Today was the first official day of SES and I thought I would present my takeaways from the talks I saw throughout the day.  I was furiously scribbling notes throughout the sessions and I have transcribed them as best I can below:

Key Notes with Avinash Kaushik

• Tracking metrics like page views, clicks, followers, fans, likes etc is all high quality trash.
• Sites should be thinking about what the searcher is looking for and optimizing their landing pages to match.
• We can use bounce rate to see how much we suck, people coming and leaving straight away.
• Brands should be driving loyalty, not page views.
• LOTS of companies have not optimised for mobile devices.  Amazon has.
• We should be measuring conversions, loyalty, and time until conversions.
• An obsession with conversion rates is unhealthy; by focusing on these people we lose sight of 98% of visitors.
• We should measure the total economic of every visitor, both the micro and macro conversions.
• A visitor doesn’t have to buy to convert.
• Traditional advertising is like shouting at people and hoping they listen, social gives a chance for everyone to converse with each other.
• Competitions are overused in social media.
• Measure social success using conversion rates, amplification rates,  applause rates and economic value.
• We need to fully understand our current performance using tailored conversion metrics.
• We should be seeing which media is giving us success, experiment to find ideal mix of media channels.
• We should be tying in our strategy with market share, market size and most importantly net profit.

This was a really inspirational talk, which fired up my imagination and got me thinking about all sorts of measurements, and experimentation that I should consider when planning strategy for clients.

Link Building Strategies with Patrick Aloft and Lisa Myers

• Link analysis is crucial in planning a strategy.
• Pivot tables in Excel can be great for showing link data.
• Links can be exchanged through news stories.
• Paid links can be good as long as they look natural.
• Link bait can often generate social shares but not links.
• Bad links can most definitely hurt a site.
• Images can be used to generate links from bloggers.
• Talking to community influencers is a great way to get links.
• Personal connections can often lead to some great, and easy to get links.

Jumpstart your Social Programme with Sundeep Kapur

• Segment your target audience and see what sort of people would be using your product.
• Write down what your business does and use this to establish who you should be targeting.
• Map your business goals against the goals of your social campaign.
• Engage your customers by being responsive, answering questions, and responding to complaints.
• Companies who ignore their complaints on social can risk destroying many years of loyalty.
• Use your customers to help you come up with content to use.  They can often provide you with high volumes of valuable advice.
• Use social media to drive your consumers to other marketing channels; email, video etc.
• Name your channels and give them some personalisation.
• Be careful in considering what social channel is best for your company, don’t just do everything because you feel you need to.
• Break useful information into meaningful tweets to give over time.
• Measure metrics to see where you can improve your social campaigns, and make sure you are engaging.
• Make all your staff aware of what is going on in your social campaigns.
• Qualify content using social.

Site Redesign?  Don’t forget SEO migration with Lee Odden and Russell O’Sullivan

• Each page of your old site should be mapped to the new one trying to keep it one and one wherever possible.
• You need to crawl your old site and account for every link as it moves to the old site.
• Avoid using 301’s on high-powered links, contact webmasters and ask them to link to the new URL.
• Find a place for every page that is indexed on the new site, if need be to a category site.
• Expect a drop in rankings for 4-8 weeks after migration, compensate by generating PR and social coverage around the move.
• Consider PPC to pick up the slack as rankings tank during the move.

All In all it was an absolutely fantastic day.  The points I have noted down here were only a fraction of the information given on the day.  I am really looking forward to getting copies of the presentations so I can fill in a lot more blanks.

JFK once said “the give and take of debating, the testing of ideas, is essential to democracy”. Debate is also essential for the running of a good campaign of any kind. Good ideas are fragile – you need more to drive business. This is because any idea has a laundry list of risks and opportunities that need to be correctly circumnavigated if you are to achieve results. Debating teaches effective research; the ability to compartmentalise as well as critically compare solutions; and effective communication of those ideas. These are skills that turn ideas in to money.

The value of debate

There are three key areas in which debating practice materially increases a colleague’s effectiveness:
1. Pitching skills: How to challenge the status quo in organizations who might think they’re doing ‘good enough’. By showing that we’ve thought of, and have tested, ideas from multiple perspectives our pitches not only come across as extremely credible, but also relatively unconventional. Points of Interest also teach persuasiveness under fire – so when the client seems like they’re wavering you can easily use persuasive framing, pick out key nuances and distinctions; explaining with relevant examples and metaphors how you’ve come to your conclusion.

