Every so often I get irritated and start looking for a job.  It’s only usually when I’m irritated or it would occur to me to use my network and check with them for a job.  However, not everyone has a network - and not everyone knows where to look or what is reasonable.

I went looking recently and was surprised at the amount of variation in salaries offered.  Since I knew of a few SEOs looking for something new, I thought it would be a fun blog post.  There are lots of decent jobs out there but I’ve tried to select a good cross-section of mock-worthy and praise-worthy.  The commentary is my own and does not reflect the opinions or views of my employer or the SEO-Chicks.

Hopefully this will become a regular feature and please do let me know if anyone reading this gets a job as a result of seeing it here.  It would be good to know I helped.

I’d like to draw your attention to the salary survey put out by SEMPO. While it relates to in-house SEOs only, it does give a good indication of what someone with a certain number of years, handling a certain budget could expect to earn.  They are currently conducting an Agency Search Salary Survey

Also - women tend to fail to apply for a job unless they have at least 80% of what is being asked for whereas men will go when they have as little as 30%.  BE STRONG CHICKS and go for these jobs whether you think you have enough or not.  This industry needs more women willing to take a chance!

I did the following searches (links should give search results):

SEO Jobs London - mad.co.uk (aggregator)
SEO England London - SEOVacancies (main site link)
SEO SEM United Kingdom London - JobsInSearch (main site link)
SEO W1 10 miles - Totaljobs

Search Engine Optimisation Assistant/SEO Assistant/Search Executive - 18-20K + benefits
This is the type of role you want to look at taking to get introduced to search optimising or marketing jobs.  It may not be the kind of impressive salary more senior SEOs get but we all have to start somewhere.  This is a great opportunity to start from nothing   GO FOR IT!

Junior SEO Consultant - to  £27,000+benefits
This is a good opportunity to get a foot in the door and get a great salary to boot.  This job doesn’t require anything but a passion for SEO  You may be experienced with SEO or you could be a recent graduate who is passionate about SEO with desire to get into the industry  WOW!  Jump on this all you budding SEOs in and around London.

SEO Executive - £28k
While these folks are asking for ‘proven experience’ don’t be put off by those strong-sounding words.  All it means is that you’ve done something and can show your work for example changing title tags after keyword research or working on a PPC campaign and the steps you went through.  They will be looking for some hands-on something so even if you just helped with keyword research give it a shot!

SEO/Search Engine Optimisation Specialist - £30000 - £35000 per annum + healthcare, gym membership, bonus
OK- the perks are nice but really - if you have 3 years agency side and 2 years managing large accounts, you’re going to be looking for a head role - and more money with a manager role.  This is most certainly not a ‘top salary package’ as they claim in the ad.  Look elsewhere!

SEO Specialist - Leading Online Fashion Brand - Up to £35k
I’m always wary about people who think they know what thy are doing - asking for a ‘white hat’ to fix a site with ‘1,200 back links’ and a ‘PR of 4/10′ plus want someone ‘who has the skills and commercial experience to turn their vast links into profitable link juice’.  The pay is not fantastic but if you’re only caring for one site - fashion though it may be - how much work is there going to be after 6 months?

SEO Manager - £35 - 50,000 basic + bonus + excellent package
Oooohhhh- I’m liking the sound of this one - especially if you can negotiate up to the £50k salary.  The request for skills is reasonable, and really the requirements are realistic.  They aren’t asking for the moon and have a good idea of what they want.  I’m not an agency kinda gal and sales isn’t something that ever floats my boat but this looks like an excellent opportunity!

SEO Manager- Online Marketing Agency - 40-45k + Bonus
I’m always wary of jobs like this as it doesn’t really seem like they know what they want.  However, this is for a new team and so you’ll be coming in to an environment where you can mould and shape and grow the team.  This is the perfect kind of job for someone who wants to get in to it up to their elbows and really make a difference.

International Search Director - £40,000 to £50,000 per annum
I’m sorry - is this a joke?  Man management, Google qualified, experience - Ladies, go elsewhere.  What kind of a moron thinks this is enough to pay for someone with skills, qualifications, a degree and a European language?!?!  Seriously!  Don’t apply for this job - laugh at it!

