I’d really like to try and help him out finding the right person for the role. If you’re looking for a SEO job in Preston please let me know.

It’s a new role, the company being quite sales orientated in their outlook at the moment, however they are moving more towards a marketing orientated business model so whoever gets on board at this point will be central to not only developing the online marketing strategy but also direction the company takes in general.

SEO Jobs in Preston

The business has multiple websites so it’s not just a case of making one website work and on top of that there are plans to put in place a number of other sites in the future so there’ll be plenty of scope for SEO work. You’ll also have to be able to put in place a decent marketing strategy to get things going and also come up with a plan for customer retention – but that shouldn’t be too difficult.

It’s a medium-grade role, they’ll pay relatively well for the area and the business is doing well and is in an industry where the margins are high so I think it would be a good find for anyone looking for that kind of role.

Preston SEO Jobs

Send me an email to sd@growtraffic.co.uk if you’re interested in a Preston SEO role or really have Online Marketing skills in general and think you might be a good fit for an up and coming business.

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I’d love to here your thoughts on how the market will change in the coming year.

How will Google+ change Search Marketing?

• Google will begin to show Adwords in Google+ (possibly within display advertising, or maybe through a new AdWords option).
• Google will develop a Google+ API (and probably Google+ comments for sites to rival Facebook)
• Google+ stats will be integrated with Google Analytics
• Google+ will feature more distinctly in search results when making brand or individual search (I imagine Google wrapping multiple search results together to make some kind of super serp result – such as Google+, Google Places and website)
• Google will use Google+ results far more as ranking signals – if you’re business isn’t there it’s unlikely your site is going to be anywhere in the future.

How will Facebook change?

• The demographic of Facebook is getting older – this means Facebook is going to have to do some serious work over this next year to get the younger generation on board or at least back on board. No matter what Facebook wants us to believe, it’s not cool to hang out with your parents and share every embarrassing moment with them, maybe it’s time for a Facebook junior?
• Facebook will change and develop as the other social media sites out there gain ground which inevitably this year they will. Google+ is the obvious one however other sites such as Printerest will also have an impact on Facebook’s offering and dominance.

How will Search Marketing change?

• Rich text snippets will be used more and more and will start to resemble the type of spam content that meta keywords used to represent – Google will have to do something to stop this.
•  Links will become less important, or rather link spam will become less important – it will evolve that Google starts to use authority from social media sites and other sources as well as interactions in order to determine how to weight the links themselves rather than weighting them on their pagerank values.
• Marrisa Mayer has moved to local – so I’d guess this will be the year that they finally sort out what they’re doing with this side of things
• Google will continue to develop Panda and sites will continue to be removed from the rankings based on poor search marketing carried out in the distant past
• There will be a big rise in the use of personalisation in search results and we’ll move more towards the personalisation era
• Geolocation will become more important and this will be made up of more factors – watch your server location and your office location and make sure you’re using the right TDL – as mobile search grows (it’s likely that it will overtake desktop search this year) geolocatised content will become much more important.
• Sites will become far more integrated with social media sites with a lot more emphasis put on gamification which will allow sites to create a more sticky and personalised experience for their users. It should be noted that 2011 saw not a lot of difference between the results for different devices.

How will the SEO industry change in 2012?

• Professionals in the industry will become far more specialised in 2012 – we’ll see the growth of technical seos, with people specialising in forensic seo, local seo etc) other seo marketing professionals will move towards calling themselves Inbound Marketing Specialists.
• Creative marketers will start to look like authority figures that make recommendations about products through social media, blogs and less and less about creating loads of links back to people’s sites – it’s their individual authority that will really start to count.
• Google will continue to make it more difficult for web owners to work out what keywords are driving traffic and conversions.
• All search marketing professionals will become certified (which leads me onto the point below)
• I believe we’ll start to see a decline in the industry – which I believe has become a bit parasitic and out of control. Lots of people have been burnt over the past 10 years and they will hear the horror stories and are less inclined to get burnt (or burnt again) – this should see only the best seos left in the business.