2. Making good decisions decisively:  In a debate you’ll have 15 minutes to prepare around 3 points. This forces debaters to recognize the policy’s strengths early on and hone strategies, which optimize those strengths and minimize risk.  In doing so, we enjoy high productivity and a large impact.

3. Systematic thinking:  As a debater you know your policy will be challenged on all levels – so your strategies become more contextual, integrated and holistic. You know to think through on both micro and macro levels, comparing the relative significance at each level. After all, there’s rarely a good reason to run a short-term win campaign if it’s going to lead to long-term losses. By applying systematic thinking to an idea it leads to incremental refinement that removes potential choke points.

How it affects our processes

At Red or Blue, we always thoroughly debate any concept before adding it to a client’s strategy document – even if we’ve used the strategy hundreds of times before. We do this because critically debating ideas prunes out the weak ones and forces you to consider all contingencies.

At an OMNLondon event yesterday someone said that you can’t predict ROI on search campaigns – I couldn’t have disagreed more. Red or Blue’s debating style to strategy planning means that we have a data driven approach centred around reproducible ROI. On top of this we always build in contingency plan layered over disaster management layered over plans B, C and D.

When we advance an idea, we rely on data from tools such as Searchmetrics and Linkdex to prove market size and opportunity; because otherwise the idea’s guaranteed to be shot-down in a hail of ‘what ifs’. If a link building plan isn’t producing the traffic we’d hoped, we will have already planned for that and can begin plan B. If it’s going terrifically – then we’ll just smash target. So the interrogative nature of debating bullet-proofs plans.

When you’re next planning out a client strategy, ask yourself, or your colleagues, these questions:

• What are we trying to achieve?
  • To what extent does this get us there?
  • What’s the ROI?
• What’s the context?
• What is the strength of this choice?
• What is the weakness of this choice?
• What would Leroy do? (this may be specific to Red or Blue and SEOptimize)
• What could go wrong?
  • Are the risks acceptable?
  • How can we make the negative outcome less likely?
  • How can we mitigate this?
• Who are the experts in this field?
  • What are they doing?
  • What are they not doing?
• If we do go ahead with this, what will the competitors do?
• Is this the best way to achieve the goal?
• Could the same strategy be performed in a different way?
• How do we sell the solution to the client’s industry?

Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest – they all started with a singular idea. They’re also all headed up by amazing people who display the traits discussed above by the bucket-full. Take the ability to research with both depth and breadth in a way that can be distilled into standalone points that allow (good) decisions to be made quickly and decisively and throw that in to the mix though, as they do, and you have a formula that rarely fails.

We suggest being ruthlessly critical of every decision you make without being cynical. If you can’t make a colleague buy-in to the idea then your idea’s not fully formed yet. Relying on data and real-world examples as the foundation of any strategy is a pre-requisite to debating – and winning in a tough market. I’ll let you know how I get on.

It’s 5:30pm and I’m late leaving work. I walk out the door and a voice enters my head “your wife’s running late too, if you hurry you’ll catch the next train and be home before her”. I pick up my pace when another voice enters my head “Hi James, why not pop in – our Easter eggs are half price” – to my left I see Tesco with a big sale on.

Prediction 1: Whilst I may be one of the lucky few to currently hear this many voices in their head, by 2022 mobile phones will be making search personal, local and a little bit creepy for everyone.

I get home – Siri was right, I did make it home first. Thinking I need to book a weekend away, I boot up my laptop. My laptop’s running Android – as Google, our evil overlord, dictates.  I load up my browser and Google begins to display holiday destinations – it guessed my intent before I touched the keyboard. Local information, reviews, prices and flights are displayed on a single page – all freshly scraped from the relevant sites. Google knows not to show suggestions with unstable dictatorships and, cross-checking against my medical records, filters out a further 10 destinations. Turkey is absent from the list, probably because earlier in the day I’d emailed my friend that I never wanted to see another Turkey sandwich again in my life – OK search still isn’t perfect.

Prediction 2: Google will use my personal information in ways I would currently find disturbing.