Head of Search - £65 - 80k
This should actually be billed as head of PPC rather than head of search.  A throw-away statement at the end of the job advert makes this clear.  This looks to be a fun position with US and European travel and liaising with non-technical departments.  If you’re looking for that next move to head, I’d go for it.  In fact, I might go for it myself!

Hope you had fun and maybe applied for a few jobs.  The two with search results (madjobs.co.uk and Totaljobs) are a quick way to find what’s gone up recently.  The other two (JobsInSearch and SEOVacancies) you will need to put search parameters in yourself.

I’m banging my head against the wall; I keep on saying “NO, that’s not it, it’s not just about keywords. Hang on, I’ll explain”. We’ve all been there, trying to explain SEO. Whether it is to a prospect client, a boss, a friend or your mother (mine still thinks I work for Google, and frankly I’ve given up!). But WHY OH WHY, do people have selective hearing. It makes me want to bang my head THROUGH the wall, not just at the wall. I’m in the middle of the presentation, been through the basics of how the search engines work, the potential traffic and ROI, then you move on to the basics of SEO. The second I say keyword, it’s all doomed. For some reason people think they know and understand everything about SEO from this point on.

Prospect Client: “Ahhhh!! It’s all about keywords, yeah I see, of course, that makes sense. Yes you can’t be found for a keyword unless you have it on your website, we’ll just bash it in”

Me: “Erm you need to do some research first, don’t just bash in any old keyword”

Prospect Client: “Nah we got it covered, we know what people search for. We just bang in, I mean spam in, erm I mean input all the keywords from our brochures and stuff”

Me: “have you got a rope?”

In my opinion, and I’m sure most of you will agree, Search Engine Optimisation isn’t something you can have a bash at doing. You can’t try SEO, either you do it (and properly) or you don’t.

But sometimes it’s so difficult to explain it all, you know how important it can be for a website, you got all these facts and figures and even case studies to prove what it has achieved. But when you only have a few hours to pitch, to explain, that you, the SEO Jedi can bring their site to another level. You realise they just aren’t speaking the same language.

If after an hour they are still asking whether they can put keywords in hidden text, target 30 keywords on one page (29 of them being general keywords such as high competitive brand names) and they insist in putting in 200 keywords in the meta keyword tag (just in case). RUN, RUN FOR THE HILLS!

Basically the “moral” of the story is simple; sometimes you have to chose your battles. It’s not likely that someone that think they can do SEO as well as you, after only 1 hour is going to be a client you want!

(A semi-fictional tale)

Back in the day, long, long, ago, SEO was a simpler time and place. With a little understanding of basic on-page fundamentals, and the knowledge that ‘the player with the most links wins’ (even if those links were bogus or internally generated), a chicklet could own the SERPs. If that gal had a nice network of sites from which to gather backlinks, mo’ betta!

Lots of things have changed over the years. Algos have injected annoying things such as ‘trust’ and ‘quality’ into the mix, and link juice no longer gets distributed evenly and equally, as algos decide whether or not there is enough juice to go around.

Despite the many changes, some folks just refuse to let go of the things they long to hold onto. Let’s consider the case of someone I like to call “Mr. Stubborn”. No matter how stubbornly he tries to argue that all of his pages should be ranking well, based on the fact that he has internal link juice flowing sitewide, the fact is that the site doesn’t have enough juice to support all its pages. No matter how stubbornly he argues that he’s sculpted the PageRank so that certain pages should be doing well, he refuses to see that there’s not enough clay to sculpt!

Sure, it’s hard work to find trustworty, quality backlinks (outside of our own private networks that the search engines have likely already identified) that will bolster our site’s juice. And yes, it would be easier if we could rely on algos of days gone by. But stubbornness in refusing to do the hard work required is only preventing the site from achieving the greatness he’d hoped for it. This stubborn man can continue doing what he’s been doing all along, tweaking internal links, sculpting and redirecting link juice like he’s some master artisan, but as Dr. Phil would say, “How’s that been working for you?”

Considering that week after week, Mr. Stubborn keeps moaning and groaning about pages not getting indexed, or being relegated to the the supplemental index, I’d have to guess that it’s not working for him. How much time, effort, and energy did he waste on all of that? What if he’d directed that time, effort, and energy at doing something differently? What if his efforts had actually caused the site to obtain quality, trustworthy backlinks?

