Posts by Peter Young

Peter has been around the industry for a while now, having previously headed up both search and SEO operations at Connectpoint (now Amaze), Mediavest, Brilliant Media and now Regional Head of SEO - UK and Ireland for Mediacom - during which time he has had the opportunity to work with clients as diverse as the Co-Operative Group, Lexus, Barratt Homes to Bupa. In his spare time, Peter Young (@peteyoung) blogs on the Holistic Search Marketing blog on a range of SEO, Social Media and PPC issues
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The SEO Resource Conundrum

empty-office

Perhaps its something that affects the UK market more than most, however talking to a number of the colleagues both at SES London last week and since my return to the local scene the issue of SEO staff or more like the lack of it. A conversation with Richard Gregory at Latitude last week, as well as others from other colleagues at Group M and wider agencies highlighted a significant demand for SEO talent which at present many organisations are struggling to deal with. The net effect of this is an obvious rise in renumeration that many skilled SEO practioners can demand – and even more junior staff now demanding competitive salaries particularly in comparison with many of similar marketing related occupations – and even PPC. Perhaps the only similar channels are that of both social media and more recently conversion rate optimisation experts where one might argue demand is even more acute.

It would also appear that the problem isn’t just limited to the UK. Recent surveys by both Onward Search and SEOMoz suggest SEO in the states shares many similar traits in terms of both the demand and supply side issues as we do here in the UK with New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco and Chicago leading the way in terms of potential wage earners in the states. (more…)

No easy answers to an age old problem

integrity

What started as an innocuous article on a regional publication, last week provoked a lot of debate on both sides of the pond around the age old SEO subject of integrity. The article in question related to a SEO company based here in the UK who had released a press release claiming to be the number 1 SEO in the UK. Now this post is certainly not going to tackle that particular subject as I and I would imagine many of the State of Search readers are very bored of that particular subject.

What I did think it highlighted was the fact that despite the SEO industry has come on leaps and bounds, we do still struggle with many of the age old problems that have so often blighted it in the past. Many people have suggested a number of ways of attempting to help organisations looking for SEO services – particularly as SEO moves away from the cottage industry mentality into one closely integrated with other channels such as PR and Social Media. (more…)

Whose line is it anyway? Getting Social Media right

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In many modern day SEO campaigns, social forms an increasingly important part of the campaign mix, particularly to organisations willing to exploit short term opportunism, viral campaign development or just simple brand building. When one considers the vast reach of social media particularly through Facebook and Twitter, that’s hardly surprising. These sites are the most visited sites in the internet accounting for millions of visits and billions of page views a month.

Brand protection can often be a big part of this, whether to directly tackle potential issues online or to utilise to reduce negative search engine results pages. Further to this such activity can often fall into that crack that’s sits between different channel owners such as PR and SEO – who often may share the development of an Online PR function for a client – strangely enough a similar type of scenario which often exists within the SEO/Social Media framework. (more…)

Has Google+ missed the boat?

ark-missedtheboat

I was involved in the State of Search radio show this Tuesday night with Bas and Roy, something I have been fortunate to have been involved with on a number of occasions. During the conversation, we got onto the subject of Google+ something which has had a lot of noise over the last couple of weeks for a number of reasons not limited to Google engineers venting with others outlining the perceived decline in Google+ takeup over recent months.

I have to say, I was one of those that was very exciting at the thought of Google+. My personal thoughts are that the hangouts and Huddles are a great idea – yet something stops me from fully engaging with the product. I know I am not the only one – talking to many colleagues and industry peers it is clearly apparent that take off isn’t what many of us thought it would be – and the general public appear to be of a similar perception. I should add at this point that I am not saying Google+ is on its last legs – just that it certainly isn’t fulfilling its potential. (more…)

Search engine wars – Is the empire striking back

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I have done a couple of these search engine market share analysis pieces on my blog over the years, and for much of that time Google has ruled the roost. The likes of Yahoo and Wolfram Alpha (who????) have all offered much and delivered little and in recent times Bing has made some serious noises but struggled to gain much traction at Google’s expense – although recent news suggested Bing had made significant inroads in terms of the US marketplace

When I ran a similar piece of analysis around 9 months back, Google had around 90% market share, a figure it has had for the best part of three of four years now – and a trend commonplace pretty much around Western Europe – and North America to be honest. Whilst Yahoo used to be the deputy for much of that time, Bing has made some significant strides and over recent years has become a significant threat to the Yahoo market share and now accounts for a higher proportion of searches than Yahoo according to a number of recent Hitwise reports. (more…)

Bing – still life in the old dog yet?

bing+skype+baidu

The battle for search engine supremacy appears to be hotting up. No sooner have we seen the launch of Google+ than Bing announce a potentially huge deal with Baidu to power the English based searches. With the current Search Alliance running behind schedule (in the UK at least), Google must have been rubbing their hands at the thought of taking a further lead on their rivals however it appears that we are potentially seeing the sting in the tail, with Bing announcing a number of deals in recent months which could see them take a considerable step forward.