I pick Norway, because for some obscure reason everyone now loves Norway, and Facebook flashes up an itinerary based off of the comments, photos and videos of 23 of my 39,000 friends who’ve visited it in the last 6 months. I regret obsessing so much about Klout every time I see that 39,000 figure. The itinerary’s automatically transferred to my cortical implant, so I’m all-set.

Prediction 3: Facebook will actually become useful for more than just socializing.

Wanting to relax, I think of a really cheesy pop-song. My browser refreshes with the band’s official site. Try as I might, I can’t find anything unofficial about the group – the RIAA and MPAA have totally ruined song and movie searches.

Prediction 4: SOPA style legislation will eventually win.

The next day I’m woken up by Spotify playing. Every minute longer I spend in bed leads to my agenda appearing brighter in my head as items are moved backwards and train schedules recalculated – searching through national rail APIs, my colleague’s calendars and restaurant booking systems to make everything fit just right.

Finally in work I log in by cock-thrusting my monitor. Up pop’s the Linkdex logo; I click one button and my clients are instantly propelled to position 1 for their money-terms. ‘Ah Linkdex’ I think ‘I love you because you beat Google, but most of all because of the massive cheque you send me for mentioning you in each and every one of my articles’.

Prediction 5: I will be sacked for repeatedly cock-thrusting my monitor.

As I’m led out the door by security, I reflect back on my time in SEO and consider how it’s changed – and not – in the past ten years:

1. With personalization taking over, different groups began to see wildly different search results leading to de-personalised based searches becoming almost pointless. Defining demographics prior to link building became far more important so that real competitors could be identified and so that messages could be tailored to the right audience.
2. As rankings’ importance declined, three big metrics replaced its dominance: return on investment, sentiment and user engagement.
3. Content’s still king – except nobody calls it that anymore because it’s so insanely cliché. Most agencies now have at least as many content writers as they do SEOs.
4. It’s not all about the content though. I still remember when link building was a matter of casting your email nets far and wide. Now even the smallest brands spend hours researching individual link targets before pitching content to them; making sure the content’s appropriate, niche and tailored to the target site. I suppose the biggest change this led to was that it made quantity over quality approaches impossible. After all, when a site acts like a curator you have to prove not just that you have good content, but that the content actually matters.
5. Local search always used to be influenced by reviews. With frictionless sharing becoming a reality instead of just a buzzword everyone began to review products and services online – mainly through social channels. Why did we ever try so hard to force consumers to trust brands directly, when all we needed was for them to trust their friends’ own recommendations? Incentivising users to shout about their brand experience online became more important than advertising the brand experience through brand-led social activities.

As much as we might all secretly desire to be hipsters, our main motivations for moving were two-fold. We need more space as our team expands, and the Old Street area is becoming a hub of exciting tech companies. “Silicon Roundabout” (as it is referred to), has been a real British success story in the last few years. With the country in the midst of an economic downturn, and the news constantly reporting doom and gloom, many of the companies who have already set up camp here have shown that success is still achievable for young start-ups, especially in the tech world. With the opportunity to mix with (and add our own touch) to this thriving world, we are certainly looking forward to the future in our new home.

To get an insight into how Google has developed, and it’s future plans I first thought about looking through their company history, reading articles predicting technological trends, and gaining expert opinions etc. Before I could actually do this though I started thinking about sci-fi tv/films and decided that was far more interesting.

I first thought about Star Trek.  Now the wonderful inhabitants of the Utopian universe use a style of computers that are already in society, just they don’t actually work (Siri).  Could a decade more development time allow this voice technology to develop to the point, where, like the Star Trek computer we can ask our handy friend a question and immediately get the answer no matter where on our ships (or homes) we are?  Probably yes, but then this would only be good for those informational searches, and hearing a voice is never as enthralling as a visual feast, which leads onto the main Star Trek recreational entertainment source the fabulous holo-deck.  As much as I would love to get a date with Sienna Miller (even if she is a hologram), and to see how those people in black hats would spam some kind of holographic, virtual, internet world just for the pure hilarity I think this technology could be beyond the reach of even the mighty Google.

The Spam Report

Head of Google: There hasn’t been a murder in 6 years. There’s nothing wrong with the algo, it is perfect.