Hey, I am guilty of laziness many times over. I totally understand the desire to cloak laziness with stubbornness. I have neglected more sites than I care to think about. Some of those sites might have risen to greatness if only I’d put a little more effort into pleasing the algos of today, rather than those of years gone by. Luckily, for me, I’m willing to accept that the issues those sites have aren’t going to be solved by attempting to manipulate the internal linking structure. (Note: There’s nothing wrong with sculpting. Sculpting can be beneficial, however, there must be something with which to sculpt before one can make use of this technique).

All I ask of Mr. Stubborn, is that he squarely face the facts. What fundamental problems does the site have, beyond what you’ve been focusing on? Seriously, if this weren’t your site, Mr. Stubborn, would you look at things a little differently? If you were me (who is pretending to be the Dr. Phil of SEO at the moment), you’d see all that is lacking, and you’d begin to focus on the real problems. See, that’s why it’s easy to diagnose someone else’s problems. Dr. Phil understands that. Now, all we need to do is get Mr. Stubborn to let go of his preconceived notions just long enough to really “hear” what we, and more importantly, the search engines are trying to tell him.

Or, Mr. Stubborn, you can keep doing what you’ve been doing, and keep getting the same results. It’s up to you.

Schoolkids Records in Chapel Hill, NC is closing, after 33 years in business. Apparently the store isn’t getting enough foot traffic, which is insanely difficult to believe considering it’s on the main drag of a massive university town that has a thriving music scene. There was little competition here as far as I can tell, but somehow they’re unable to survive even in the midst of over 30,000 college kids who, by all acounts, listen to music quite a bit. I guess the problem is that these kids aren’t actually BUYING anything in stores. Whether you can blame the high prices of CDs or the ease with which people can quickly download the music that they want, brick and mortar record shops are quickly crumbling. (cough)

I wrote a post awhile back about how the indie music scene didn’t need SEO…my point was that independent music was, so far, mostly disconnected from mass media coverage and, as such, remained true to its very spirit. In this post, I stated that people should personally get up off their arses and seek out new music by actively searching for it without going online, by getting their music news through word of mouth, or by showing up at the local punk rock club for a night.

As I was moaning about Schoolkids closing, even though I haven’t shopped there since 1995 and that was to buy a cheap poster, I started to think about something: has our industry actually been a contributing factor to the demise of my beloved physical record shops? I freaking think so (at least I do at THIS moment) and here is why:

If you do a search for most bands, and let’s take Grinderman as an example since I am such a Nick Cave fan (although I can’t tell my mom the name of their new single (like she’d ask) since it’s got a dirty word in it that rhymes with wussy), you’ll likely see tons of results for their videos on YouTube, their MySpace page, their Wikipedia entry, their Amazon listing, and their actual website if they happen to have one. Nick is well represented in the SERPs, to summarize. You can hear and watch the videos for free, and you can listen to new releases for free. If you happen to buy from iTunes, you can quickly grab a digital song or album and the whole thing’s done in less than a minute. Gone are the days when you accidentally buy an Assuck cd because it was mistakenly put into the Avail section, the store was closing, and you ignored the record clerk who said, looking at your other purchase of The Smiths, “boy you’re all over the place aren’t you!” Your main concern now is that when you got the download of The Mission’s Deliverance, it was actually Tower of Strength which you don’t really like and now you’re out 99 cents. Record shops are closing because of people like you. And me…ok and yes, the photo of Grinderman is only necessary in order to show you how insanely cool Nick Cave is. Sorry.

Seriously, why would you leave the house and go out, in PUBLIC, to risk the flu and ebola and lice and panhandling punk rock kids with $100 nose rings, not to mention having to be chatted up by an overweight and unwashed college dropout wearing a faded and hole-ridden Pixies tshirt who only works at the record store to meet chicks that look like Kim Deal and get a 10% discount on bumper stickers, when you could sit at home in your salt-bagel-encrusted chair and stay safe? Thus, you order online and this record store clerk gets fired, the store owner tries to keep the shop open by showcasing crappy local bands until the landlord sues him for back rent and the only bands they can book are ABC and The Lick Stick (ok I made that one up), and then it all truly goes straight to hell and the next time you show up for your used record fix, you’re greeted by a giant padlock on the door.

