Starting to understand the word Leadership

About eight years ago, I told myself that the path I should journey into was the management world. But sadly, I never really understand what the management world is. I only knew, well, I wanted to be a Project Manager.

But what exactly is a Manager? Manager, in any organisations, is someone who was granted with a position to govern over a group of one or more people to fulfil certain tasks during their working hours. The people that were reporting under that Manager will be required to comply with any order within his/her control. And that's my friend, is called a "position leader".

But what is so peculiar about this "position leader"? Well, anyone who worked under this person will not only be unmotivated, but would only do what is needed from them, and will never contribute anything more to the organisation. Have you ever counter this strange phenomenon in your office that all the employee left the office exactly at knock off time? 10 minutes before d-time is the toilet break, 5 minutes before d-time is the saying goodbye stage, and what happen exactly at d-time? An empty office without a single living soul.

But why is it so? The answer is simple. Heart. All the employees under this person had never felt any sincerity of being cared for and never felt the heart of this leader. This unappreciated feeling results in distrust of this "position leader" and would never follow him/her outside their jurisdiction.

That is what happened to me two years ago when I was with DSTA when building an internal application with 13 developers. As all other "Managers" had left the project, I am lucky enough to be appointed as their Scrum Master, someone who is similar to a Manager. It is a very new position for me as I had never lead such a big team before, and not even worth mentioning, to influence the Scrum way to them.

Excitement rushes all over me, and the first thing I would want to do is to execute all the Scrum methodology processes to all the developers. Day by day, I would make changes in different areas and try to enforce everyone to follow them. Then came one day, suddenly I realise how distant I am with the team, and how much unhappiness I had created just within a three months period. No one on the team approves me or appreciate what I had done in the last couple of months. It was more of a devastating experience to them, then an opportunity to learn something new. Deep down, I am sure that I was trying very hard to create the best out of everyone, but in reality, I don't understand what went wrong.

Looking back now, I realised what I had wanted to do is not wrong, but just that I never really get the trust of the team before implementing so many changes. Everyone in heart will always have this fear of change as it an unknown path where they had never stepped foot on before. And without a good leader they trust to bring them along, they will never move out and explore the new horizon.

This experience is just a glimpse of what a fail leadership is really about, and I now understand that I am still just around the starting line of this overwhelming topic.

My SEO Experience

Search Engine Optimization is one of the fastest moving industry that changes its algorithm now and then. As someone who is always keen in the latest SEO trend, I consistently update myself with the most current information so that my effort will always provide the best value to all my clients.

Even tho search engine algorithm for Google or Bing are constantly changing, I still believed that fundamentally these big providers are always moving toward providing more values to their users. By saying value, I meant providing accurate information to their users by semantically understanding each website sole purpose and meaning. This is the reason why I always focus on the business first, even before talking about the website and SEO portions.

In my past 10 years of developer life, I am honoured to be appointed by some of my clients to handle their SEO as an analyst. The following are some of the websites I helped to improve their performance in search engine:

http://www.siidcap.com/ (on-going)
http://letsvolunteer.today/ (down)
http://heartlandbuzz.hdb.gov.sg/ (down)
http://www.nexwavetelecoms.com/
http://www.digitalwalkietalkie.com.sg/
http://www.csfsolution.com.sg/

Here are some of the steps I took to help my client to improve their search engine performance. These are just the tip of the iceberg, and there are more subtle steps to be done.

1) Before we even talk about bringing traffic to the website, first and foremost, is the website presentable? Does the website align with the business branding strategies? Does the website capable of converting users into their client? If not, the best way is to start the process is by re-aligning and re-designing the site. During this process, we will identify the demographics the company is interested in so that we can effectively pinpoint to that sets of audiences.

2) Discuss with my clients to come out with the best "keyword phrases". Normally, I will sit down with the company stakeholders and write down all the keyword phrases they think is important, and do research on tools like Google Adwords keyword planner to understand what is the best list of keywords to optimise.

I always suggest looking into their online competitor's website and research on which keyword they choose to optimise so that we will know more about how others position their SEO effort.

3) Next, would be the Technical Phase. The website should be technically friendly towards search engine crawler where it can easily pick up the necessary information and semantically understand the purpose of your site. Keywords phrases will require being strategically incorporated at difference sections inside the website markups and URL to communicate effectively to the search engine about the site.

One of the importance of this step is how Google or Bing will display the website inside their search engine. Does this page have a rating? Is it a restaurant or does it have a geographical address?

4) Content is always the key priority in SEO. I will guide the company to provide content that has all the necessary keyword phrases at difference section of the content. This allow's the best impression to the search engine on the selected keywords.

5) How does my client know their SEO effort is worthwhile? Measurement. It is when we analyse and understands how much traffic being directed to the website from search engines. In this phase, we will need to research and understand what keywords client normally search to reach the website, what is the bounce rate (users that leave the site immediately after opening the page), does traffics comes from Google or Bing?

After we analyse and understand the situation, we will make arrangement to improve those specific portions so that we can further improve the outcome.

* Do note that measurement can be used even further to improve the customer conversion rate, but I will not cover here in this write-up.

Search Engine Optimization is a long term investment for any company, and we should always create micro goals and iterate the process to reach the global presence ultimately. I call this the Lean SEO process.