Black Hat Wearing Individual: [simultaneously] – perfect. I agree. But if there’s a flaw, it’s .edu comment spam. It always is

So what then? How about a minority report style retina scanning system that reads our eyes, recognizes us and what we want, and then displays some results which appear before us fulfilling all our needs. With search plus your world Google are already making inroads into knowing everything about us. Even if at the moment, they would think I have 8 friends who are all SEO’s (I actually have 9 and one of them works in PR), It isn’t beyond the realms of possibility that social will be able to provide so many signals that Google won’t really need to rely on too much else, and will in effect “read our minds”. This poses some worrying problems though; I don’t want to have an eye transplant when I want non personalised search results, I don’t think I really want my friends influencing my search results too much, and with all this data Google with become incredibly powerful. This leads me onto my next scenario….

I was having another think about Google’s power and sci-fi films, and discovered something pretty alarming. Ponder this, If you change the o’s in Google to read ky, swap the e with l, change the l to a t, then make the g’s; s and n, it reads SKYNET. Pretty compelling evidence that Matt Cutts is in fact a machine, and soon enough Google (or as we now know Skynet) will be plunging the world into a nuclear apocalypse. We just have to hope that politics hasn’t taken too much out of Arnie, and he’s still able to help the future of humanity.

I’ll stop making shit jokes now

In all seriousness, and sci-fi joking aside I don’t really know what the SEO world will look like in 2022.  The developments that Google have made are changing the way we think about search all the time, and I can only see this speeding up.  The end goal for Google is to provide the user with the best content available; eventually they will figure this out without having to rely on factors we can easily influence.  In the same way that we can’t cloak, buy mass links that actually do a lot or any other manner of old school manipulation has fallen by the wayside, eventually keyword optimization, URL matching, guest posting etc will go the way of the dodo too.

Don’t despair though!

The tools, data, and willingness to share knowledge at the moment have meant great people are at the top of the SEO world.  There aren’t many excuses for rubbish strategies now, and in the same way people who work in the industry, in whatever guise it may be, and create exciting, well thought out strategies using the tools available (one can only imagine how complex they will be) to analyse data, and provide a richer overall experience for the end user will ultimately be successful.  If your content is relevant and full of awesome why wouldn’t Google, or other people want to send traffic your way?

What medium this will take, I don’t know, but in the same way the last ten years has meant people have to do less manipulating and more great work, the next ten will amplify this infinitely more.  One thing I can say with confidence is that even if search was completely impenetrable and SEO made completely redundant, the intelligent people we share our industry with wont be out of work.  They will be at the forefront of whatever combines the technological, social, and psychological elements of business, still creating, debating and innovating, just in a whole new way.  Hopefully with a bit more hard work, and by using the force (shit, wrong theme) I will be at the forefront with them.

Up, up and away! Red or Blue is moving to bigger, better offices because we’re now bigger and better – also because Kun told us to. Follow our progress on the map below – we’ll provide a full update later today:

How do you even begin to predict where an entire industry will be in 10 years time…especially an industry that is already as flexible, changeable and temperamental as a Hollywood starlet? The fact is, nobody really knows, and nobody can really predict the future.

I was planning to just outline what I think the landscape will be in ten years, but that seems a little dry, so I figured I need to up my game a little.

But how? I asked around for some advice, and was told to “stick to what you’re good at”.  This seems like pretty good advice on the face of it, but since my skills mainly revolve around getting drunk and having arguments, I wasn’t sure how this would help. But, I thought it was worth a try. A bottle of Scotch and a 2am phone call to my ex-girlfriend later, I was still fresh out of ideas.

But then I remembered this amazing post by Rob Ousbey over at Distilled, which despite being almost a year old, is still amazingly thought-provoking. Well worth a read to any SEOs, new or otherwise.

So I decided to….adapt it.

Anyway, enough preamble. Hope you enjoy!

2022: An SEO’s Odyssey

As the fireworks burst over the River Thames, heralding the start of the year 2022, the CEO of a major digital and SEO agency was sat alone in his office, drafting a number of letters that would get the year off to a terrible start for some of his employees. They were about to get fired.