When I saw Polyphonic Spree a few months back, the lead singer made a great statement at the end about buying their t-shirts and robes (yes, robes and let me just say YIKES) because they didn’t make a lot of money on CDs anymore and needed the support. Whether or not that’s true isn’t my concern of course. I like the idea behind finding other ways to keep these artists going. He also pleaded with the audience, in his cultlike manner, to support other bands as well by going to shows and buying their assorted rubbish there. For the record (HA!!), I did not buy a robe from P. Spree, since that would just be stupid. I did, however, buy a tshirt in a wildly unflattering shade of light blue.

It’ all evolution, of course, but it does make me a bit sad. This certainly won’t mean the end of music, of course…just maybe the end of walking into a store and spending hours poring over the bins to find something amazing. And what I do for a living is partially to blame.

Ch ch ch ch changes…

I’ve never really understood why these niche search engines keep cropping up until now…and it involves one of my favorite things in the world. Yes, it’s wine. Glorious, spellbinding wine.

Doug Cook, a former search executive at Inktomi (for those of you who’ve been in the industry more than a few years, you’ll remember them fondly) and Yahoo has just rolled out the beta of Able Grape, a search engine that scours wine sites. The database already contains almost 10 million pages. To use this engine properly, you don’t need to add the usual wine-related terms that would normally be necessary in a regular engine like Google. The example given on the Able Grape website clarifies this point:

“While you need to type Spanish Wine on Google to get good results, on Able Grape, you will get better results than Google by simply typing Spain. Similarly, instead of needing to type Argyle Winery or Argyle Vineyards to get just wine-related results, try simply Argyle. And instead of climate change and wine, try simply climate change. (We have included some great general resources about climate change, but you’ll find that most of the results are wine-specific. Moreover, Able Grape knows that global warming and even cambiamento climatico mean the same thing).”

How successful will a niche engine like this be, if users need to use different search terminology than they would on a traditional engine like Google or Yahoo? There’s no convenient toolbar (yet) and unless users read the bit about how to best use the engine, they may not get the best results.

A search for “Spanish wine” on Able Grape reveals this: and in case you can’t see it there were 348,422 results returned.

A search for “Spain” on Able Grape reveals this: and again if you can’t see it, there were 645,402 results returned.

The recommended “Spain” search gives the user almost twice the amount of results as the search for “Spanish wine.” Obviously, if you learn how to properly use the engine, you’re going to get the best results. Now, the previous example isn’t the best one to use for why Able Grape is better than Google but think about this one:

“If we type in “Barbera,” we don’t want to know about “Hanna.”"

For those of you who don’t know, and I counted myself amongst that group until just a minute ago, “Barbera” refers to an Italian red wine grape variety. If you do a search in Google, the first result returned actually is one for the wine, but most of the other results on the first page deal with non-wine Barbera entries. Bypassing Google and going straight to a niche engine is definitely going to prevent you from having to weed out all those irrelevant results. However, if you have the convenient Google toolbar with the handy dandy search box on your browser at all times, are you going to actually go to another engine like Able Grape? Or are you going to simply take your chances and quickly skim over all of the irrelevant results that are provided? That isn’t too difficult, honestly, and if it’s a choice between letting an engine filter out so-called irrelevancies or doing it myself, I’ll take my chances since I’m a massive control freak.

I am definitely not suggesting that niche engines are a bad thing, of course, but I have to wonder about their popularity. I love wine and buy it often, but if I am looking up a bottle to see how it rates, I’m going to use Google because that’s my default engine. The time it takes to go to a niche engine is time that I could be spending on uncorking that sucker at home you know.

There are a ton of other niche search engines, and I’ve written about them before on this very blog. However, what’s not previously been explored (at least not by the SEO Chicks) is how you can use these engines to your advantage from an SEO’s perspective, NOT from a user’s perspective. How, exactly, does one go about being listed and performing well in one of these engines? Since Google, Yahoo, and MSN all like different things, why would a niche engine be any different? Will optimizing for a niche engine cause you any harm in the main three engines? There isn’t that much information out there about this, unfortunately, at least not that I could find during my 5 minutes of digging. OK that’s a complete joke. I spent a full hour of my valuable time trying to search for data on what these types of engines look for in a site, how they determine the most relevant results…and I’ve come up about as empty as my current wine glass.

