A podcast about movie making and the science fiction featurette, Daughter of God, with Director Shri Fugi Spilt, (Dan Kelly). Daughter of Godcast, Episode 059, Guides. Analysis suggests SEO strategy. Guides, the ultimate ungurus.

Hello! Well I'm fair to bursting with excitement this week. I keep promising the model shop and then yanking it back, but not really. We are going into A model shop. In the sense of the matrix, a simulation, a miniaturization. As I mused in episode 057 about scientifics asserting that OUR reality is a software simulation, and my counter that sure reality might be a simulation, but not of our descendants' past, but of duality, setting the stage for adventure, the human game, theme park earth.

But surprise, that's NOT the model shop I want to talk about today. I want to talk about the model shop of SEO or search engine optimization, because I've been getting my mind blown and hey, another wave of clarity about our collaborative unfolding.

Yes your listening and perhaps even watching the Daughter of Godcast, where we get to make a movie together, aka crowd creation and I'm your lead researcher, Dan Kelly aka Shri Fugi Spilt, self taught polymath and proud misfit, just like you, or maybe not. And this is Episode 059 Guides. Together we're not only making a movie but remaking culture, with luck into a environmentally sustainable, spiritually fulfilling and socially just configuration, stealing unapologetically from the Pachamama Alliance.

Fine, I'm not stealing because I trained to be a facilitator for Pachamama's Awakening the Dreamer. However I drifted away from their organization because we spent 100% of the training indoors during a gorgeous fall weekend. That seemed incongruous. Also, there was a kid also taking the training who was Travis Bickle from Taxi Driver incarnate, and I was the only one who noticed. Some super creepy juju. I still like the Pachamama premise tho, thanks to artist Melonie Chopko for turning me onto them.

I'm taking Rebecca Gill's course on SEO and the information is dense, there's a stiff technical learning curve. I am spending way more time on this than I expected to so I'm just going to combine what I am learning with this week's episode of the Daughter of Godcast, that's the path of least resistance this week, the path of most fun, better stated.

Turns out there's also an emotional journey to be had in learning SEO, which is a huge boon for the Daughter of Godcast audience because whoo, that means I got some vulnerability to reveal, which Milagros loves.

This is truly cutting edge listeners and watchers because I REALLY don't know what I am doing and we're going to grope around until we do right now!  How many podcasters are brave enough to try that?

Ok, I'm lying a little. I have the barest inkling of what I am doing otherwise I wouldn't be able to get this episode started. I am pretty sure I have no idea where we'll end up tho, so that's exciting, right? Yes, I'm reading this but remember I had to write this first and there was no net then, that's for sure. Here we go.

What is SEO?

What is Search Engine Optimization, and why should we care?

Because our shared destiny on the Planet Earth is pretty much being shaped by freaking search engines.

Dramatic eh? Just hang in there and see how this sensational claim stands up as we unravel this episode.

Also, I suspect that the Daughter of God is THE answer to all sorts of questions that folks are about to be urgently asking search engines. SEO could be how a vast tribe of super cool people like you discovers the movie.

I enjoy starting with basics because I'm a world builder. Also, offering a solid cognitive foundation means we're less likely to loose anyone, so if you already know everything there is to know about search engines, your patience is appreciated.

What's a Search?

Search engines help us find shit on the web, yes? We might have a question, which translates to a more or less urgent need. Somewhere between a problem and desire. In my way of thinking, problems are best converted to desires, but that's a different topic for another time.

So that's where we start from, a problem or desire. The experience of searching for answers can be quirky. I type in some words that I imagine reflect the gist of my problem or desire and then results show up. Maybe I click on one or two of the results and they aren't quite the answers I was hoping for. So I try again, I type in different words, I vary my language, get more specific, maybe more general, I test related terms, getting creative to unlock the secrets of the web.

As of October 2017, here's my understanding of how search engines produce results. First they constantly inventory what's on the web. They crawl, which means going to each web page and creating an index of what's there.