Keywords used by people to find this content include:

• seo predictions 2012
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Most viewed blog posts in 2011:

1. The Personalisation Era: Determinism and Passive Media Individualism
2. Does ROI focused internet marketing spoil creativity in marketing?
3. How to predict SEO ROI (return on investment)
4. What’s the future of exact match domains?
5. How to set a PPC Budget
6. Why is Google hiding organic search data?
7. Does Google penalise websites for poor spelling?
8. Advanced Web Ranking Software – Review
9. Google’s Forget SEO Advertising Campaign
10. How to get white hat backlinks

It’s good to see that by and large the blog posts that are in the top 10 are the new ones from this year, but there are a couple in there that are from the last couple of years which demonstrates they are still useful (I might revisit them in 2012 and update them where possible).

I’m really proud to see my my crusade post The Personalisation Era is the most viewed blog post from the whole of 2011, that tells me I’m onto something and I need to really make some more of this in the coming year.

I look forward to the new developments in search marketing and inbound marketing generally over the next 12 months – as always, exciting times.

Let’s go back to the start. The site in question is iClickShredders.co.uk, it’s a relatively new site and domian (having been launched in September 2011) and it’s an ecommerce website that sells (wait for it!) shredders.

Before we start, it’s worth saying the site has something going against it and that domain age and history, essentially it has no authority.

We’ve done a bit of PR, a bit of blog posting, a bit of social media, created directory entries to build things up slowly. However, if we put the fact that the site has no authority to one side for the time being, the site is relatively well optimised, has a good conversion rate (about 3%) and has a design that leaves most of its competitors in the shade. The issue is it doesn’t seem to want to rank easily for the terms it’s optimised for.

Why Choose Cross Cut Office Shredders?

To carry out a bit of a test on this subject I decided to attempt to get the site ranking for a long tail phrase that incorporated a couple of keywords that we want to give the site as a whole strength for, we had a look around and came up with a phrase that wasn’t at all competitive, namely: Cross Cut Office Shredders. By having a look at what other sites are doing it seem that there are only around 3 websites in the top 20 Google results that target this keyphrase. Perfic as Del Boy would say (it’s Christmas times and I’m ready for the reruns).

Targeting Cross Cut Office Shredders

The first task was to create a category page called Cross Cut Office Shredders and assign all the cross cut office shredders to this category, next job make sure the category page is well optimised for everything to do with a cross cut office shredder – this isn’t just about the search engines though this is a useful category for anyone visiting the site so everyone wins. This done, the new cross cut office shredder page was set live and we waited to see what would happen. And we waited. And we waited. OK – so nothing seemed to be happening we checked the sitemap was being pushed out to Google Webmaster Tools and it was, so we added a link to the footer and we waited another week or so and again nothing seemed to happen, no rankings in the top 100. ext job build some links to the site this was done by using social media, blog comments – still nothing in the top 100. Odd – I’m seriously questioning the software that the site is built in now (and still am a bit), it’s built in classic .asp and we’ve had to work closely with the developers to bring it up to 2010 / 2011 standards.

So what’s next? Next thing I did was to create a blog post on the corporate site’s blog explaining about cross cut office shredders and to explain why we’ve created this section on the sherdders website – mainly from the point of view of usability (although this is a test it’s a new section that we believe will be helpful to the site visitors). So I create this blog post – gave it one link back to the category page and the new blog post is ranking on the second / third page of Google the next day. Great I think – so I’m not losing my touch. The day after that the category section start to rank, not as highly as the blog post but it’s still ranking. The blog post was written on the corporate site which is built in WordPress which Google obviously loves.

Continuing the Cross Cut Office Shredders Experiment

As with every experiement you carry out in the search engines they’re never really finished. I’ve got to page 3 for a term that should be very easy to rank for, it’s a result but not a great one. I have now got more unanswered questions. I question is it domain age counting against the site, is it that the system it’s built in isn’t fast enough or search engine friendly enough, maybe it’s just that Google doesn’t like my copy about cross cut office shredders or maybe there’s something to do with it being a listings page that is working against it.