As much as Google annoys me, it’s fairly easy to understand their guidelines. The same holds true for the other two engines as well. With such a large presence on the web, there is a literal ton of data out there that tells you how to do well in these engines, what to do and what NOT to do, etc. This isn’t the case, at least not yet, for most of the niche engines. Obviously, in the case of Able Grape, wine-related sites will be the ones that are indexed in the database, but what factors influence the order of their SERPs? If these niche engines want to grow, will they have to drum up this type of information for us, so that we can all try and conquer yet another engine? My head is splitting, and it’s not just from the seriously poor chianti. What’s the future, then, of small engines of any sort? Do they have any chance at all against the big three? Is it possible for me to ask more questions in this post?

One of the absolute worst songs ever recorded, in my opinion, is Timbuk 3’s “The Future’s So Bright I Gotta Wear Shades.” While I could make a lengthy post out of my utter hatred of this song, I will spare you for now BUT since I seem to have a pathological need to cross reference music in these observations about SEO that must, by this point, seriously annoy many readers, I thought this truly abysmal attempt at music would be a good one to use. I mean really, it’s not good for anything else…certainly not for listening, or anything remotely like that.

Well, I sure as hell don’t think that the future of paid ads is full of sunshine and light. I may indeed have to wear shades, but it’s to hide my cryin’ eyes. Honestly, the future of paid ads scares the bejaysus out of me and there are three handy reasons for it:

1. Money’s involved and people are really, really stupid when money is involved, especially when there is a LOT of money involved. Stupidity is bad enough on its own, but coupled with the attempt to make more money, it can make you feel like the one vaguely attractive girl at a meeting of the county chess club.
2. Many traditional marketing methods no longer work well, so advertisers are forced to look for alternatives. These alternatives tend to be freakishly invasive and creepy. Just check your Gmail ads sometime after you’ve been emailing your favorite transvestite friend. Ick.
3. Machines will be forced to make judgment calls about what they think you want to see (like with the Gmail ads), and that’s going to be enough to make a freight train take a dirt road. God forbid I ever refer to a cat by the p word.

The Money Plus Stupidity Equation
This usually equals disaster, if I may have a mathletic moment. A Paris Hilton/Jessica Simpson/Lindsey Lohan reference would be too easy here so I’ll spare you. The point here is that when lots of money is being sought or held by people who aren’t overly bright (see above), the world could easily end. I’m sure Timbuk 3 had money, and look at the stupid song that they unleashed upon the world. I wish I had more of a point to make here but I really don’t.

The Personal (AGHHHHH) Touch
Few companies are as high on the shudder factor as Microsoft. They are apparently really interested in audience intelligence, which is defined as “figuring out what kind of person the Web user is based on their surfing and searching habits — and display[ing] ads including video.” Based on my surfing and searching habits, I am one bad seed, let me tell you. I like Cabaret Voltaire videos, knee high leather boots, strawberries and cream, cursing, and the Fibonacci numbers. If I’m being shown ads based on that, god help me. I’ll be expecting some perverted math fetishist to be knocking on my door at any minute. Actually, that doesn’t sound so bad…

Process This!
Think about how you slow down when there’s an accident, and you try to get a good look. This certainly does not mean that you are sexually turned on by car crashes like someone in a J.G. Ballard novel does it? Well, if it does, keep it to yourself please, you pervert. Speaking of J.G. Ballard and his infamous novel, aptly titled Crash, if I’m searching for it and buy it, does anyone know who I’ve purchased it for, or does a machine simply “assume” that it’s for me? Will I then be shown ads that tell me where to buy footage of car crashes? Or how to connect with others who so obviously enjoy car crashes? There’s no way of telling the machine that hey, I’m not the perv, JON is the perv, is there?

It’s a grim future to consider, isn’t it? It’s the same feeling that you get when one of your favorite novels is being made into a movie starring Ben Affleck. First you’re incredulous. You quickly become agitated and try to convince yourself that actually, it’s not Ben, it’s most likely Tom Wilkinson and someone’s gotten really confused. Then, once you accept reality, you cry yourself to sleep after a few vodka tonics. It’s not pretty.

