[00:00:00.00] - Gordon
Hello
[00:00:09.09] - Taylor
Hello.
[00:00:09.26] - Gordon
My name's Gordon from Drayson Design.
[00:00:11.25] - Taylor
And I'm Taylor from The Creative Tinker.
[00:00:13.25] - Gordon
And welcome to "This Week With Taylor and Gordon," a weekly podcast and vidcast where we talk about things that have affected our businesses over the last seven days. And thank you so much for joining us. It's been an interesting week for me. I had a competition during the week on the Tuesday at my local Magic Club, and I got the "Best Newcomer" award.
[00:00:37.13] - Taylor
Well done.
[00:00:37.28] - Gordon
Or as I'm going to call it, "The Only Newcomer" award, because I was the only one who was a newcomer. So I got it by default, really. I didn't win the main competition. I didn't even get into the top three, and I was very disappointed with that. But as someone said to me the other day, different judges, different day, different outcome. So I'm not going to beat myself up too much about it, but at least I did come away with an award.
[00:01:08.09] - Taylor
I got an award. I won the club championships in Squash last week, I think it was.
[00:01:17.26] - Gordon
Very good. Well done.
[00:01:18.28] - Taylor
And I got this really nice plate which had been engraved, and I 3D printed a little stand for it. So it came in like a box. It was just a flat square box.
[00:01:31.01] - Gordon
Yeah.
[00:01:31.25] - Taylor
Couldn't really display it very well. So I went online, just did a search for "plate stand" and 3D printed something. It looks great.
[00:01:39.07] - Gordon
Yeah, it's just standing up over there, and it was a little L-shape type thing, two of them. And then you just slotted them into each other so that it ended up being 45 degrees. And it's working really well, isn't it?
[00:01:54.14] - Taylor
Yeah.
[00:01:54.26] - Gordon
Yeah, really well. Right. Shall we get straight into our topics? Would you like to go first or shall I?
[00:02:00.29] - Taylor
You can go first this week.
[00:02:02.06] - Gordon
Thank you. So today I want to talk about Search Engine Optimisation and how it's changing. So when the website business started, people wanted to build websites, Search Engine Optimisation consisted of putting lots and lots of keywords and things in the same colour as the background on the bottom of all of your pages so that people couldn't see them, but search engines would read all the text. They got wise to that very quickly and started to put you lower down in the search results if you did tricks like that. And things have progressed steadily for quite a long time, and the search engines got really good at finding content that matched what you were searching for. And the more targeted your content, the more targeted the people that were coming to your site were. So people would do what was called long tail searching and long tail SEO, where you would instead of saying, for example, "magician in Croydon," you would put a keyword as "children's entertainer in the Purley and Croydon and South Croydon area." So it's a really long keyword. And if people were searching for that, they would send them to me because it matched my keyword more closely and therefore was more likely to be specific to what they were looking for.
[00:03:43.17] - Gordon
Now, SEO has moved on, and we got a little bit later on, we had things like putting alt tags for all your images and making sure that all of your navigation made sense. And you basically had pages underneath a main heading so that all your navigation worked correctly and everything was all easy to find. And we are now moving into an era where AI is basically taking over. A lot of people do searches using ChatGPT or Gemini or another artificial intelligence, LLM. And even Google themselves now are showing an AI summary when you get results to your search queries. And that's now the first thing that you see. So you'll see an AI summary with a button to say "read more," and then you're going to get your sponsored links and your organic links below that. So if you've spent a lot of time Search Engine Optimising your website, you are now likely to be found below the fold in the organic listings, further down the page than you ever have been in the past. So learning how to do Search Engine Optimisations for the AI is getting really important. And I mean, I've not looked into it a lot.
[00:05:25.03] - Gordon
I know it's something that's really important, and I know that this is something that's going to change how everyone searches in the future. So it's something you need to get on top of right now before everyone else does. Because if you can jump ahead of people, you're going to be there before everyone else is. And I think that's going to make a big difference. It definitely did with the SEO previously. You got a jump on. You were going to be found for months or years before before your competitors were. And I think this is where we need to look for website optimisations at this point in time. Now, as far as I can see, the search engines are basically indexing your pages on your website, and they're looking at the content, but they're looking not just for keywords now, they're looking at all of the content, and they're indexing all that, and they're learning from the content you're putting out there so that when someone asks a question, it can regurgitate your content and send people to your site. So if, for example, your information on your website, on your page, is being used as an answer to someone's question, there'll be a little link icon after the answer that it's given, which will then link to your website.