The agency was big, it had many high-profile clients, and had some of the biggest industry names working for it. Their expertise and experience was unrivaled, the breadth of their service offering was peerless…and yet all was not well. SEO had become a quick, cheap and cost-effective marketing ploy for any business, large or small. This had attracted hundreds, if not thousands of smart marketers to its fertile lands. The agency found themselves competing on all fronts with smaller, more nimble businesses.

The word “scalability” became a key part of the SEO vocabulary, as many SEOs devised ways to manipulate the search engines’ algorithms in ever more creative and devious ways. The “scalability” of any strategy became key, as “black hat” manipulators and “white hat” marketers went to war.

But meanwhile, the search engine giant, Google, was not idle. It quickly became the biggest recruiter of technical whiz-kids around, and soon boasted a higher PhD per capita ratio than anywhere else on earth. And all that brainpower was not going to waste, as it soon became one of the biggest, richest, and most powerful companies in the world. By 2012, it had become a formidable entity.

Google’s geniuses were working constantly, refining the way that their search algorithms worked. Before long, it seemed that SEO as an industry was doomed. Google was too big, too powerful, and too smart to outmaneuver anymore. The fact was rammed home as it announced that no longer would it provide information about keyword searches carried out by users logged in to any of its many web properties. The SEO industry was up in arms but by the time, two years later, that Google stopped providing keyword data for any searches, they were just resigned to their despair.

Gradually, Google, and the other major search engines, ramped up the inclusion of what they called “social signals” into their results pages. Google went as far as launching its own social network, and aggressively incorporating it into its search results. The loss of keyword data, and an increasingly granular landscape of personalized search results rendered many of the popular tools that SEOs used on a day to day basis all but obsolete. One by one, they went bust, until by the mid twenty-teens not one was left standing.

Many SEOs struggled to cope, and either quit the industry or went broke. The old labels of black and white hat became irrelevant, as Google and the other search engines had become so sophisticated, and accounted for so many ranking signals, that they were nigh-on impossible to manipulate. So those that had previously sought to manipulate the engines found themselves at a loss.

Eventually, as 2020 approached, it seemed that SEO was dead. At least, SEO as it was known at the turn of the millennium was dead.

Google, in 2018, had announced the extension of their Google Instant feature. For years, Google Instant had presented searchers with instant results and options, calculated based on amalgamated search patterns. But now, they were transforming it into a more predictive form of online search. They had hired a team of the world’s best psychologists and behavioral analysts to work on predicting search patterns. Before the search had even begun. Many laughed at this idea, but Google carried on regardless. They had the money, resources, and most importantly, the data to make it work. And they did.

By cross referencing location data from their Android mobile platform; social sharing patterns through Google+; web browsing information from Chrome, their web browser; the use of Google TV and YouTube, their major video and television streaming platforms; emails, and countless other data points, they were able do devise a search algorithm that could much better match a searcher’s intent than ever before. Gone were the days of searches based merely on keyword-inferred intent.

People protested about the invasion of privacy, but the inevitable court cases, equally inevitably, failed. Google argued, reasonably enough to many, that if you didn’t want your data used in this way, you didn’t have to use their products, which they offered free of charge. And besides, they asked, where was the harm? They were making the internet a better, more useful place, weren’t they?

The CEO leant back in his chair and laughed bitterly. A better place. For many people, that was true. But for many more, it was the beginning of the end. Small businesses had turned to the internet for years as a way of competing with much bigger, more powerful companies, as a way of marketing their products, and of spreading their growing brand. And SEO had been crucial in that. While, at times, SEO had been exploitative, seeking to manipulate search for the benefit of its clients, it was still the most affordable way for any business to market itself. But now that Google effectively pre-empted search intent, a huge potential market was cut off. Denied access to people searching the web to discover new things, many small businesses died out, while the big corporations only grew bigger. And “traditional” SEO could no longer help. Google had hammered the final nail into its coffin.

Or had it? By 2020, many of the professionals that had been working in SEO since it began had left the industry entirely. But there were still a large number of people who called themselves “search marketers”. They had joined the industry relatively late, and had not yet latched on to any “best practices” by the time those same practices had been shot dead by Google. They were young, smart, creative and could think on their feet. They realized that trying to stay one step ahead of Google was a pointless and thankless task, so instead they sought to merely understand it. Google thought, searched, and behaved like a real person now. Link buying, blog networks, comment spam, none of those old tactics worked any more.