What worries me the most is the invasive bit of this…normally I prattle on (and on) about machines not being able to properly interpret meaning from simple words, and while that’s frightening enough, it’s the invasion that freaks me out the most. I’ve been listening to someone on the radio for 45 seconds and not realized that he’s plugging a product. It’s all become so NATURAL, like those pesky product placements in films that gently suggest to you that, since Bruce Willis likes 7-Up, you should go out and get some. I can look away from billboards, and I can completely ignore ads in magazines or on the sides of the SERPs, but it’s really becoming difficult to completely avoid all forms of advertising. And, as you may have been thinking, marketing is kind of the industry that I’m in right? Most likely that means that I’ll become a creepy (or creepier) and invasive presence in someone’s life at some point in the near future. Go ahead and get some restraining order templates ready because you’ll be needing them.

As universal search begins to dominate results and previous above-the-fold results get pushed below the fold, leveraging all channels possible is becoming essential.   Image search optimization offers several advantages not just limited to simple rankings or just image search.

One definite benefit for anyone involved in e-commerce is the possibility of free product promotion within organic results without looking spammy. Product images in search results can seriously boost click-throughs and conversions.

With image search, you’ve got more optimisation opportunities than organic search alone.   The name of the image, along with the tag and associated words will all factor in to ranking an image.  This gives you opportunities to optimise differently or capture searchers where organic is not doing as well.

At the moment, for those involved in e-commerce, not as many retailers are paying attention to the possibilities of image search and universal search when compared to PPC or SEO.  This means as Universal search becomes more prevalent, those in early will probably get better rankings.

So, what can you do?  Lots!  And most of it can also be done through many CMS systems so never say can’t, never say die, never say never… blah blah blah.

Why not try a bit of alt tag (attribute - I know!) text optimization? When I add an image to a page, I can ad descriptive words for the image.

Make these descriptions specific and include the keyword that you want the image found for.  Don’t be spammy - by being focused you’ll get more relevant traffic.

How about putting the images in separate HTML files named after the keyword (linking to the image with your keyword, using ‘keyword.html’ as the file name)?  Try putting the keyword in the title as well as in your H1 tags on the keyword-named page where the image appears.  Again, keep it specific and focused and remember semantically related text and ‘buy me’ button!

Give your image the name of the keyword you want it to be found for.   So if it is a picture of a box of Chocolate Society champagne truffles, call the image ‘champagne-chocolate-truffles’ and not ‘1276394′.  Remember that alt tag text of ‘Chocolate Champagne Truffles’!

Never forget that semantic relativity!  Ensure you are keeping a careful eye on the on-page text.  An image of chocolate covered almonds on a page about white chocolate with strawberries won’t do as well as an image of coca dusted almonds (with the right name) on a page talking about chocolate and almonds.

Remember that to optimize your images for more than a single word, you should use dashes and not underscore.  Matt Cutts has an old but brilliant blog post about how Google sees a dash and why.

Finally, quality is king.  Have high quality images with sharp, clear contrast showing the product with little clutter.  As Google does shrink the image in the results, you will need to ensure you capture interest with not just words but pictures.

Search is changing and we all need to change with it.  It isn’t just text SEO that needs changing though - all elements of our pages can be optimised for search.

Always remember - just say no to spam.

Matt Davies, faithful reader of this blog (or stalker) and SEO/music guru brought up a really good point in a comment about one of my posts…where does the responsibility of an SEO begin and end?

I’ve had as many bad customer service experiences as anyone else, although to hear me talk about them, you’d think that I never received anything even remotely resembling good service. I do enjoy hyperbole. Anyway, a well known women’s unmentionables company whose name I shan’t mention (although the initials are the same as the 2 first initials of a famous writer born in Trinidad to parents of Northern Indian ancestry) almost seriously shafted me on some really nice knickers, and I am not one bit happy with the way this was handled. Thankfully, in the end (HA!!! I mean come on that was a good one…) I did indeed receive them, but it cost me quite a bit of aggravation.

Now, admittedly, I did not use any sort of search engine ANYTHING to find the aforementioned knickers, but here’s my rationale for discussing this…the site is quite visible in the SERPs, the usability seemed just lovely, and the ordering process was nice and painfree. It was only after these idiots somehow managed to lose my order and fail to provide me with my customer number (needed to login to check order status, which strangely enough did not allow me to actually see anything other than that, indeed, my order had shipped.) And, worst of all, there was no actual tracking on the shipment on their website. In this day and age, that’s simply quite unacceptable.

Obviously you don’t see this kind of issue until you’ve placed your order and attempted to track it. I’d had one horrendous experience ordering boots from a well-known site that also didn’t provide order tracking functionality, and I have never ordered from them again. I certainly will never order from the knickers site again, even if I CAN get 3 pairs for $25. SEO couldn’t have saved this, you see. And the responsibility of an SEO most likely would have ended well before these issues occurred.

