Before we go any further, can we clear up something… what’s all this Bothan business? Something to do with a former cricketer?

Ha, wondered when that would come up… Ok so when I first started learning SEO everyone had their avatar, and no-one really joined forums etc with their “real name” (yes I’m looking at evilgreenmonkey and rishil here!). So when I signed up to be a pro member at SEOmoz I thought, well Rob.. and Bothan came from a Star Wars race – the ones who steal the plans to the Death Star. Thus RobBothan suitably geeky I thought! So at some point I do need to move across to RobNicholson.

OK, next thing to clear up… what the hell is a “Digital Customer Experience Analyst”?

Well I won a competition to have the longest job title… no really it addresses the fact that I look at everything on the customer experience side at Easynet Connect – from SEO to Usability and how the CRM system deals with them.

Final thing to clarify, who are Easynet Connect? Aren’t they just Easynet (Sky’s ISP)? What’s the difference?

Easynet Connect is part of the Easynet Group, established in 1994 and now owned by BSkyB. Easynet Connect is one of the leading providers of quality connectivity and internet access for small to medium size businesses, such as leased lines, SDSL and 100Mbps Fibre.

With those things sorted out, tell us a bit about how you got into SEO.

Well it was in the days of optimizing per keyword, and I was running an ecommerce website. As part of the site launch we looked at expanding the marketing for it. As such the web design agency said “we’re learning about this thing called SEO – and it’s £500 per keyword per month” – at which point I started thinking l’d learn about it as we couldn’t afford the budget.. and got hooked! I still have that RFP lurking around somewhere! Since then I’ve moved across e-commerce, to enterprise level travel & government sites & now onto the B2B telecoms world.

On your SEOmoz profile you say SEO is so fascinating you have bored people to death about it. Have there been any recent fatalities?

I’ve persuaded a British Olympic rowing team member to not use the internet… due to a discussion at a fancy dinner party revolving around “so what is SEO” – and I guess I scared them with the concepts of analytics everywhere & manipulation of data on the internet!

You helped organise a News Corp SEO conference last year with me. What did you get out of the session?

Well that was quite a conference – first off I became intimately involved in how global videoconferencing solutions work! Getting New York, Los Angeles, San Fransisco and London hooked up on a live HD video conference took some doing.

It was a great conference to learn from people like Drew Broomhall at the Times and yourself at LocateTV on subjects I’ve often not had the opportunity to look into – like enterprise level news SEO. I think it also pulled together the widespread SEO’s in Newscorp to allow us to chat on a more casual basis on tips and tactics – I’d recommend this to any large organistion!

You often tweet about Sandhurst Military Academy, what’s the connection?

I used to be in the TA at university, so I’ve a lot of friends who are now either in Sandhurst training or deployed with the British Army. Great guys and amazing talking with them, even though I’ve been know to discuss how the project management & presentation skills I’ve learned in my career are useful to them.

If you were a character in a Disney movie, which would you be?

Disney movie… Wall-e? hmm too easy… and not scary – I’d go for Maximilian from the first Disney movie not to have a U rating, the Black Hole – as most Disney robots are a little too cute and cuddly – and I’d want to be a bit of a scary robot (more fun ) (can you tell I’ve watched scifi films?)

Tea or coffee?

Coffee is essential in the mornings. I actually can’t function without it.

What advice do you have for other in-house SEOs?

I’d say patience is key for SEOs, get a full knowledge of your company from end-to-end, from customer service to the product teams – as you’ll find some surprising allies and ideas lurking around there with people keen to help out. Then really sort out your analytics so that you can measure and produce dashboards for your key stakeholders. Its no good saying “trust me” – they need to be shown proof & a plan to succeed. That’s one of the key first things to do, once you’ve done that yes you can look at the fun things in SEO – but you need to be getting the basics right and making sure elements like PR are providing the best input from the very beginning.

I guess one of the key things to establish as an in-house SEO is whether you’ll be on your own, or have a team with you, as then you can delegate tasks, such as analytics, to specific people. Otherwise if your on your own you’ll have to spend some time at the beginning automating or liasing within your company so that your time isn’t drained by regular tasks such as monthly reporting, or press release checking.

