When considering the nature versus nurture argument, I find it very interesting to look at myself and my younger sister, Molly. While we were brought up in the same environment (nurture), we are very different people in many ways (nature). That said, we also have a lot of similarities; you just have to look a little harder to find them. While I love to travel, my sister is most definitely a home bird. I have a cat, she has a dog. Molly is making her way as an artist while I struggle to draw a stickman. We’re following very different career paths and yet, over the past few weeks, we’ve come to realise we can lend our individual skillsets to help one another. Rather than sisters doing it for themselves, therefore, we’re doing it for each other.
I suppose we are both creative; she with images, me with words. For the past year, I’ve been working for a digital marketing agency, writing blogs, websites, social media copy and much more. I have learnt what is required for a business to rise through the ranks of Google and land at the top of relevant search engine results pages and capture the attention of customers. And now my sister wants to do exactly this with her new website.
Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is simple enough once you know what Google’s PageRank algorithm is looking for. You need to deliver the information it is seeking in a straightforward format which it can identify and analyse to determine your page’s relevance. While Molly had a great website built for her by one of her friend’s, Google would have struggled to recognise its relevance before I got my hands on it. You see, Google can’t (yet) read images. It relies on text to understand what is on a page. Therefore, beautiful though Molly’s website was with images of her artwork, as far as Google was concerned, it was empty. Now, however, we have added in the relevant tags and alt text and meta descriptions which allow Google to scan the Internet, pick up keywords such as ‘pressure print’, ‘oil painting’ and ‘British bird greeting cards’ (all Molly’s specialties), and push her website up the pages of results whenever a relevant search is googled.
It’s a great feeling to not only be able to help my own sister but also to see the positive results in what I’ve been doing for her (using an analytics app kindly lent to me by my boss). It’s also validation that I really do understand what I’m doing. And the best part about this is that it’s a two-way street. While I may be helping Molly, she has skills to offer me too. Or, more specifically, my charity.
I am always looking for new ways to raise money for SKOPE, my education charity I run in Cambodia. Between us, Molly and I came up with the idea of her creating a charity greeting card as part of her British bird range from which the proceeds will go to SKOPE. We’re considering it her way of saying thank you for my help. And yet she’s helping me too. We are now both in positions where we are excelling within our chosen careers and able to offer support and help for one another using our specialised skills.
The cards Molly will design shall feature a Cambodian bird and are due to be available in her Etsy shop within the next couple of months. Hopefully, by that time and with my continued SEO efforts, she’ll be landing high up Google results and attracting more web traffic and more customers. We both benefit from helping one another. I’m sure our parents are reading this and wishing we had realised we would have benefitted from being friends as children so we could play together rather than fight. But it’s better late than never, right?
Molly and I are doing it for ourselves in our separate career paths but we’re also now working together, offering our unique skillsets to support and better the other. We’re two sisters who are doing it for one another.
Oh, and in case you hadn’t already clicked, here’s a link to Molly’s website and her Etsy store.
Lemon in Cambodia 