They behaved more like conventional marketers than ever before. They would approach every client individually. There were no one size fits all solutions, and everything was driven by tireless, in-depth research and analysis of each client’s business. To help them rank in search, this new breed of SEOs would find out why that business should rank in search. Sometimes there was no reason, and then they could do nothing but wish the client good luck, and watch as they inevitably went bust without the online traffic that only Google could now provide.

The landscape of SEO had changed. Content was truly king. They had been saying it for a long time, but now more than ever it was very true. The idea of “linkbait” had been around for ages, but was now an absolute essential, not merely something it was great to have, and it was not about getting links, it was about getting people talking about the brand on the huge social networks that Google paid so much attention to.

While this creative angle of SEO had blossomed, the traditional analysis of backlinks, rankings, keyword data, and other metrics had died out, thanks to the aggressively personalized search results that had evolved from Google’s changes to its algorithm. Instead, monitoring of social signals, and monitoring the uptake of content distributed through many channels became the norm. Being able to understand and perceive patterns within data sets became much more important than the actual data itself. Understanding sentiment, discussion and the cultural pervasiveness of a brand became vital. This was the key element of the new breed of SEO. In a way, it was still underpinned by data, just as the old SEO had been. The dataset was just different. You couldn’t know anything for sure, but you could do a lot to find out.

And so SEO had changed, adapted, and survived. But unfortunately, the changes had not been easy for many to take. Excel spreadsheets, coding skills and link building know-how were just not relevant any more. And so many of the old experts were now unemployed, and many were unemployable. An unfortunate consequence of the fact that Google was now the biggest and most powerful company in the world.

For many people, it is the internet now. And only the smartest, most adaptable marketers could take advantage of that.

Epilogue

If you made it to the end, well done, you win a prize! (not really) In all seriousness, I hope you enjoyed my rambling thoughts, and if you didn’t, feel free to comment or tweet me and tell me why I’m an idiot. But be specific, as there are many ways in which I’m stupid.

So back in the world of today, what are my predictions for SEO in 2022?

• Obviously, social signals are important now, and are only going to get more important.
• Traditional signals like links and on page optimisation is going to be gradually devalued until it is practically worthless
• Google’s new privacy policy implies that all the products will gradually meld into one. And that suggests search will only get more aggressively personalized, using all kinds of data
• That personlisation is going to kill conventional SEO tools. What point is reporting rankings if nobody sees the same ranking page? This is a problem I know many of us already face when reporting to clients (“Oh you see it at a different position? You need to use an incognito browser…”)
• I love analytics, and I’m the data nerd of the Red or Blue office, but I can tell its shifting. Keyword: (not provided) is going to only become more of a problem, especially as more people use Google products. Before long, the number of people signed out is going to be so insignificant that Google will just shut the door on keyword data entirely, and we’ll have nothing to say about it.
• But fundamentally, SEOs are a smart, devious and crafty lot. I don’t see the industry dying just yet. Whatever happens, all those clever folks will adapt and will just change their working practices.
• Ranking won’t be enough, you really will have to deserve to rank. And that means being the best search results, not just tricking Google into thinking you are. There will be no way to rank irrelevant content, and so great content will float to the top. Content. Is. King.
• Data analysis is the most important thing any SEO can do right now. Everything starts from there. You don’t know what you don’t know (as we say around here), but you can damn sure find out. That won’t change, but the datasets we investigate will.

The problem is that the legislation is way too broad, as its vague and poorly written nature leaves the door open to massive abuses and frivolous usage. It represents a very real threat to the internet as we know it, placing many sites at risk, and opening up the possibility of a fragmented, censored web. And nobody wants that….except maybe the big business and media interests backing the legislation, obviously. You can read more about the impact of the legislation, and also find links to some of the best write-ups of the issues on this Wiki page.

We here at Red or Blue joined in the protest by blacking out our site as well, because anything that affects the web, particular in its capacity as a content distribution and sharing network, is going to have an impact on SEO as well. Especially when you think that there is, if SOPA is passed, a chance that sites can be removed from search rankings, or from the web entirely, if a court order is obtained. But anyway, lets get onto the real meat of this post, the impact SOPA will have on SEO:

Hah, not really. There is a lot to cover, so stay tuned for a fuller update.

