Your Weekend Reading List for Search and Social – February 17

One and a half weeks ago we re-introduced our ‘reading list’. Great articles from around the web which will help you improve your online marketing strategies.

Off course we have a lot of great content ourselves, which you can see by reading the site. To keep up you can off course register for our newsletter and our RSS Feed or follow us on Twitter or Facebook.

But there is much more and that is what we provide you with just before the weekend. If you have any tips: tweet us or let us know! Enjoy! … Continue Reading

Google SERP Twitter Talk – Boring the Pants off the Normal Man

This is a guest post by Peter Handley, SEO Director of theMediaFlow. Like this post? Let us know!

Sometimes it’s easy for us search marketers to get lost in our acronyms – and let’s face it, there are a hell of a lot of them in this industry.

SEO, SEM, PPC, CTR, CPC, SMO, PR– there is absolutely loads of jargon flying around in our industry, and we are constantly coming up with new ways to shorten terms – who can forget one of the latest ones with GSPYW?

It’s easy to get trapped in your own bubbles and circles on platforms like Twitter and forget that we communicate with wider groups of people. My own Twitter account, whilst predominantly search marketing focussed also attracts followers based on music and food/cooking that I share. … Continue Reading

How to Leave your Job, the Country and Survive

I am writing this in a flat, with food in my belly and water on tap, instead of a cave with a month long beard and nothing but a rattlesnake for company, so I guess in essence I have survived. And in doing so, I guess I am qualified enough to give some advice if you are thinking of moving to another country to work.

I decided to up sticks and move to Australia in October last year. I always wanted to work abroad and I felt with the job we do it was a perfect opportunity.  Sometimes I feel we don’t appreciate how good our industry is in this sense; not many people can work remotely, or work in an industry as flexible as ours and it took moving abroad for me to realise how fortunate we are.

There are certain questions that need to be answered before and after you move.  In fact, depending on your initial choices there are questions and challenges at every stage, but instead of looking at them as a hardship the right mindset should see them as opportunities. … Continue Reading

No easy answers to an age old problem

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. … Continue Reading

TopSEOs: Kill The Hypocrisy, It’s Time To Take a Stand

Disclaimer: Just to make sure there’s no confusion, the opinions expressed here are mine and mine alone and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of State of Search or any of its affiliates, etc etc.

Now, with that out of the way, cue the rage.

Yesterday a press release, uncritically regurgitated by The Drum, made the rounds on various social media platforms. It concerned a company’s “number one UK SEO company” ranking, as awarded by none other than TopSEOs.

Aside from the editorial blunder of publishing this drivel, there are massive levels of fail in evidence here. Anyone in the SEO industry who can rub more than two braincells together knows that TopSEOs is a scam (as should be evident from the links provided later in this post). … Continue Reading

A Perspective on the SEO Industry

A very interesting infographic today, all about the search industry. This infographic was created by Datadial.net based on a Twitter survey they performed a few weeks ago.

They asked 22 questions about working in SEO, from where the SEOs are based to ‘do you buy links’ and “Have you ever had a site penalized?”. The results are made into this infographic. A very nice way of doing a survey and presenting the results. … Continue Reading

How To Build Those Links (infographic)

Linkbuilding, it still is (one of) the most important aspects of optimization for search engines. There will not be many SEO’s who will disagree there. But as simple as it sounds: “Get links!”, it is not easy. Linkbuilding takes time and effort.

Many also don’t know where to start. Will I be sending out tons of non-personalized e-mails? Will I be buying the links? Or will I be begging for them? This infographic could be a start. Or would the linkbuilders amongst us disagree on that..? What do you think? … Continue Reading

Five Reasons Why SEOs Should Legitimately Be Scared of Google

Am I the only one who is starting to think Google might have it in for SEOs? I’ve never been one of the tin foil hat brigade who thought the posse up at mountain-view have always been out to get the search industry, but these five recent events have lead me to start to think otherwise.
… Continue Reading

All the Winners of the UK Searchawards: Lisa Myers Personality of The Year! #searchawards

Tonight in London the UK Searchawards have been given out. Our very own Lisa Myers was voted as Search Personality of the Year. Other winners were Fast Web Media, who won no less than four awards, including the Best Agency Award.

The ceremonies in the Emirates Stadium saw a lot of winners, which you can find below. The jury explained that it was very hard deciding on the winners because there were many cases, but also some great cases missing. The winners however can be very proud of their awards! Congratulations to all of them. … Continue Reading