I’m going to continue to work on this page and get some more insight into what’s happening here and I’ll report back as soon as I’ve come up with any firm conclusions. I’m going to put a guess that I’ll have it on the first page of Google for the term cross cut office shredders by the second week in January.

Time will tell and we shall see.

Keywords used by people to find this content include:

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You’re probably thinking my monitor isn’t not big enough or something, well I can tell you – on 3 monitors it’s still the case.

As a search marketer, I realise that Google’s main aim is to keep people on its platform for as long as possible, ultimately that means Google has the best opportunity to expose the searcher to as many ads as possible – so they might click on one of them.

Google’s Recent Marketing Campaign: Forget SEO

I didn’t really think that Google wanted to get rid of the organic results, I mean the organic results are at the heart of what they do right? Apparently not, Google ran a search marketing campaign around the globe that told people to forget SEO (especially when people searched for SEO).

This targeting of SEOs wasn’t just an attack on the search marketing community, it was a flagrant attack on organic search itself, this was Google saying “our core business has been Google AdWords for a long time, you just not realised it yet.” Google no longer loves organic search results – because they don’t make any money directly from it.

Google’s Forget SEO advertising campaign proves what manner of us SEOs have been arguing for a long time, Google still views SEOs as the enemy when the rest of the search marketing community has grown up to see ourselves as being marketers working in the search engine space. It’s a bit like the Post Office making it harder and harder to deliver Direct Mail marketing campaigns, instead the Post Office is all for encouraging more use of its network.

Did Google Violate it’s own AdWords Advertising Policy?

No one else would get away with running ads about PPC, that targeted people looking for SEO, before you know it you would find you’ve violated the Google AdWords Advertising Policy – it’s just Google doesn’t seem to apply this same methodology to their own ads. Surprised? Not really.

The End of Google’s Forget SEO Campaign

Whilst I’ve been writing this blog it looks as though Google’s Forget SEO Campaign has been coming to an end. Matt Cutts has been busying himself on Twitter calming the community down and OK, this is the end of the Forget SEO Advertising campaign, but can Matt Cutts really say, hand on heart that this is the end of the Forget SEO Campaign or even the Forget Organic Campaign, after all the organic results are the only bit of Google’s offering that it can’t make money on.

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I’m a bit of a part time runner. What I mean by that is used to run and I run every now and then, sure I run 10k everytime I go to the gym, but there is only so far I can run, only so long I can push myself before I start to fail.

Is failure the problem?

I’ve been failing at one thing or another for years, if we were honest we all have. Like most other people I’ve been over analyzing the details of my failure and it’s taken me years to understand that it’s not really failure that’s the ultimate problem.

With running it’s doesn’t matter how good or fit you are, failure is going to happen at some point or another. It doesn’t matter how optimistic I am, no matter how much I stock up on energy drinks, I can’t run a 10K in 15 minutes tomorrow.

I say I’m a part time runner because I haven’t managed to get myself out of the mind set that makes me ask the questions internally that ultimately stop me running, questions such as “are you sure you can do this?”, “have you prepared enough for this?”, “have you done enough training for this?” etc.

What’s certain is as soon as I start asking myself these questions I am setting myself up to fail, I am giving myself a chance to fail, in fact I’m actually planning to fail.

When running, my body is quite  capable of telling me when it’s time to have a rest, when it’s time to give up etc, until I’ve got to that point there is no point in worrying about it when I will need to stop, doing so just allows me to plan further my failure.

All you can do is give yourself the preparation required to get you to the end and then stop worrying (remember the 6 Ps whilst training, forget them whilst running).

I realise that the most important thing is to allow yourself to fail, rather than plan the road to your failures. From now I am only going to plan to fail when I fail, learn from it and move on.

It’s a long time since my days at Parklands High School in Chorley or my college days in Preston and even my university days in Manchester. I think it’s fair to say that although I’ve got an education, it’s not the best education I could have got and it’s one which has very little to do with what I’ve been doing since I left education.

The last time I sat on such a panel one of the big topics of debate was the area of how fair £9,000 university fees are.