Additionally, manage your stakeholders well, I’ve often found conflict between marketing & dev teams can lead to unnecessary delays – and an in-house SEO is perfectly placed to be the go-between to help out those parties and add value to their projects. Those people, such as PR, might not understand SEO – but when you explain it helps them get more publicity they quickly become fans!

If you had a FlashForward to 6 months from now, what would you like to see?

6 months from now? Hopefully I’d see something I do love that FlashForward series (ST: Rob added the link, not me). What would I like to see, I’d like to see some more regulation in the SEO industry, both in regulating the search engines as well as the professionals in agencies & inhouse roles. I definitely feel that whilst our market is constantly shifting, from Social Media to new platforms such as mobiles and tablets – we’re a maturing industry and need to act like it. On that point, I think I’d also like to see a little less hysteria and negativity in both the UK start-up community and also in the SEO industry at large.

I guess I’d like to see on a personal side I’d like to see some B2B sales cycle research I’m doing completed, and my attempts to setup ChromeOS on Ubuntu on VMware on a mac…

Thanks Rob for a great SEO.BIO. If you aren’t already, you can get to know Rob even more by following him on Twitter.

First up was Kevin Rose from Digg. He had a bunch of tips for gaining popularity:

• When building features find ways that they can increase the users self-worth or stroke their ego using emotional and visible rewards (leaderboards, highlighting profiles against top contributions)
• Stop over building features, pick 2-3 things to focus on and always ask yourself “is there anything I can take away from this feature?”
• Stop thinking you understand your users – learn from what they’re actually doing on your site. Decide on what you’re going to build and build it (avoid analysis paralysis). Keep iterating.
• When launching features think about using invite-only systems to deliberately limit the number of people. Hand out invites to influential bloggers/press and see the buzz build.
• Connect with your community: start a podcast, throw launch parties and quarterly/yearly events.
• Look for a hook to get people involved (e.g. with Farmville on Facebook they send notifications – three of you friends helped you out – repay the favour).

Also Kevin gave some good answers to questions asked from the audience:

• Dealing with people trying to game the system: Be careful about banning people – don’t do it visually – some users might do stuff that looks like gaming without realising – create a user on-boarding process that takes them through positive steps to help them understand what then need to do.
• Did Digg ever pay for marketing? Digg never did, everything was basically word of mouth, they never paid for traditional advertising, PPC, etc.
• What’s next with Digg? Digg will doing less on just the homepage and also looking at promoting the other vertical landing pages.

Video of Kevin’s presentation:

Taking your Site from One to One Million Users by Kevin Rose from Carsonified on Vimeo.

Mike McDerment from Freshbooks gave some advice on “socks and underwear” (boring but essential) things you should be doing to analyse your site.

• You need to understand the funnel of how your users convert. This is not always simple if you run sites with different options, such as freemium (give users a free account then encourage them to upgrade). The conversion to paying user could take many months.
• For tracking users you need to ensure that your marketing information (referrer, keyword, landing page, etc) is stored with the user’s account. This way you can see how different marketing strategies convert over a period of time.
• Build a simple reporting interface that allows your marketing team to run simple ad-hoc queries across the user data so, as a developer, you are not constantly bugged with requests.

David Prager from Revision3 described three steps to building a great web app:

• Get niche – find the absolute core of your demographic and build around that community (apparently “niche” is really pronounced “nitch” – who knew?)
• Get rich – create the best quality and depth of content on your niche
• Go mainstream – take your niche and find new communities

An example of this was a specialist rock-climbing site that creating great content around that subject and then branched out to other extreme sports. Digg also did the same thing with tech news and then expanding into other verticals like entertainment.

Osama Bedier from Paypal discussed the way in which legacy infrastructure hurts innovation. He gave a wonderful example of why the space shuttle (one of the most advanced forms of transport) has limitations based on legacy infrastructure. Although I can’t entirely remember it all, essentially the space shuttle is limited in terms of the distance it can fly by the amount of fuel it can hold in it’s solid rocket boosters. The solid rocket boosters are built in Utah and are transported by train to the space centre in Florida by train. On the journey, the train must fit through a narrow tunnel that is just big enough to fit the width of the tracks (and hence the solid rock boosters can be no bigger than this). The width of the tracks is 4 foot 8.4 inches.