Its no secret that Google see Facebook as as big a competitor as they do Bing. Facebook certainly have the potential, they certainly have the audience – at the moment they dont have the where with all. Likewise, Bing have the where with all, unfortunately we often fail to see the innovation and speed of thought of Google. Whether this is simply down to culture is open to debate – certainly Google still have much of the dotcom speed of movement to them which Microsoft/Bing don’t however I can’t help thinking Bing are quietly working behind the scenese and we may just may get to the point where they actually have something special. (more…)

Schema.org – What does it really mean for us

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Its now been just over a week since the three major search engines announced a unified approach to “create and support a common vocabulary for structured data markup on web pages”. The announcement made almost simultaneously by Google, Bing and Yahoo is in simple language a way of standardising markup – such as microformats – for any party wishing to utilise the schema.org framework. According to the official schema.org site the requirement for a new schema was bourne out of three main issues

  • Webmasters – Schema.org provides a single resource for webmasters to go to rather than the existing fragmented approach.
  • Search Engines – Provides a centralised structured approach required in order to ‘improve search’. In real terms – pages can be interpreted as required with no potential for misintepretaton’
  • Users – With structured data – users will have a better experience from services such as search engines. We have already seen evidence of this via Googles Microformats adoption however further takeup of schemas.org should see this translate across multiple engines. (more…)

A dangerous game?

dangerous-game

There was an interesting debate taking place recently between a number of high profile people within the organic search space regarding the recent spate of outings taking place over on influential online publications such as the New York Times. During recent months, the New York Times has been responsible for the reporting of a couple of major organisations for activity which goes against the guidelines outlined by Google regarding how people should be optimising their websites. (more…)

Link Analysis tools: SEO Spyglass (Link Assistant) – any good?

link-assistant-screen

Increasingly we are seeing a burgeoning industry in SEO tools coming into the marketplace, as we see the SEO industry mature into an ever increasing part of the marketing communications mix. In particular link analysis is a fundamental part of many search engine marketing organisations armouries – and this is increasingly becoming a battleground as the likes of Majestic SEO, SEO Moz (+Open Site Explorer) and more recently other tools such as Search Metrics have become entered the market – symbolic perhaps that the industry has come along way since the days of many of us using Yahoo Site Explorer (whooooo!!!)

One of the organisations trying to make a move into this space is that of SEO SpyGlass – Link Assistant, a company who have been around since 2004 – and whose flagship product link-assistant.com was released ‘way back’ in 2005. The latest tool has come a long way since those early days , and I was given an opportunity by Bas to review the latest release of SEO Spyglass. (more…)

Google: C+ – Still room for improvement….

Grade - C+_x275

Google has come in for a lot of criticism over the last year or so, some of it justified, some of it not so. Whilst it is unrealistic to expect and assume that Google is and potentially can be a perfect entity, I for one would certainly suggest there is some room for improvement within the current resultset both in terms of quality of results and support for existing products.

Sometimes struggles to focus
There isn’t a day that goes by where we don’t see something new in our search index, whether that change be algorithmic or increasingly structural within the search index. From the addition of comparison ads to new layout to cater for local searches to the integration of local – 2010 was certainly a bumper year for changes. (more…)

How to make friends and influence people in SEO

It seems we have gone conference mad here at State of Search, and with some great conferences about – potential attendees are spoilt for choice – as Bas’ poll would probably suggest. As a conference organiser (I organise the Sascon conference in Manchester UK), I have been on both sides of the fence, as both attendee, speaker and organiser.

One of the things which came out of some recent events within the SEO community are just how many relationships are developed from sources such as Twitter, which then develop onto other social platforms such as Facebook/Skype and often then become ‘real life’ through meeting at conferences whether this be at the conference itself or indirectly via the various social forums which are often associated with these events such as Manchester SEO or London SEO.

So how do you make sure you get ahead in the game of SEO, and make the most of these opportunities …. (more…)

The futures bright, The futures Bing

This post was originally published in our newsletter. The last one of the year will be published soon, so be quick to register here and check out the earlier versions of our newsletter.

A few weeks ago I published a post on Holistic about whether Bing could be a viable alternative to Google – something which came up with some interesting results. Having watched the HTML5 enhanced version, I have to say I am genuinely impressed with some of the usability features they are integrating into the Google search engine. Unlike Google’s rushed and barely thought out implementation of Google Instants, some of the usability features of the HTML 5 enhanced version of Bing appear genuinely well thought out and well implemented.

Technologies within HTML5 have allowed them to integrate some very slick functionality – particularly with the new IE9 technologies – such as the video tag which can be used to change the new homepage. Whilst some people hate the background in Bing, I think both Google and Bing are trying to make their search engines ‘portal-like’ in their own right and social hubs to the rest of the internet. To this effect I think the new Bing framework does hold some significant promise for the future. (more…)

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