This has got me thinking, when the Blair government came to power in 1997 there was a shift towards university education being a standard that everyone could come to expect, they committed to getting 50% of the school leavers into education. This all sounds great and plays to the aspirations of middle Britain parents but it’s probably fair to say it’s also left us in a bit of a state, a Britain that has too few plumbers, electricians, labourers and yes, even cleaners.

The hundreds of thousands of solicitors our education system will create will have their hands full no doubt!

University has been an aspiration for many parents, I know for mine it wasn’t expected but was pushed for, but just at the time I was going to university attitudes started to change, university was becoming mandatory, if you didn’t have a degree you were almost a second class citizen.

And with this shift in public attitudes so can the movement of the goal posts, university was no longer on a grant based system, you get a loan and you pay it back as you earn. However it’s more expensive than ever, I’m always shocked to hear quite how expensive it is! In fact I lose a significant percentage from my income every month paying back these student loans. Looking back there is an argument to say that unless you’re going to take up a job that requires a vocational, degree (and/or post degree) lead qualification – such as being a doctor – you might want to consider your options a bit further before you sign up for university.

It’s very easily forgotten that universities are businesses, and big businesses at that! They pay wages, pay for some of our most impressive architectural buildings (and their upkeep) and ultimately, they make profits. I sometimes wonder if our universities focus too much on the bottom line and not enough on providing our nation’s undergraduates and postgraduates with a decent education, let alone the providing the nation with the type of workers we really need.

Whilst speaking in front of these sixth formers I asked the question: “How many of you want to go to university?” A sea of hands went up. I then went on to ask the question “what do you want to get from university?” Nothing, silence – no one would commit. A bit of prompting lead to answers like, “a better education”, “freedom from my parents”, “to get a better job”. Vague answers really that don’t get to the heart of what they are there to achieve, or at least it’s vague in that not one of them would commit to a plan of what they wanted from the other side of their university life in any specific manner.

I know the doors university can open up, but as soon as I said “you don’t have to go to university you know?” the room turned to look at me, this was something novel they hadn’t really thought about it before – in a way they hadn’t been allowed to think about it.

As soon as the talking shop was over I had chance to meet with some of the kids, many of whom wanted to shake my hand, I’m hoping because I’d gone in there and given them the chance to think about another way, another option.

What kind of world do we want to create, why are we pressuring our kids into a future of academia for them only to come out and find they have to start right at the bottom rung of the ladder where they would have done if they’d have started that job three years earlier. What type of world are we creating where we ask our children to start their working lives depressed because their aspirations can’t be realised.

I’ve got friends who’ve been to Oxford who live with the same problem, they struggle to get jobs, they have to work for free for months just to get any kind of experience.

We’ve created a lie and are making our children live it out. Destroying their confidence and our economy in the process for the sake of creating a marketplace of a university system to keep some dusty intellectuals in jobs.

We have to free up our industries to become truly creative and entrepreneurial and give our school kids the confidence, belief and self-worth to go out into the world and make something for themselves.

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My epiphany is about smoking, I was stood in the bathroom and thinking it was time to throw away that old tube of smokers toothpaste that’s been behind the mirror for years. I used to smoke, as a smoker I had thought about giving up but didn’t bother to try, then one day I just did it. I didn’t tell anyone but I knew my time as a regular smoker had come to an end.

OK – so I gave up smoking.

I know what you’re thinking – this isn’t really Tony Robbins stuff is it? Well the thing about having given up smoking is it’s something that shouldn’t really be a failable task however people all around the world fail at it every day! And the thing about smoking is it’s not about the amount of money I have in the bank, it’s not about luck or the people I know, I control whether or not I buy a packet of cigarettes and smoke them, let’s be honest I’ve always had that element of control even when I was a smoker.

These are the choices we can make about our lives, we can’t choose to be rich and powerful, we can’t legislate for luck, whether and who we fall in love with etc, we can just push in the right direction. However, what we can control the things we eat, the exercise we do and we can stop doing the things we do that are going to kills us.

If it’s so easy why do we fail?