The reason the tracks are this width is because the American railroads we built using the same equipment to build railways in England. The railways were built the same width as tramways, which in turn were build to fit the grooves created by wagon wheels in dirt tracks. The distance between wagon wheels dates back to Roman war chariots pulled by horses. The wheels on those chariots were positioned to essentially be the width of two horses arses. And so, the reason why the shuttle cannot fly long distances into space is due to the width of two horses arses.

Osama also described an analogy of the internet being a little like electricity, in that for a very long time electricity was limited by the fact that appliances had to fit light fitting (as lighting was the first killer application for electricity). Many appliances failed to be safe until the socket (and switch) was invented so you could easily unplug. His point was that to enable innovation you need to remove friction. Coming from PayPal his main point was “cash is dead” and we need to move to entirely electronic payment systems. There are some barriers to this, such as allowing money to move in real-time (not days) and allow for micro-payments to work efficiently. This is the aim of PayPal moving forward and why they have launched their PayPalX platform to open up their API for using in innovation.

Chris Abad from Spymaster (the Twitter game that invited you and your friends to start conspiracy theories and interrogate captured agents). The application around two weeks to build (one week to plan, one to execute). They had great success in building buzz around the application (the first TechCrunch article was written within an hour of launching the closed beta). The things that worked for them where

• Build a great product
• Build a passionate community of raving fans
• Empower your users to market for you (they used the #spymaster hashtag along with a link to play the game)
• Incentivise your users to market for you – notification preferences (tweets) – recruit you friend – take non-playing people and turn them into players to give you more power
• Find key viral channels to maximise exposure – choose things that get attention – tag it with your brand so people know it’s you and trend
• Target influential people when you launch

Aza Raskin from Mozilla described their vision of browsers:

• You Centric – The browser knows who you are, it can be an identity broker, for example let the browser authorise payment
• Social – your friends are too important for any one company own it – the browser could store all you friends scrapped from twitter, facebook, etc and then know which networks to use when you want to communicate with them
• Secure – as the web gets more and more sophisticated the barrier between what we store on desktop and what we store on the web. Traditional web applications are prevented from accessing local resources such as your hard drive. To allow barriers to be broken down we need security.
• Make the web revolve around you – one of the big problems Firefox faces is that of two many toolbars. Tasks are disjointed (to translate a section of a page takes many actions to achieve). Browsers should become task-centric and allow you to use natural language to achieve the task you want to do (here he demo’ed some cool tech allowing you to select some text and type “translate to English” and it replaced the text inline). Your train of thought is key – the technology should allow you to think about what you want to do, not how to do it.

Video or Aza Raskin

You-Centric: The Future of Browsing from Carsonified on Vimeo.

Here are some slightly more techy snippets that I enjoyed:

• Dustin Diaz – Twitter
  • jQuery is like cocaine – one line can get you hooked
  • A framework is something that frames the way you work – if you use one make sure you pick one the allows you to work the way you want to
• Chris Lea
  • Scalability and efficiency are different things. Pretty much every app eventually becomes I/O bound (CPU,DB,Disk,Network,etc). A scalable system is a system where overcoming I/O obstacles can be expressed in financial terms. An efficient system is one where the costs of scaling are considered small. Working on scaling problems is almost always beneficial. Working on efficiency is sometimes beneficial.
• Addison  Berry – Lullabot
  • On the ethos of open source: Code is just a tool. Products are the things that make money. Sony uses Drupal and puts their code back into the open source community – they don’t sell code, they sell music.
  • Also a lot of things about making good sh*t but not monkey sh*t, just crazy sh*t and how you need to kick ass or she’ll kick your ass.
• Francisco Tolmasky – 280 North
  • The line between desktop apps and web apps is blurring. Take a look at 280 Slides which is built using the Cappuccino web framework. And with 280 Atlas (released 15th Nov) you can build the applications using a really great interface builder and run them on the web or on the desktop.

  Video of Francisco’s presentation

  Introducing Atlas: A Visual Development Tool for creating Web Applications by Francisco Tolmasky from Carsonified on Vimeo.

