Random babble by Paulh

4eyes, one of the main organizers behind many an SEO meeting, has made a great post on how to best setup a meeting..

 Trying to organise a bunch of SEOs to do anything in unison has been described as ‘trying to herd cats’.

You can’t do it.
Cats won’t be herded.

What you can do is throw a load of smelly fish where you want the cats to assemble, and if the fish are smelly enough you’ll be beating cats off with a shitty-stick.

Full post over at SEO Circuit

Wish 4eyes would post more often

SEO Circuit makes finding those all important SEO meetings a lot easier, or arrange your own meeting in your local area. With some SEO old timers like 4eyes behind the site, this has to be one place you visit to find out what’s going on. These guys played a big part in arranging meetings from the invite only SEORoadshow, Syndk8 meets, and the upcoming meeting in Manchester on the 14^th of September.

You can also find details on all the major conferences from SMX, webmaster world, and search engine strategies, but for me the best events are the much smaller hotel meetings. The smaller meets have much higher ratio of pros vs newbs, you get to pick the brains of some SEO legends for free, drink to you fall over, and not have to listen to a presentation on meta tags that you or company just paid a lot of money for. Plus you get to poke fun at people like EarlGay and DaveN, just don’t expect either of them to buy you a drink.

I really like Google webmaster tools, but they are so slow to release new features.

What I really want right now is an email alert system for each of the possible errors. Company I recently consulted for had dropped out of Google serps for a week.  Took me about 5 minutes to find and fix the problem (500 internal server error being returned on every page, but site looked fine in browser), but if we had email alerts the company involved could have fixed the problem in hours instead of the week it took to notify me.

Another feature I would love to see, but doubt we will ever get, is to specify our target country. Google curnelty looks at the domain tld and where the site is hosted when deciding weighting for country specific Googles like google.co.uk – have a .co.uk hosted in the USA and rank ok in .co.uk, have .com hosted in the UK and rank ok in .co.uk – but have a .com hosted in the USA when u are trying to target UK customers, then things are not as rosy. So just get hosting in the right country? No always so simple. For legal reasons some companies have to host their sites in the country the company is registered in. So for some offshore companies this creates a bit of problem. Solution? Let me specify our chosen target country for the main domain and subdomains.

Nice feature I would also like to see, to save me having to whip our own code monkeys, is a history of linking data, what links have we lost/gained. Trend over time, quality of those links. This isn’t some black hat link spamming monitoring but i want to know if our promotional blitz is working and reaching the right places, or are we only being picked up by EarlGrey’s crapy scraper farms.

 What webmaster tools features do you want to see?

Just read the The In-House SEO Life Cycle on searchengineland.

Working in-house sure is different from working solo or for a dedicated SEO agency.

The company realize they need search engine optimisation but are not really sure what that means. They know they need to increase traffic but have no idea how its done. In boardroom meetings you hear phrases like “SEO magic” and “SEO vodoo”.   Just smile. 

Believe me sometimes it’s best not to talk SEO to some people. They pick up on fractions of what’s been said, and a little knowldge is a dangerous thing, next thing you know some well intentioned monkey is spamming google with JavaScript redirecting content. With no idea of the risks involved.

I can cope with good intentioned colleagues who email you articles from 4 years ago about some gooogle patent. Or pass on link exchange requests that your learned to ignore even before you knew what “link farm” meant. They are only helping, and its not thier job to know if its crap or not. Occasionally even my mom emails me some shite search story she found on the web.(sorry mom).

It’s even ok when your boss asks why we don’t rank for certain terms that aren’t worth targeting, or will using AdWords increase our PageRank.  All valid questions from people who’s job isn’t SEO.

But the the most frustrating part of corporate SEO is being asked for your expert opinion only to get looked at like you just asked to shag your bosses wife. Worse is when your bosses look at each other then laugh - still not made better when 3 months later your biggest competitor does exactly what they thought was so amusing - yeah not so fucking funny now! And that domain we said you could buy for $10k 4 months ago just sold for 10 times that, and now you wnat to buy it.. argghh!