1.     No one really knows

No one has all the answers in SEO.  One of the things that has been hammered into me at Red or Blue is to never be afraid to put my ideas and opinions forward, as there is no right answer.  What one person tells you may not necessarily be right, and even if it is now, it might not be in the future.  I have tried to make sure I remember to question everything and to never be afraid to have my say, as it might always be right.

2.   It’s an ART

This one is stolen directly from the Red or Blue website.  Thinking of SEO in terms of Authority, Relevance, and Technology helped me grasp the full concept, and provided me with a framework when analysing sites.  Authority deals with the amount of, and authority of, the links the site is getting, Relevance refers to the site content and ensuring it is optimised and of quality, and Technology relates to how the site is built and optimised.   Looking at each individual area one by one and seeing where a site is slipping allowed me to focus in strategically and set about implementing successful changes.

3.  SEO’s love to talk (and tweet, and blog etc)

The SEO community is packed with people who love to talk.  Following about 50 people from industry on twitter has meant my news feed is packed with a never ending stream of SEO and marketing articles, which has proved incredibly useful for someone just getting into the industry.  The willingness to share ideas, data, opinions, and all manner of other things is a really wonderful resource meaning learning is at the fingertips of us all.  And what better way to stay on top of any updates, you might even be able to learn something before your boss finds out (especially if your boss doesn’t like social).  Just remember not to believe everything you read.

4.  What’s the problem?

When approaching an SEO task I’ve realised it is important to think what the problem is before you get too carried away with possible solutions.  A few times I have come in looking at how I can change the world when that wasn’t what was needed.  I found if I slowed down and was analytical, and calculated with my approach I could work out what needs to happen and then all importantly how I will make it happen.

5.  Everyday, and everyone is different.

This touches on a few of the other points, but I found that working in an agency meant I had to be able to change my mind-set and consider what the different clients wanted to achieve, and the many different ways of doing this.  It may sound simple but when I had been working with one client for an extended period of time, using a particular set of tools and techniques, I found I might still be in that mind-set when it came to moving onto something else.  Understanding the situation and all the alternatives has proved vitally important in making sure I have done the best job I can.

These 5 points are only just beginning to touch on what I learnt, SEO is an incredibly vast subject, which is one of the reasons it is so fascinating.  In reality a probably learnt 5 things and hour over the last 5 weeks but that title just wouldn’t have had the same ring.  I look forward to continuing my learning!

Basically, if you’re logged into your Google+ account, when you search using Google you’ll see, as well as “normal” search results, a whole raft of social content as well, from Google+ updates by your friends, Picasa photos, Google+ profiles and pages, as well as a whole bunch of other exciting content, like anything your friends have shared or +1′d using Google+. How lovely. And if you’re feeling anti-social, possibly because you live in a basement and are allergic to sunlight, you can turn it all off and just use normal “global” search.

At least, in theory all this is true. However, since this is a staggered roll-out, like most Google updates, I am unable to actually see any of these options, settings or shiny new toys. So I suggest you take a look at the two blog posts mentioned earlier, as well as following the link on the Google homepage to this page which details all the specifics of the “Search, plus your world” update with pictures and videos.

But I feel there’s another problem here as well. I have no friends. More specifically, no friends that regularly use Google+ and share content through it. Everyone I know just uses Facebook. Which is a bit of a problem that tempers my enthusiasm for this new update. Maybe I’m just a cynic, but I feel there is a heavy element of inertia with the general public in terms of switching over to Google+ as their main social network. While Google have gone some way to expand the user base beyond marketing gurus, tech geeks, and habitual early adopters, particularly by including Google+ as a core app on current-gen Android phones (opening up a whole new tech geek niche) I have to say, neither I nor anyone else in the Red or Blue office seem to use Google+ as our primary social network for sharing the kinds of content that is intended to appear in the new social search function, and following a quick survey, this seems to be reasonably typical for most people.

So to summarise, an exciting development to Google’s core search product, and one that has interesting potential, but hampered by the same problem Google+ itself faces. How do you get people using G+ instead of Facebook? Or maybe I just need to get some friends.