• Robin Christopherson
  • 19.4% of US population have a disability. Adults with disabilities spending twice as much time online as adults without disabilities (25 hours compared to 10).
  • He gave a demo of how bad Facebook is from an accessibility point of view. Try using a screen-reader such as NVDA on your site to make sure you aren’t making the same blunders.
  • HTML5 offers some nice accessibility features, in particular the new <video> tag (which allows for plugin-less video embedding) can support fully screen-reader capable subtitles and audio description.
• Chris Thorpe – Guardian
  • The Guardian have launched some interesting applications they often require rapid development and have peak demand around a particular topic (for example http://mps-expenses.guardian.co.uk/). A big CMS good for big stuff but very slow to implement new things. This is where cloud computing comes in: they deployed on Amazon EC2 using Django framework with only 1 week dev, 2 days of design and 1 day of a sysadmin. They have also used Google App Engine to deploy similar applications.
• Bruce Lawson – Opera
  • If you want to style (using CSS) the new HTML5 <header>, <nav>, <article>, <footer> in Internet Explorer you currently have to use JavaScript document.createElement(‘header’), etc – WTF!

  Bruce’s presentation on video:

  The Future of HTML5 by Bruce Lawson from Carsonified on Vimeo.

• Simon Warldey
  • Simon gave a really entertaining talk about the future of cloud computing using over 100 slides. As the presentation is so visual so here is the video:

    The Future of the Cloud by Simon Wardley from Carsonified on Vimeo.

    I advise you to find an opportunity to see him speak sometime.

• Dave McClure
  • Had a great quote with reference to your web site: “Some sucks. Find it. Kill it.”

Anyways, that’s all from me. In the words of Ryan Carson…  preciate it.

I think, when it comes to entertainment, people want to consume it (and pay for it) in different ways. They either buy it, rent/subscribe it, or want it free (and are willing to tolerate adverts). I think this varies with the type of entertainment also (here I’m mostly talking about music, TV and movies).

With TV and movies, people are used to paying some form of subscription for most of their viewing (be it satellite, cable or via a TV license). They also accept that much of their subscription will be subsidised by advertising. Fans will want to buy DVDs of their favourite shows so they can watch them again.

This is somewhat perplexing if you think about it. How many people do you know that have all the Friends boxsets even though it’s repeated constantly on E4 (or The CW in the US)? How many times, on average, would you say that you have watched any individual DVD in your collection in the past few years? I imagine it’s close to once each.

With music I think the picture is a bit different. For each CD or mp3 you have bought I would imagine the average number of plays is much higher. Why is this? Well maybe it’s because with TV and movies it is a lot about the unknown. You enjoy the show, the ride you are taken on, but in most cases when you are done you want a new experience. Sure there will be a few movies that you love to watch over and over, but in general I expect that once you’ve watched it once (or maybe twice) you will want to move on.

The same isn’t as true with music. Familiarity with music brings attachment. Many songs are “growers” that you only really begin to enjoy after a few times. Music can also have attachments to particular emotions and memories as it can set the soundtrack to your life. Portability also plays a role (you can’t drive and watch TV – well at least not safely) and also music can be listened to whilst doing other things. Also there is collectibility – the joy of having the original music with artwork in something you can keep forever.

So how does this come back to the Spotify app? Well clearly Spotify is asking users to take a different approach to the way the listen to music. Unlike TV, people are not used to paying a subscription for music. So far they have either bought it (owned it), stole it (torrents), or got it for free with advertising attached (YouTube and Spotify desktop app).

A subscription to Spotify gives you access to millions of tracks, but only while you continue to pay a subscription. A soon as you stop paying you stop listening. For some people this is acceptable, others would rather know that after one year they had £120 worth of music they could call their own. The iPhone app gives you an illusion of ownership by allowing you to download playlists and showing the album art but if you stop paying it’ll all be gone. Probably with a TV/movie application this wouldn’t bother people but I think music is a different case.

There are a few things I would think about if I were Spotify. Firstly, I’d consider how to make the iPhone app truely free. This could use advertising, like the desktop app which is downloaded to the iPhone (and hence could be used offline), resticting the number of tracks you can play in a day, restricting the catalogue available, etc. Also I would look at in-app purchasing (available in OS3.0) to pay both for a premium subscription but also for the tracks themselves. A final thought would be to offer a paid app that maybe costs £5 and gives you a certain amount of subscription included.