Now, there are a ten thousand schmagillion web sites and umpity fucktilion pages, so that part is only mildly mind boggling. How many stars are there in the sky? But that's just the beginning.

Model Shop

When you search and then click on a link, the search engine watches you interacting with that website page, and depending on what you do, decides whether or not your question was answered.

So are search engines reading your mind? Yes, in a sense. Based on your behavior, time spent and clicks, and the behavior of brazillions of other people who also asked the same question, search engines infer, they make an artificially intelligent guess.

If the search engine infers that a web page answered your question, that your need was met, then the next time someone searches for what you did, that same page will be brought up first. That web page will rank.

So the search engines model the entire www with an inventory of content and an inventory of interactions with the content.

This is a figuring us out by how we conform to the norm, what 99.9% of people who asked the same question did. That's not exactly omniscience, because as individuals we've got at least that .1% going on. Imagine if our search queries were matched up to our credit card purchases, education, medical records. When a search engine knows who is asking the question.

That's psychic search engines, coming soon to an episode of Charlie Brooker's Black Mirror.

The model shop I was planning on bringing you too a couple weeks back is about clay and plastic kits of Abrams tanks and Airbus 380s and scraps of copper wire and desicated mouse and bird corpses.  We not going to visit that model shop AGAIN this week, maybe not for several weeks, because another model shop is looming a little larger.

Search engines recreate the global web experience in miniature, abbreviated, and this model of the www generates answers to our questions.

SEO models that model.

Content Squish

Exactly how search engines miniaturize our interactions with the web is a bit mysterious, trade secrets. If we want our pages to rank, we've got to model the model, infer from search engine behavior how they work. How will our content get squished and how can we optimize for squishing?

That's SEO - helping the machines to squish our content. Adapting our content to the machines, even. SEO might not make our writing more scrumptious for humans to read, just easier for machines to squish.

A big part of Google's business hinges on advertising,  a broken paradigm IMHO. The sensational and darkly hilarious collapse of consumer culture, that's the origin myth of the Daughter of God universe. Science Fiction movies never come true, so no worries Google.

On CBS in 1979, according to Wikipedia, Sylvestor Stallone's Rocky hit TV for the first time. My dad and I were in the living room. I had a wind-up stopwatch and timed all the commercials. In the 2 hours, there were 30 minutes of commercials. The theatrical running time for Rocky is 119 minutes, so that means 29 minutes of the movie had to be deleted to make room for advertising. That advertising paid for me and my dad to be able to watch Rocky for "free".

Google's freebie is their model of the web, which anyone can use for searching. Along with the entire Rocky franchise, Google gives us access to whatever we've uploaded, through the miracle of model making. Google pays for their model by making advertisers show up before results from the model. Results from the model are called organic, because they pop out of the model based on the query without any financial boost or bias. Or maybe the results are called organic because they aren't loaded with toxic cognitive poison, like advertising often is. Nope, that's me making shit up. The first reason is the right one.

Rebecca Gill insists that Google is all about helping people meet their needs, she seems pretty smart and what the fuck do I know, so that's the premise I'm operating under for now. And needs are not always met by a product or service that you purchase with a credit card, paypal or zcash.

Climbing off the soapbox now. I bring this up because I'm still very much trying to understand how Daughter of God fits into SEO. Because I'm not selling shoes or life insurance, I'm selling dreams, baby. Blue sky. Nothing at all.

This screed has been a little technical, but for you non-geeks we're edging towards more emotional depth. Just had to set the stage.

The first step in SEO is identifying keywords, ultimately the phrases I want dog.movie to rank for. If my SEO is solid, then when a searcher enters these phrases, dog.movie will show up in the top links of the results page, that's what ranking means.

A shoe company might be meeting a need for warm feet, or fashionable feet. What about a movie company? A movie? A movie maker? me?