Part of the reason we keep failing at the tasks we set ourselves is that we don’t really commit to them, I knew that I should stop smoking, however it was only when I truly believed it was good for my health, for me, I actually had a chance at making it work. You can only really change for yourself – that’s the epiphany.

To start off with in my mind it was impossible to stop, there is the ritualisation of this act at different times during the day and how could I ever get through the day without this ritual? It was tied in with so many other parts of my life that it was virtually impossible.

Excuses and Defusing Them

The main issue surrounding excuses is that they aren’t lies, they have an element of truth about them. So, I had to ask myself the question, where the benefits of stopping smoking worth changing my routine? Yes absolutely, it disrupts your time and I believe it takes 30 days to set a good habit and 2 to set a bad habit. As soon I had managed to convince myself – really convince myself it was time to stop.

And in the bathroom, staring at that old toothepaste tube, which should have been thrown away years ago I realise that you’ve got stop projecting 20 or 30 years into the future, and it’s important not to compare yourself to anyone else just work out what it’s going to take to achieve your goal, get a plan together, be realistic, share it with as few people as possible. Just strip your plan right back to the bear essentials of what are required to get started and you’ll be surprised about how much you can achieve on your own.

Afterall the best way to unravel an excuse is to pull at it.

Facebook is one of the main drivers of this. Here you will find a list of the most recent Facebook articles:

1. Satellite Photos of Japan, Before and After the Quake and Tsunami (New York Times)

2. What teachers really want to tell parents (CNN)

3. No, your zodiac sign hasn’t changed (CNN)

4. Parents, don’t dress your girls like tramps (CNN)

5. (video) – Father Daughter Dance Medley (Yahoo)

6. At funeral, dog mourns the death of Navy SEAL killed in Afghanistan (Yahoo)

7. You’ll freak when you see the new Facebook (CNN)

8. Dog in Japan stays by the side of ailing friend in the rubble (Yahoo)

9. Giant crocodile captured alive in Philippines (Yahoo)

10. New Zodiac Sign Dates: Ophiuchus The 13th Sign? (The Huffington Post)

11. Parents keep child’s gender under wraps (Yahoo)

12. How to Talk to Little Girls (The Huffington Post)

13. Stop Coddling the Super-Rich (New York Times)

14. Why Chinese Mothers Are Superior (Wall Street Journal)

15. (video) – Twin Baby Boys Have A Conversation! (Yahoo)

16. Man robs bank to get medical care in jail (Yahoo)

17. Why You’re Not Married (The Huffington Post)

18. A Sister’s Eulogy for Steve Jobs (New York Times)

19. Ryan Dunn Dead: ‘Jackass’ Star Dies In Car Crash (The Huffington Post)

20. Scientists warn California could be struck by winter ‘superstorm’ (Yahoo)

21. Notes From a Dragon Mom (New York Times)

22. A Message to Women From a Man: You Are Not “Crazy” (The Huffington Post)

23. Obama’s and Bush’s effects on the deficit in one graph (Washington Post)

24. Penn State, my final loss of faith (Washington Post)

25. Golden-Voiced Homeless Man Captivates Internet (Yahoo)

26. The most typical face on the planet (Yahoo)

27. Widespread destruction from Japan earthquake, tsunamis  (CNN)

28. Permissive parents: Curb your brats (CNN)

29. A father’s day wish: Dads, wake the hell up!(CNN)

30. (video) – Laughing Baby Loves Ripping Paper! (Yahoo)

31. Epic Cover Letter: How To Get Hired For Your Dream Job (PICTURE) (The Huffington Post)

32. New Zodiac sign dates: Don’t switch horoscopes yet (Washington Post)

33. Things Babies Born in 2011 Will Never Know (Yahoo)

34. The Psychology of Revenge: Why We Should Stop Celebrating Osama Bin Laden’s Death (The Huffington Post)

35. (photo gallery) – ‘Where Children Sleep’ (New York Times)

36. Quake moved Japan coast 8 feet, shifted Earth’s axis (CNN)

37. Steve Jobs, Apple founder, dies (CNN)

38. China’s latest craze: dyeing pets to look like other wild animals (CNN)

39. Grant Hill’s Response to Jalen Rose (New York Times)

40. Steve Jobs’s Patents (New York Times)

Have you ever wondered what happens when you engage with a social network or create an online review? How does the service you’re using work out how much weight to put behind the contribution you’ve made? Essentially how does it work out how to trust you?