Amazon:

eBay:

even SEOmoz:

but interestingly enough, not MySpace:

It is interesting to see which brand are appearing with the direct link and which are not.

I wonder if the set of sites is hand picked or from an algorithm based around domain trust and click-throughs?

Also, what could this mean for sites who rank for competitor’s names (who won’t have their pages displayed if the user doesn’t hit the SERPs)? Your thoughts in comments below.

Here is a snip (courtesy of chrismoyles.net):

So back to Hannah. The song that has been going round in my head is a version of this but, of course, with the words “Hannah Bo Banna” (please forgive my bad singing – I am no singer):

Now with this clearly there are other people in SEO that it could work for and so next I have “Stuart P Turner”

And whilst I’m in the mood, here’s one for “Rebecca Kelley”:

Can you think of any other people in SEO who could fit the same song? Feel free to download the backing track from Vitamin String Quartet’s “Processed Strings” and have a go yourself!

Whilst Stuart continues his obsession with trying to get the ladies to reveal all (he did a pretty good job getting Chelsea to tell us what she likes to do with a boom mike), I thought I’d try to keep things a bit more balanced and invite another bloke to give us his SEO.BIO.

I’ve met Richard a number of times as well as watching him present at SMX. Also, having worked in-house for a large travel site, he has some very interesting experiences to share.

Give us a quick rundown of your history in SEO.

I started out working in Financial Services back in 2002 doing usability and live release testing. Within a year I’d moved into e-commerce and after launching my first transactional site, my boss started asking why we didn’t rank for their generic product terms in Google and wanted me to sort that out.

From there on I started learning SEO and eventually, SEO became my full time occupation. Since then I’ve worked on SEO in a number of industries, including engineering, construction supplies, travel, recruitment, financial services, technology and events.

You have a lot of experience dealing with large site architecture issues. What are the biggest challenges for a site of that size?

The biggest challenge to be aware of is that with a large site, nothing stays the same for long. You’re constantly monitoring for, and keeping errors at bay while watching for any impact of (seemingly unrelated) releases on your search engine visibility. Of course while all this is going on, you’re also measuring and recording the results of your own SEO changes and managing a team, their activities, training and development.

Defining your site architecture and developing your keyword strategies are the next biggest challenge, and again – there’s nothing particularly static about either one. “Technical SEO” and search engine accessibility has always been my favourite part of the job, but I also enjoy working through keyword data and spotting new opportunities.

I saw Derrick Wheeler speaking at this year’s SMX Advanced – he’s Senior SEO Architect for Microsoft and shared some stats about the Microsoft site that blew my mind – billions of index-able URLs on 19 different content management platforms. How’s that for a challenge?

You recently took another look at the Vince update with some great analysis using link metrics. Tell us a little more about your findings.

I found some interesting trends between value passed via inbound links and ranking position, demonstrating the update was (in part) a trust / quality related algorithmic change. There were a few exceptions in the data (I think of them as anomalous rankings) that on occasion, happened to be large brands.

I still don’t think the update was a matter of Google “favouring brands” though. You only have to look at the “Searches related to:” section to see there’s a link to some of the anomalous rankings I found and the related search phrases that get displayed in that section of the serps.

I think Vince brought in more of a user search data influence, where brands receiving related traffic to generic search terms receive a boost in their positioning as a result.

Linkscape data underpinned all of my analysis and given there are so many different variables involved I invited anyone reading that post to draw their own conclusions and share them. I think that in the future we’ll see more of these types of changes, and more often thanks to future updates such as Caffeine.

You also run SEOgadget. What made you set up the site and where is the infamous gadget?

I decided to set the site up after a conversation with Matt Cutts at SMX Advanced in June 2008. He asked – “Do you have a blog?” and I felt a little embarrassed to say “Er, no.. Not yet”. I’d been doing SEO for ages but never really got round to writing up any of my thoughts in a blog. I’d already owned the domain name for a while so it made sense just to get on with it and launch a blog there.