The keyword process starts out by asking really basic questions and making lists of all the words and phrases that seem to match. Like... who am I and what do I do? For dog.movie, the I is plural - I is Dan Kelly, the Daughter of God movie, and I could also mean you, the audience who influence the movie with feedback. What do WE do?

What questions does the entire Daughter of God franchise including podcast, swag and archives, answer? What needs will this post apocalyptic romantic comedy featurette meet? What needs would we want to meet?

What the heck do I think I am I doing? Uh oh! Emotions ahoy!

I've repeatedly stated in this podcast that I don't know what I'm doing. Early on I discovered maybe 10 different reasons for this podcast. We're making this up as we go along. Well, you're down with that, you grok. You're a human adept with emotional nuance, with rapport.

Now tho, I've got to help the AIs understand. Robot brains in air conditioned bunkers running precise lines of code. Cold calculating mentalities, detached, machines who have never known love.

I've got to find a way for search engines to identify the ineffable, I have teach them how to point their chrome and plastic fingers at the moon.

I wrangled with all this for a couple of days.

Trouble is fantastic, yet another opportunity revealed. I finally remembered that all this is supposed to be fun, intriguing. What could be more fun than diving into the mechanisms of reality creation, especially the mediated reality that search engines offer us daily? The new model shop.

This week's assignment from Rebecca Gill was about looking at my competitors SEO and figuring out what works for them. I can't easily identify competitors, since 1) I haven't figured out what I am actually doing AND 2) what I am doing could be unprecedented, so maybe nobody else is doing it. If I don't have competitors, I certainly have some heros who overlap with the Daughter of God movie and me.

Here are broad categories dog.movie fits into - 1) life hacking or experience optimization, which covers everything from pragmatic spirituality to health and motivation, 2) film making or applied polymathics and 3) the power of audacious mistakes or the making of the movie that made me.

I analyzed several web presences for each category.

1) Life hacking / experience optimization

tonyrobbins.com - super famous motivational speaker
abraham-hicks.com - access to infinite intelligence through Ester Hicks and origin of the law of attraction
davidwolfe.com - health and longevity expert

2) Filmmaking

indiefilmhustle.com, the #1 rated filmmaking podcast on itunes, how to make and distribute independent film.
kungfury.com, a crowd funded cult movie, very inventive and came out of nowhere.
fxphd.com, offering advanced visual effects and production techniques tutorials and courses

3) Making of the movie that made me

From WBEZ Chicago and the BBC, interviews with filmmakers and actors about movie making that made them. These are huge sites, and I couldn't figure out how to get SEO for the specific interview pages on their sites, so I just did the motherships in my analysis.

The takeaway.

Looking at these different site categories and the traffic flowing to them made me think about what *I* might like to emphasize on dog.movie. With the exception of WBEZ and BBC, which have huge staffs dedicated to thw creation of content, all the other sites are driven by one or two primary creators. The life guides like Tony Robbins, Abraham Hicks and David Wolfe enjoy way more traffic than the movie geeks like Alex Ferrari at Indy Film Hustle, Mike and John at fxphd. So to win at SEO maybe better to be more of a guide than a geek.

You've been optimizing your search for delight with Episode 059 of the Daughter of Godcast, Guides. I trust your digging this tour of the model of the model of the model, thanks to both the electric brains and the people who set them loose on the world.

My SEO course lasts another 5 weeks, I've got just enough information to be dangerous and I intend to use it. We're gonna look at search engines again and how the Daughter of God is going to infuse the matrix with her love and free every last one of us. We've still got a chunk of 2016 to cover and of course, there's a model shop with the airbrush and precision tools and tiny parts to saw and glue, ooo! We'll get there. In the meantime enjoy your own sandbox, however that looks for you, make a cozy space for your heart's desire and do come back next week and the week after that because I love imagining you listening and watching, I love sharing this crazy ride with resonant beings on and off planet. Shout out to all the aliens tuning in! Howdy from planet Earth!