These questions are at the heart of the way Google is changing and evolving its algorithms right now and why social signals are becoming much more important to us search marketers.

So let’s have a think about Google’s most basic use of social – Google Plus, if you’ve shared content on Google Plus or clicked on one of the +1 buttons you’ve already engaged directly in giving Google some feedback on what you think about this page.

How much weight does Google place on a Google Plus Endorsement?

Google have developed collaborative reputation systems designed to basically work out if you’re giving them the right information. This is known as the Crowdsensus Algorithm developed for use on Google Maps to keep checks on Google Maps editors.

The interesting thing about Crowdsensus is that it gives us a bit of an indication about the way Google might look at other reputational analysis because for once they’ve and specifically Ashutosh Kulshreshtha has said quite a bit about how it works (probably because of the mess they kept getting into with the bodged software that was Google Maps / Places – although that’s another post!).

Although Google doesn’t give too much away, one of the things they are telling us is that using reputation scores create results with lower error rates that when they use systems that don’t use these stats.

What is Agent Rank?

Google has patented something it refers to as Agent Rank – this is a kind of digital identity, it allows Google to associate disparate bits of content with each other and then with an individual. It’s important to remember this when looking at how the trust factor will work, as without this Google can’t work out who you are online and how you are associated with (or aren’t associated with) your engagements.

This system can then create a significance rank, for example if one user has a higher reputational score and mentions a user with less reputational score this will improve the reputational score of the user with a lower reputational score, but more importantly this will have a higher impact on the user with a lower reputational score than it would visa versa.

It also implies that there is a reputational score associated to a user based on the content that the user is associated with.

The newest version of the Agent Rank patent has been developed to emphasise this concept and adds the notion of the Trusted Agent, these being individuals that endorse content created by others.

The endorsements then flow back and increase the score of the individual that created the content in the first place.

Of course, it’s pretty needless to say that the  patent doesn’t tell you who will be considered a Trusted Agent, or how you or I might become one – we also don’t really know if this is part of what Google is using to build reputational management and trust ranks in their social media ranking signals however it would appear the framework would be there.

It wasn’t long ago that Google introduced the (slightly overly complicated) concept of authorship markup – so we can be sure they are already tracking our digital signatures around the web. These digital signatures will help Google recognise who the original developer of the content was – which is the first step to introducing the above.

Let’s face it, Google Plus is just the latest attempt by Google to control the social metrics of the web before it’s too late – it’s going ok, I’m not sure it’s going great; however it’s starting to work for them. This social graph is nowhere near as mature as Google’s link graph that has evolved out of PageRank over the last decade.

So you need to be referencing your website all the time – but you can’t be one of these people that only ever put marketing posts out there, that’s not how social marketing works it’s all about engagement, you’ve got to interact and you’ve got to interact with the right people to make it work. Only then will your social media presence have the type of strength and relevance required to directly benefit your rankings.

What is Interaction Rank? (Implicit vs. Explicit Social Mapping)

It’s important to make sure that you’re not just interacting with your friends as this will decrease the relevancy of these interactions and their engagements with your content. Interaction Rank measures how related your social media (or we might in future just call it online) presence is to the people you engage with.

Google have thus built into their social media offering (Google Plus) a way of letting the users let them know how they are related to other people in the form of Google Circles. Using this explicit form of social mapping combined with the implicit form of social mapping they’ve been doing for some time should give them some seriously strong ways to predict how people are interacting with each other (or will do) and how much weight should be placed on their interactions.

I think there is still some way to go yet – how you become a trusted agent and how this plays in with Interaction Rank – and if this in turn has anything to do with the endorsements we’re making through Google Plus, +1 (and in fact every other type of social media out there) is something we’re going to have to wait to see, all we can do really is keep plugging away at our social media efforts and keep trying to build up our authority status’.

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