[00:07:02.03] - Gordon
So people can follow it that way to see what it is that the full answer or the full article or whatever it is, which means that blogs and podcasts and so on are becoming even more important today than they ever were in the past, but not necessarily for people to come and read on a regular basis, which is what blog posts used to be, right?
[00:07:28.05] - Taylor
Yeah.
[00:07:28.15] - Gordon
You would do a blog post and people would come along and read your latest blog post, and they'd get alerted, and they would normally have had an RSS feed, so they would know when there's a new blog post. But I mean, I used to do that a lot, but I don't even have an RSS reader anymore because it's just not become relevant anymore. But creating these posts and these articles is, I think, becoming more important because of the AI summaries and results and answers that search engines are given now. Have you had any experience with the developer side of this or the website owner side of it?
[00:08:14.21] - Taylor
Not really. I know that I have a couple of friends who when they've been talking to leads, they've said, "How did you hear about me?" And they've said, "ChatGPT recommended me" or whatever. And they don't know that they, they haven't done anything specific. So it's not something that's replicatable.
[00:08:37.10] - Gordon
So their website is basically giving the search engines the information it needs for people to get ChatGPT, in this case, to find them.
[00:08:49.22] - Taylor
Yeah, but they don't know what the reason is behind it. They don't know. There's so many algorithms behind it that there's so many different parameters that could be the reason why it shows, there's other reasons why it wouldn't show. Every time you're looking at the rankings, one week you could be at the top and one week you could be halfway down. And there's almost no reason or rhyme or reason why it's happening that way, which is one of the unknowns that people that do SEO, obviously, study and look into detail about "what are the common patterns," or "is there a way we can, or is it purely potluck?" In a sense.
[00:09:30.29] - Gordon
And that information is normally gathered from when a change is made. So as soon as, for example, Google and all the other search engines are following suit. So when I say Google, I mean pretty much all the search engines, but I think Google is still number one at the moment. But when Google makes a change to their algorithms or their ranking order and indexing, that is when all of these Search Engine Optimisation professionals will get alerted to the changes, and they'll then go and investigate to find out what they believe has changed. No one knows for sure, because every search engine keeps that sort of information very, very closely guarded as a secret. Because if they gave that information out, well, everyone would just do what it is they're ranking people on, and then there would be no way to actually rank people anymore because everyone's doing it. So they keep that information very, very quiet. And all these experts are just guessing, based on facts though. So they're not really guessing. They're doing tests to find out what they believe has changed and making assumptions based on their results. One of the resources that I am using is a gentleman called Neil Patel, who is one of these SEO experts, and he's been talking recently about these AI summaries, and he has a membership/subscription service that you can sign up to, and he will then give you information as to what he has found out to help you to leapfrog your competition.
[00:11:19.06] - Gordon
I'll put a link to his site and his offering in the show notes. We're not sponsored by him, but if anyone would like to sponsor us, please get in touch. We'd be happy to have a discussion, see if our thinking aligns so that we can promote you on this podcast. But that's where I've been getting my information from. And also, one of the things I would suggest doing is actually doing a search for your business in all of these AIs. Go into ChatGPT and do a search for what you think will bring yourself up or even be really specific and put your company name in. See what ChatGPT knows about your company. And the same goes for the search engines as well. Put your details in there and see what it comes up with. And then at least you'll have a really good idea of what you are ranking for currently. So that if you do make any changes, you can go and do this test again in the future and you can see what's changed. Anything you want to add to that?
[00:12:26.07] - Taylor
I don't think so. It's not something that I specifically focus on, but I know it's important to at least keep updated with it.
[00:12:33.15] - Gordon
Yeah, it's true. Right, on to your topic. What would you like to talk about?
[00:12:37.26] - Taylor
So I wanted to share a couple of the tools that I've built myself over the past couple of months that help me or make my life easier. So obviously, one of them that I've spoken about before is the script that I wrote that calculates the time to leave, adds all the event details, all of that stuff.