With that in mind, really, what IS the responsibility of an SEO on a site that offers something tangible to a searcher? Years ago, as I’ve mentioned, I (perhaps erroneously) assumed that my job was to get the user to the site. I had nothing whatsoever to do with what happened after the click occurred in the SERPs. That was kind of nice, actually, since I could easily relieve myself of the responsibility of converting the user. Now, however, I think that it’s definitely a part of my job to lead the user to the most relevant landing page, make all the buttons and links visible and user-friendly, and work my arse off when paid ads don’t have a good ROI. Well, I should say that this is what I do when I’m well-paid…otherwise, I really do nothing but lead the horse to water but that’s a funding issue. You get what you pay for you know.

It’s now my job to pore over the web analytics, too, to figure out what information is useful to help me make the site owner more and more money. Usability is a major concern, and I’ll definitely keep the main principles in mind when doing my work. However, when your customer service sucks or you don’t provide a basic service AFTER the fact, how is that my problem? It should be my problem, since if this is happening with great frequency, it’s going to lead to fewer return sales unless your site sells something designed specifically for hardcore masochists. However, honestly, is something that occurs after a conversion an SEO’s responsibility? Is brand reputation now mine as well?

I think it is, sadly. While I’d love to say that no, it’s not, I think that I’d be remiss not to worry about things like this. I could be alone in my constant desire to find something to bitch about, but based simply on the people that I encounter daily, I don’t think that I am. When I told a few friends about my horrendous knicker debacle, after inquiring about exactly what type I bought, most said simply “blog about it” and here you go…that edict is springing from the lips (and fingers) of everyone these days.

Obviously I’m a seriously classy and high end type of woman, or else I’d be calling these people out on their shoddy system publicly without resorting to literary references. Oh, and remember that the products DID eventually show up, which softened the blow a bit. Still, it was a dreadful experience waiting, with baited breath, every day by the window, for the postal worker to show up empty-handed. The Country Curtains catalog just wasn’t enough for me.

With all this being said, and quite lengthily, for which I apologize, what do you think IS your realm of responsibility with regards to SEO? Where does it end, do you see its circle continue to widen, and what effect will this type of thing have as we move farther away from actual on-page factors?

The English Speaking Union was the location of the “B2B Marketing Debate” (watch the video!) between SEO and PPC. SEO experts Lisa Ditlefsen, head of search at Base One and Andrew Girdwood, head of search at Big Mouth Media debated with PPC defenders Stuart Small from Google and Simon Norris from Periscopix.

With over £700 million being spent annually on paid advertising within search engines, pay per click (PPC) advertising is often seen as the easy way in to the top spot on search result pages. Easy to change, start, stop and completely transparent, Stuart asserted that PPC was a better, more targeted way to gain leads.

Stuart Small from Google mooted that with 85% of all B2B purchases starting in a search engine, paid search ads were vital to any business. Google sees 80% of searchers clicking on organic results, with 20% of all searches clicking on a search ad.

With SEO perceived as a “black art” taking time, expert knowledge and effort, both Lisa Ditlefsen and Andrew Girdwood tackled the issue expertly, mooting that organic results were often perceived as more directly relevant, with a lower overall cost.

With three times the interest in SEO, paid search ads just don’t generate as much interest. PPC is a “money eating machine” according to Andrew. “People don’t want to put more money in. For B2B campaigns SEO has a definite advantage over PPC.”

Lisa Ditlefsen spoke about how SEO is like buying a house and PPC is like renting. While initial costs may seem larger, SEO is by far the cheaper investment. A well optimised site lasts in the SERPs, while a poor site with PPC lasts only as long as the money.

Simon Norris mooted that organic results were manipulated by devious SEO methods. To counter, Andrew Girdwood argued that Google was excellent at filtering spam out of the index “Google does an excellent job at this. ‘Gaming’ the search engine is just no longer possible the way it used to be.”

Simon also claimed that Google is trying to increase the number of ads clicked on by searchers and that personalisation changes the ads shown based on user intention. “That is not true” said Stuart Small from Google. “Google is very careful about privacy and we do not change ads based on people being logged on to Google. That is completely wrong.”

