my skills.  I’ve been really enjoying the various classes available on HubSpot which are especially interesting as they outline how they used the techniques themselves. Of course, that means that part of this blog post is to build my own SEO. That’s what blogs are for, after all. 

 I’m not about to regurgitate the entirety of the classes I took. I recommend trying them out yourself if you want the full logic behind what I’m outlining and how to re-create it yourself.  For my purposes the most interesting takeaway is a shift in SEO from keywords to topical relevance.  This is key as it means that there is more to be gained from including phrases like “How to build your SEO” rather than just shoehorning in keywords like “SEO, learning, Search Engine Optimization,” and so on. I always hated the keyword approach as it just felt artificial. This is a great development as I can write the posts with more natural flow. 

The other big thing for me was a discussion of the concept of authority in a search engine context. This isn’t something I had given a lot of thought to and it explains the inner working behind some of the winning content  promotion techniques I’ve seen bandied about over the years. Call me what you like for this but I really appreciate understanding why something works when I’m doing it. That level of depth motivates me and it hadn't occurred to me that there was a deeper level of theory which hadn’t been apparent to me. 

In brief, the concept of authority in SEO is a measure of whether other people online are linking back to you as a source or reference. This is similar to the way you might build authority by being someone that your colleagues refer to when they need to know the right move to make. This is going to be the harder side for me. I need to decide for this personal branding project what I want to be authoritative on and then try to appeal to sites which need a source or corroborative illustration on. 

Branding myself is going to be hard. Distilling who I am and what I offer to an algorithm friendly concept is going to take some doing. If you’ve looked at the rest of my site, you’ll see I do a lot of different stuff and aside from being “creative” there’s not a huge through line to it all. Luckily, I have an experimental project on hand for just such applications. So, what does the Dungeon Barkeep offer authority on? New Cocktails, Nerdy Cocktails, What Nerds Drink, Fantasy Drinks, Sci Fi Drinks… you get the idea.  Now I need to figure out what people are searching in the gaming and RPG worlds and make my content relevant to people talking about how Moon Remix is coming to the Switch. How am I going to do that? I don’t 100% know. I’m still learning and trying stuff out but you can bet I’m going to get my cocktail stick into the mix and try some stuff out.