The next most frustraing thing is how damn slow corporates move. But i expected that! Didn’t expect the go back to your corner and tweak some meta tags atitude. But its nice and hot in Spain and corporates pay good money

Some good friends in the UK are  organising an SEO meet in Manchester on September 14/15th.

You can register your interest here 

This kind of event happens on a regular basis, usually kept a lot more low key to a smaller crowd. Basiclay a bunch of seo and marketing enthusiasts descend on a hotel, talk shop, have a laugh, get drunk, and come away with some great contacts and ideas. Very informal and no boring presentations - simply turn up at the hotel and look for the dodgy looking misfits huddled round a laptop, or drunk at 11am looking like they’ve had 2 hours sleep.

Whilst looking for staff DaveN found a position wanted ad.

I am a search fiend and well known within the search industry, both within the UK and internationally. I am looking for a new challenge (and will explain why if I agree to talk with you) and am available at short notice to take your agency / search engine / online business to the next level and beyond.

I know if my company was hiring someone of that caliber we would be giving this guy a call to find out more.

Which reminds me, if you’re tempted to work fr DaveN the “northern tyrant”, don’t!! i tried it and he’s nowhere near as nice as he tries to make out - would google lie? So come and work for us in sunny Spain where we go the beach for lunch, and can go home to our pools for bbq’s all year round

Getting listed in Google news is not as difficult as many think.

Here’s how I recently got one of my companies sites listed in Google news..

1. Get some reliable hosting
2. Find a good content management system – I used wordpress
3. Create a nice design – we went for a design where the front page looks more like the Washington Post than a blog.
4. Install some wordpress plugins to improve usability like I did hear http://www.assertica.co.uk/top-wordpress-plugins-for-seo-and-usability/
5. To meet Google News guidelines the urls need to have a unique identifying number other than a date. This is very easy to change in Wordpress, modify the permalink structure from /%year%/%monthnum%/%day%/%postname%/ to something like /%year%/%monthnum%/%day%/123%post_id%-%postname%/
   123%post_id% now gives our urls at least a 4 digit unique number.
6. Recruit some editors. Luckily I work with several content writers, who write superb content. You can find willing authors wanting to write content for your site if you look around. We now have people asking to write for us for free.
7. Post daily news. A story a day was enough for us.
8. Wait 3 months – surprisingly that was long enough for us.
9. Double check you meet the Google news guidelines http://www.google.com/support/news_pub/ things may have changed since you started your site.
10. Submit to Google news http://www.google.com/support/news_pub/bin/request.py and wait for a review.

Early days for us and we don’t have the resources to publish more than a few stories a day. Hopefully I can do follow up post in a few months on getting the most from Google news.

Recently ordered some books from Amazon for a bit of light reading whilst i lie on my roof in sunny Spain.

First book on my reading list is “The New Rules of Marketing & PR” How to use news releases, blogs, podcasting, viral marketing, and online media to reach buyers directly.

Theres a lot in it that most SEOs will know, but i am already learning knew things, had an avalanche of ideas sparked, and i’m only up to chapter six. Authors blog: David Meerman Scott

We are recruiting a Junior SEO to work with us in southern Spain(near Gibraltar) . The right candidate will basically be working for me and a well known SEO as part of a much bigger team at a marketing company for the online gaming industry in our Spanish offices.

Essential Skills

Minimum of 6 month SEO experience
Knowledge of main ranking factors in major search engines
Understand differences in high and low risk strategies
Good verbal communication
Fluency in English
Enthusiastic about SEO and online marketing
Must be able to work in EU/Spain

Desirable skills

A creative mind
Microsoft office( word and excel)
2nd Language
Html + CSS

Tasks

Working closely with experienced SEO specialists(that will me and the other guy) you will learn some of the most cutting edge SEO and online marketing strategies. You should be highly passionate about online marketing, search, and SEO, with a strong desire to learn more.

Working in a highly competitive market, your main tasks will be to perform

• Manual link building
• Keyword research
• Competitor analysis
• Analysing stats and producing reports

Can ask questions here or contact me at seojob1@assertica.co.uk