[00:13:00.00] - Gordon
For when we go to the cinema, this is, isn't it?
[00:13:01.25] - Taylor
Yeah. And I recently wrote a new script that basically helps me filter out all of the noise when looking for films to watch. So because we go to the cinema every week, there's obviously a lot of the same stuff we see over a period of time. What Cineworld have started to do is they allow you to pre-book, essentially, films in the future. So films that aren't coming out yet or haven't been released, they allow you to pre-book. That's fine. But when you're looking to go on a specific day, so I'm looking to go on a Wednesday, it still shows up. And it's very annoying because it shows and you're like, "Oh, that looks good. Oh, no, that's for three weeks time." But then you also have films that are only, for example, shown in the middle of the day. They're a kid's film, for example, or-
[00:13:56.02] - Gordon
An older film they're re-showing.
[00:13:57.28] - Taylor
Yeah, it may not be, we go in the evening after about 6 o'clock in the evening. So I only care about films that are today and after whatever certain time. So I essentially wrote a script that basically blocks all of the films that aren't today.
[00:14:13.10] - Taylor
And then when it shows you all the time slot buttons, I basically remove all the ones that are before the time that I am looking for. And this makes it really easy to go, "Okay, these are all of the films that are available," and I have a much easier time to actually figure out what films we could watch rather than having to look through and scan everything and try and figure that out myself. Very very small thing, but it helps because it speeds up the time to look at films and makes it... I don't have to figure it out and use my brain for that stuff, which isn't that important.
[00:14:51.25] - Gordon
Do you think maybe ChatGPT, if you give it the website address and the location or maybe just the website URL for that location, would be able to do something like that? And maybe I've noticed that they've started sending you notifications now. So for example, I asked ChatGPT the other day to let me know if there was any Apple updates that were happening. And it said, "this is what's happened recently. Would you like me to keep checking and let you know in the future?" And it's now sending me a regular email to show me what's changed, which is something new. I hadn't noticed that before.
[00:15:33.03] - Taylor
Interesting. I mean, maybe, although I don't think it would work for this case because I still need to click the "Book" button. I still need to go through the booking process.
[00:15:40.18] - Gordon
So you still have to go to the page, so you might as well view it and decide at that point.
[00:15:44.18] - Taylor
Exactly. And if I'm logged in, I'll be able to book special screenings which sometimes don't appear. Because it's always updated and it's dynamic, it may not have the right up to date information. Another thing that I have built is I use Slack with one of the companies I work with, but I only use it for this company. I don't like Slack. I don't want to install it on my computer. And every time you go to the Slack website, it tries to open Slack in the app, in the desktop app, which I don't want to do. I just want to hit the "Use in Browser," but it won't automatically do that after a period of time. It doesn't know if you've got the app installed or not. So again, I wrote a little script that basically waits for the "open in browser" and clicks the button. It's a very, very silly little script, but it does the job, and it also stops the links opening in a new tab. That's another thing that really annoyed me. Every time I clicked on one of the workspaces that I wanted to open, it would open a new tab and leave the other one open.
[00:16:48.13] - Taylor
It's just pointless because I was only going there to see that one thing. So I, again, stopped that from happening. And very, very small thing, but saved me a lot of time and frustration.
[00:16:58.22] - Gordon
And for those who are interested the technology you've used here, is this a browser extension or something, a script that runs in the browser?
[00:17:07.26] - Taylor
Yes. So there are things called "tamper monkey" and "grease monkey." They're essentially an extension that allow you to run basically HTML, CSS, and JavaScript on the browser, and you can restrict them to certain URLs, for example, using regex. So you can say "only this URL," "anything that's got slash something," so any prefix domain, and then slash something or "only on local sites," things like that, you can have them specifically run on a certain page.
[00:17:37.03] - Gordon
This is doing it automatically when you go to the URL that matches?
[00:17:41.17] - Taylor
Yeah.
[00:17:42.06] - Gordon
Oh, that's really interesting.
[00:17:43.09] - Taylor
So it means it doesn't run every single time because that will cause a lot of errors, because what you're looking for may not exist on the page. And also, it just doesn't run if you're not on that page because it's not relevant.
[00:17:54.17] - Gordon
That's really good.