At the end of the debate, search engine optimisation won. No contest really, considering who was fighting the SEO side

Will our jobs, as SEOs, get harder as the average searcher gets smarter?

Typically speaking, people don’t really seem to get any smarter to me as time goes by. Sure, they may learn to do something more efficiently, but your average person is still a knucklehead who thinks that John Grisham is the new Shakespeare and there are gorillas running all over the place waging wars. And yes, I am using a bit of hyperbole here for the purpose of discussing what effect the “smartening up” of the searching public will truly have on how we do our jobs. I honestly don’t think that everyone is as moronic as I pretend to think, but I don’t feel like using a lot of qualifiers at the moment.

Speaking of qualifiers, that brings me to a few points about the future of search:

1. Searchers are beginning to FINALLY understand that qualifiers are useful in getting the most relevant results. This used to be something that SEOs did, mainly. It was an area of much exploitation as well, as I refuse to believe that I was the only SEO showing clients all the long-tailed phrases for which they ranked. Did these matter at all, in terms of anything OTHER than a ranking? Probably not, but there you go. At that point in my career, I had the belief that my job was to get the ranking, and the client was the one responsible for getting the conversion. I certainly do not think that way today, but this was years ago when I was young and needed the money.

Now, however, most searchers have used a search engine enough that they are a bit more comfortable with how to enter a query that gets them closer to what they’re after. Once you’ve entered enough generic queries and waded through hundreds of results to find your dancing cats sweatshirts, you’re going to realize that typing in “dancing cats sweatshirts” is much better than the simple “shirts” which, chances are, won’t have any relevant dancing cat sweatshirts too far up in the SERPs.

2. Long-tailed optimization isn’t as simple as we all think it is and it may not last as a decent SEO technique. As more cat lovers discover the joy of wearing dancing cats sweatshirts, they’re going to start wanting the matching sweatpants most likely, and a new market will open up that will initially have little competition. Our jobs will be easy at this point, as we succeed in bringing these truly insane cat people to our sites so that they can successfully tell the world how much they love a dancing cat. Then they’ll wear this hideously unstylish combination out in public, god help them, and someone’s going to want to imitate this look. Thus, more sites selling dancing cats sweatpants will go up, and competition will increase. See, this makes things a bit harder for us, all because of cat lovers with bad style.

Long-tailed optimization could easily be one of the easiest things to exploit in order to do well in the SERPs, so will we see Google, for example, making algorithmic changes in order to prevent yet another technique from working? I can’t imagine that they won’t try to stop this, honestly. No matter how relevant your qualifiers are, someone else is also going to be using them. How is Google going to feel about it when no one optimizes in order to do well with basic phrases? What will THOSE algorithmic changes do to the few remaining techniques that work? God only knows.

3. PPC prices aren’t going to come down anytime soon. PPC used to be fairly safe from major site-crushing changes, but now we have to think about more than whether or not we can afford to pay $.10 more per click for a keyword. We have to make sure our landing pages are relevant, which is definitely a good thing, and we have a lot more restrictions on what we can pay to advertise. It’s no longer a simple matter of buying your way to the top, and with Google’s insistence upon making sure that no one (other than themselves) controls any market, they’re going to be paying much closer attention to what goes on with how we all try and abuse paid ads.

We keep flipflopping between the view that most people won’t click on a paid listing and the view that people either don’t care if the listing is paid or they aren’t smart enough to notice. What if the general public DOES become more anti-paid listings? This could easily happen. People are sick of the corporate mentality…you don’t have to be a brainiac to get pissed off about someone using wealth to gain anything. If these people actually stop to think about a paid listing and what it means to get that spot, they could indeed decide not to click on it. As everyone becomes more educated about search, I don’t think that we can rely on cluelessness any longer.

So what does this mean? It means that there’s no danger of resting on your laurels any time soon, but that’s a good thing isn’t it? People may not get “smarter” so to speak, but they will become more educated on what we do in order to market to them. Just as we’ve seen the “Kill Your Television” bumper stickers and maybe even bought a copy of the magazine AdBusters, we will most likely start being witness to movements intended to break us of our internet habits. People do still watch television, but the popularity of systems that allow viewers to record and fast-forward through commercials has already cost television advertisers tons of money. If that kind of anti-marketing becomes ingrained in the minds of searchers, we could seriously be in trouble.