Keith Rankin has joined Blonde as Head of Search.

He is just back from a year travelling. His search (geddit?) for enlightenment included several months in South East Asia, including an ascent of Mount Kinabalu on Borneo. At 13,500 feet, that made him the highest Rankin (geddit?) sightseer on the island.

Prior to that Keith did lots of clever things at Fast Web Media in Manchester. His clients included The Premier League, Carling, Grolsch and PA Sport. Whilst there he picked up several awards including a “Best Use of Search” for Carling at the 2006 Revolution Awards.

Keith brings with him not just proven expertise in search engine marketing, but also a keen interest in optimising content on social platforms such as Facebook and YouTube.

As well as being good at what he does, Keith is a culturally and philosophically aligned with the people-first thinking that characterises Blonde work. We all just clicked (geddit?) during the interview process.

That’s probably enough. Small prize for the best search related pun in any comments.

If ever you wanted an example of how great content underpins great search engine optimisation, this is it.

If ever you wanted proof that optimising your site for human beings is the best way to optimise it for search engines, this is it.

The Woodlands Junior School (Tonbridge, Kent) website isn’t the prettiest thing to look at…

… but boy does Google like it.

A post on the Hitwise Intelligence blog makes this point extremely well. It shows that the Woodlands site picked up over a third of all clicks on the term ‘mother’s day’ for the 12 weeks ending 13th March 2010.

I read the post with professional interest, but with a vague personal bell ringing in my head.

It was only when I looked at the site that I realised why. It is the self same Woodlands Junior School site that my daughter’s primary school teacher had recommended to me for its interactive times table games at a parents’ evening only last week.

In fact the site is a treasure trove of useful interactive educational tools. Wall to wall utility.

No wonder it has a reputation amongst the teaching profession as a valuable classroom and parental resource.

A reputation that translates into search engine authority.

I was the seven hundred and seventy second person to save the Woodlands site to Delicious, and the popular tags suggested by Delicious when I saved it tell their own story.

The content has been developed by teachers for teachers, and this is reflected in the recommended tags – resources, school, interactive, curriculum, junior, games etc.

Once the teaching profession grapevine kicked in, so did the inbound links to the site. Indeed, at the time of writing, Yahoo Site Explorer shows 86,541 inbound links to the site.

With that kind of Google-friendly authority, it’s not surprising that a short term Mother’s Day piece on its homepage outranks all other sites for that search term.

An excellent case-study showing that consistent development of useful content for humans is the best way to appeal to robots.