[00:17:55.16] - Taylor
Another one that I wrote was a little widget that displays a little pop-up. So when I visit any page, whether it's like a service business page, it will automatically scan the website and look for any emails or any phone numbers. This is really useful if I need to grab the phone number or email of a customer or client or someone I'm looking to do business with or need to contact. Instead of having to go hunting for them in the contact page or in the footer, it just grabs them, puts them into a little floating box and says, "Here you go. Would you like to open this in your email? Would you like to call them directly or do you want to copy them?" Again, very small thing, but very handy and useful.
[00:18:40.04] - Gordon
So all these little quality of life things, isn't it? That you don't have to then spend time. It's very little time just to click on a link or something, but you do it enough and you save a bit of time. And it's definitely going to save more time than it actually takes to build something like that because it's very...
[00:19:00.00] - Taylor
Yeah, I think AI helps a lot with this because it's very easy. They're probably maximum 20, 50 lines of code. And so you can one shot it and just say, "do this," and it will give it to you. It doesn't need to be the most optimised code, doesn't need to be the prettiest code because it's only running on my computer, it's not running anywhere else. And so obviously, if there is issues, I can fix them, but it's not something that's going into production, so it doesn't really matter that much.
[00:19:28.02] - Gordon
And it also allows you to make changes and as you need to as well.
[00:19:31.17] - Taylor
And the last one is a... Oh, there's two more actually. The second to last one is a YouTube timestamp changer. So when you change the speed of a YouTube video, the speed of the clock going down increases, but the actual how long the total length of the film or the video stays the same. So if you've got a 10 minute video and you watch it on two times speed, it will still say 10 minutes. What this does, it just updates the duration time to be whatever the interval is. So if you say "10 minutes on a two times speed," it will say that it's five minutes. It's quite useful because it means you can actually calculate how long a video is going to take and watch, which is quite nice, especially if you're watching them on slightly faster. And then the last one is a news feed eradicator. This one is probably one of the ones I use the most. When I'm on Facebook or Twitter or any social media website, it essentially just blocks the main news feed from loading. It helps me to not doom scroll. When I'm on Facebook for example, I'm mainly on my computer, I'm using it to check web design Facebook groups.
[00:20:51.08] - Taylor
So I don't want to get bogged down in seeing what Stacy down the road has posted a lovely picture of her little dog and scrolling through all of these feeds. If I want to do that, I'll do that on my phone when I'm somewhere else. But when I'm on my computer, for the most part, I don't want to be spending my time doom scrolling and getting caught up. So all this does essentially, replaces the main feed timeline with a lovely little inspirational quote.
[00:21:18.29] - Gordon
Like, "get back to work, stop going through your socials."
[00:21:22.11] - Taylor
Pretty much.
[00:21:24.16] - Gordon
Very good.
[00:21:25.12] - Taylor
And they're just some of the small little quality of life scripts that I have either found online or I've written to make my life easier. They're not going to exist anywhere because they're very, very niche and mostly silly problems that don't need to be solved, but I wanted to be solved. So if you do have any ideas or suggestions, something that you've been doing repetitively or doesn't need the brain power or focus, see if there's a way to automate it. A lot of people don't realise how much you can automate or do yourself under the hood, just with a few lines of code.
[00:22:06.19] - Gordon
Very good. Anything else you want to say today?
[00:22:09.12] - Taylor
Don't think so.
[00:22:10.17] - Gordon
Well, next week, I am going to be in a play, Brief Encounter. We should still be having an episode because it's not happening at 1pm on Friday, but it's going to be a very busy week for me. I'm going to be out a lot. So if I look a little bit tired, that will be why. But that's it for today. As always, please like, share, and subscribe on YouTube.
[00:22:37.01] - Taylor
You can also go to our website thisweekwith.co.uk and find all of our past episodes.
[00:22:42.07] - Gordon
And if you would prefer to listen to us, we're on all the major podcast platforms as well as your smart speaker. We'll be back with you next Friday at 1pm. Until then, my name is Gordon, and I'm from Drayson Design.
[00:22:55.05] - Taylor
And I'm Taylor from The Creative Tinker.
[00:22:57.20] - Gordon
Goodbye.
[00:22:58.04] - Taylor
Bye.
