One of the most important and difficult questions when starting a career is deciding where to work. In SEO choosing a good first role is essential as it will form the basis of what you will learn and what sort of work you will be exposed to.
As the process can be a bit difficult and just about every SEO company is hiring at the moment (or at all times it seems) I thought it would be worth leaving a few tips to new entries into the community or people thinking about a career change. (more…)
My personal interest in mentors and mentoring was sparked a few years ago when a casual interest in SEO that I’d harboured for years turned into something else, an all consuming passion bordering on obsession.
At the time I was employed as a generalist marketing manager for a small business, lived in wildest westest Wales (still do) and was desperately looking for the training and learning infrastructure that I was sure would be provided had I been able to be a part of an SEO agency, or had there been a long established vocational path for aspirant SEOs. (more…)
There is no question that I have voiced my concern a fair few times about SEO needing to grow up, for us to become marketers, allow more transparency with our clients and so forth, though it has dawned on me that I’ve not really done too much to discuss how specifically we could go about accomplishing this. I do not hope (nor do I think it feasible) to address all of the issues we face in this one post, but I would like to point out one specific way in which I believe we can earn more respect from the people we work with directly and hopefully seek to avoid ever losing an existing client again (unless of course we choose to do so 
).
It’s a zero-sum game, this industry of ours. There are winners and there are losers. There can only be one site that ranks highest, and many sites that rank below it.
Though strictly speaking that’s not true any more – due to personalised results and the continued integration of social signals – I think we can all agree that there’s limited space at the top of any given SERP.
Fortunately we have a big playground to work in. Search engines process billions of queries a day, many of which they’ve never seen before. Every query, potentially, serves as an opportunity to reach an audience. (more…)
It’s not even taken Larry Page one week in his new role as CEO to make big changes to how Google works. We already heard of the departure of executive Jonathan Rosenberg earlier this week, but now news has come out that Page has a major reorganization of his management team on Thursday.
Page put executives in charge of individual business units at Google, reporting straight to Page himself. Several executives have made a promotion, including Andy Rubin (became senior vice president of mobile) and Vic Gundotra (became senior vice president of social). (more…)
Imagine this: a client comes up to you asking you to build them a new e-commerce website. Let’s say they are selling golf clubs. However, it turns out that the golfclubs were counterfeits, illegal copies of trademarked goods. Is that your problem?
No says an SEO company in the US, but yes, says judge Margaret B. Seymour of the U.S. District Court for South Carolina. She says the company “Bright Builders” was “guilty of contributory trademark infringement and unfair trade practices for allegedly assisting in the construction and hosting of the e-commerce site CopyCatClubs.com.”
And here comes the add on: the original owner of the website was fined $28,250. The company which build and SEO-ed the website however was ordered to pay $770,750 in statutory damages. Wow. (more…)
Yesterday I attended a fascinating lecture by Ben Hammersley, organised by the British council, about the future of the internet. Read my write-up of the lecture on the Pierce Communications blog here.
There was one small blemish on this otherwise superb evening. At one point an audience member – probably not coincidentally a grey-haired man wearing a checked shirt – in the course of asking a question, referred to SEO (with venom dripping from his voice as he pronounced the acronym) as “snake-oil” and the embodiment of all that was wrong with the corporatisation of the internet. (more…)
Comparison, it has one of the hottest subjects on the web for years. Try to compare a holiday and you’ll find tons of comparison websites. Try to compare one loan to another one and you will experience the same.
With Bing becoming a ‘decision’ engine it was only a matter of time before Google would be entering the market of comparison sites. After all, isn’t a search engine already a kind of comparison website?
With the acquisition of UK price comparison site BeatThatQuote (for £37.7m) Google has made a next step into the comparison market. And the game is on now. Sites like Go Compare and Compare the Market, who are now the major players, gained a huge competitor overnight. And if things go as planned for Google, within months they will be a major player on the comparison area for both financial and travel products, not surprisingly enough two areas which has a lot of money going around. But Google is moving on thin ice here.
<See update halfway through the post>
This is a guestpost by Brandon Moreau – Webmaster for Citiguarda Sydney Security Company, and DelMonico Hatter, seller of Borsalino hats for over 100 Years. Opinions expressed in the article are those of the guest author and not necessarily State of Search. This article is the second of a series dealing with privacy, technology, and where we are all headed. Read part one here.
Brandon is simultaneously a Technophile and Techno-skeptic. He is an avid reader of Stateofsearch.com and is grateful to Bas for the opportunity to guest post on this topic.
Well ok, where do we go from here? What’s the true future of Search? (At least, my best guess?)
It’s fascinating to me, I’ve heard Eric Schmidt reference this more than once: “If you have a billion people using a platform, someone will find a way to monetize it.” (more…)
This weekend TechCrunch posted an article about how Search still sucks based on a story which came out through the New York Times last week in which a company was ‘caught’ buying links in Google. Arrington responded to this and Google’s attack on Bing last week by saying that search still sucks. It looked like linkbait from Arrington to me to be honest.
But there is a lot you can say about this, and a lot which will be said. We decided we would go to one of the experts on the matter to see how he feels about it. In the State of Search expert opinion we asked Dave Naylor about his views on the matter. He addressed Arrington’s article, but also the ‘battle’ between Bing and Google.
Today we welcome a new blogger to our team: Martijn Beijk. Welcome Martijn, good to have you on board!
The Internet has integrated fully with our everyday live – some of us cannot live without. This has made (at least most of) us forget how the internet started to exist and what the underlying architecture is. Even with search we have to deal with the architecture of the Internet everyday.
Your computer is connected to the Internet via your Internet Service Provider or your router (which probably uses Network Address Translation) – which in its turn is connected to your ISP. You might be browsing via a proxy. Everything connected to the Internet uses an IP (Internet Protocol) address. You might not be aware that when you type in www.stateofsearch.com there is an extra service (DNS) translating the domainname to an IP address for you so you will not have to memorize all the billions of numbers.
Not trying to get into too much technical detail, the IP addresses that are available in the IPv4 (version 4 of IP) are now fully allocated. the last blocks have been depleted. none left. Time to look into the future, what can you expect. (more…)
The first big SES conference of the year and the biggest one in Europe is getting closer and closer: SES London 2011. Which means you will see more and more coverage appearing about that conference right here on State of Search. And remember, you can still win a ticket if you nominate someone or someone nominates YOU for a ticket!
The conference which takes place between the 21st and 25th of February at the Queen Elizabeth II conference centre, in Westminster London, UK will see about 1500 marketers get together to learn about search, social and online marketing strategies. There are many sessions you can attend which are interesting to see, see the program here.
But one of the main reasons you should visit SES is the huge opportunity to network with not only these 1500 marketers, but also to get in touch with the experts in the field. Those who can help you get that step further. And there is no better place to that than in the pub! And that place to be is at the HMS President on the Wednesday 23rd of February. (more…)
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