SEOgadget has come such a long way in the last 18 months thanks to all of the support I’ve received from our community and I’m always grateful for the Sphinns, links and discussions people start there. 2009 has been great – I’ve been lucky to get some really interesting clients on board this year and I’m really happy with the direction it’s headed in.

I’ve got some good stuff planned for the next few months with a rebrand, re-launch and a few other exciting announcements coming rather soon…

The infamous Gadget! What, you mean you haven’t found the registration form yet?

You have a great SEO jobs board on your site. Are you still seeing good SEO positions being advertised despite the economic downturn?

Actually I’m seeing a huge increase in the number of jobs advertised, particularly in London. I’m probably receiving in the region of 10 new vacancies a week in the London area alone, ranging from junior to Senior roles in house and at agencies. It’s a good time to be in SEO!

You are presenting at the upcoming SEOmoz Pro Training in London. How did you get involved?

I was invited to speak at the seminar earlier this year, and given the enormous support and inspiration I’ve had from both Rand and Will in the past year I couldn’t really refuse. The best thing about the event is the time we’re given to speak. Around 45 minutes means we can really cover each point in enough detail to get some really actionable tips across – it’s going to be a very different experience to an ordinary SEM conference. I believe everyone attending will leave with an enormous amount of actionable takeaways and get a chance to network and have fun at the after parties.

If you were a Marvel superhero, which one would you be?

Are you into Marvel, Stephen? I had to look at the website and didn’t really come to a conclusion. That said, I thought Luke Cage had by far the coolest profile picture so how about him? Looking at Marvel.com reminded me to get excited about Iron Man 2. Cheesy, yes – but the first one was brilliant. Can’t wait.

Tea or coffee?

Make mine a Mojito. Oh.

You are a bit of an Ubuntu fan boy. Don’t you sometimes miss the ability to drag a frozen window across the screen and make pretty patterns?

Believe me when I say switching to Ubuntu is basically exchanging one kind of crashiness for another. I tend to find myself using Ubuntu for all things fun and geek, but Windows still plays an important role in my professional life.

If you weren’t working online, what would you do?

If there’s one thing I’ve learned it’s that as much as I love what I do, working outside can be really good for you. I’ve just spent the weekend on a friend’s farm and it was such a welcome change to London, so I’d try to do something in the great outdoors.

What is your number one tip for someone working as an in-house SEO?

Put time and effort into explaining how SEO works across your whole business. Build relationships by giving as much support as you can and communicating (and demonstrating) new tools that help everyone work with the right SEO principles behind them.

I’d like to Richard for taking the time out to tell us a bit more about himself. If you aren’t following Richard on Twitter, I think you should.

The search suggestions it comes up with is one of the typical searches people do to try and find the strongest pages on a particular domain (site:mydomain.com mydomain).

Does this mean that Walmart are very interested in what pages on their domain have the most power or does it mean people are looking for strong pages to get links from Walmart?

Taking this a bit further, let’s look at what happens when we add another letter, e.g. ‘o’

Hmm.. anyone think ‘office supplies’ is quite a competitive term (hint: guess who are number 1 and 3 on Google.com)?

How about another letter, say ‘c’:

And how about ‘b’:

I’m seeing a pattern. Let’s try one more, say ‘l’

Anyone spot it? Your clue: two words “Bald SEO“.

Yup, except for the generic ’site:’ operator, Google suggest seems to have a large number of Tribune properties (Orlando Sentinel, Chicago Tribune, Baltimore Sun, LA Times + Blog).

Sorry Brent – we know what you are up to!

The basic promo tweet:

Win a MacBook Pro with @mpora http://bit.ly/svZNM #mpora
2:58 AM Jul 27th

A bit of word analysis

If you take away the letters #mpora from “MacBook Pro” you get #cbokro. Best anagram of that I can think of is “Bo Rock”.
3:08 AM Jul 27th

A tribute to 90’s band “Snow”:

Back to the 90s: #mpora, you no say that’s who I’m gonna blame, A licky boom boom down.
3:31 AM Jul 27th

Travel tips:

Was thinking about one day going on holiday to Bora Bora but now think I may go to #mpora mpora
3:45 AM Jul 27th

A new take on a classic story:

Hmmm, maybe I should read my kids “The #mpora ’s New Clothes” tonight.
3:49 AM Jul 27th

An apology for my mpora tweeting:

Sorry guys, the possibility of winning a MacBook Pro brings out the creative cheesy side of me #mpora
3:55 AM Jul 27th

A liquid solution:

Having trouble transferring liquids beginning with the letter ‘M’? Try an #mpora for guaranteed satisfaction.
3:58 AM Jul 27th

A hopeful last tweet before the first draw:

Going offline for a while. Hope when I get back I will be the proud winner of a MacBook Pro #mpora
4:38 AM Jul 27th

The battle with Yoshimi_S begins:

@Yoshimi_S you can try to beat me but only if you can shoe-horn #mpora into a sentance.
about 20 hours ago

Spreading the word:

#mpora – 70% lower in saturated fat than butter
about 20 hours ago

Boots the Monkey’s new friend:

A favourite TV show of my kids is #mpora The Explorer
about 20 hours ago

A fairy tail memory:

What’s the name of Sleeping Beauty? Oh yeh, it’s Princess #mpora
about 19 hours ago

Trash talking Yoshimi_S:

@Yoshimi_S could you attempt be any #mpora considering you can’t even type my name properly?
about 5 hours ago

Rhyme time

Under my fedora there is a plethora of #mpora
about 4 hours ago

Pop-tastic:

A bit of Scissor Sisters action: #mpora Can’t you give me some time? I got to give myself one more chance. To be the man that I know I am.
about 4 hours ago

Film buff:

Favourite line from Notting Hill: I knew a girl at school called #mpora. Never got to see her box, though.
about 4 hours ago

Time to go back to English class:

@Yoshimi_S I’m the #mpora of bad spelling.
about 3 hours ago

Who says romance is dead?

Wedding vows: …for better or for worse, for richer, for #mpora, in sickness and in health, to love and to cherish…
about 3 hours ago

How far will I go to win?

@Yoshimi_S as long as I don’t loose friends I’m willing to loose some followers if it means I win a MacBook Pro from insane #mpora tweets
about 3 hours ago

Yoshimi_S starts to cheat:

@Yoshimi_S retweeting me to get an entry… Cheap shot to win #mpora
about 3 hours ago

Can’t agree more with Rob:

RT @RobOusbey: Will #mpora please give @StephenTallamy a prize, just to make him stop? (me: yup gimme that MacBook!)
about 3 hours ago

I find a new friend:

RT @Moxley: @StephenTallamy ‘How to lose followers and influence #mpora’ (me: I’m doing my best)
about 3 hours ago

A desperate man foiled by retweets:

@Yoshimi_S hmm, how do I copyright my #mpora entries?
about 2 hours ago

Selling out my kids for a MacBook:

A lot of people say my kids are #mpora -ble
about 2 hours ago

What I will do if Yoshimi_S wins:

@Yoshimi_S I will hunt you down a rip that MacBook out of your arms #mpora
about 2 hours ago

Long distance relationships never work:

@Yoshimi_S or we could share it. Hmmm how can you share a MacBook from either end of the M1? #mpora
about 2 hours ago

Giving everyone a well deserved break:

You will be glad to know I’m going offline for a while. #mpora out.
about 2 hours ago

For those who haven’t been paying attention, tell us a little bit about your background in online marketing.

My background is in good old fashioned offline marketing. I spent ten years in the betting industry, originally as a betting shop manager; then in retail marketing – sales promotion, point of sale etc; and latterly in telephone betting – direct mail – (yep snail mail!), advertising, etc.

Having spent my whole working life in betting I figured it was time for a change. I headed up the marketing team at a niche online job site for around a year before coming to my current agency, Gravytrain.

I still feel very new to the industry. But online marketing is just a different channel. Ultimately the same marketing principles apply. Marketing is about engagement not selling.

What areas of search marketing do you get involved in the most?

I’m not the most technical of people (I can’t even get my iPod to work), so I get involved mainly in strategy and leave the technical implementation to the people who know what they’re doing.

That aside I spend a good deal of time on content creation for clients – article writing, blogging etc; and manage some of our client’s PPC accounts which I really enjoy.

Where did they “Bo Banna” bit come from and do you think Ms Montana’s name was inspired by you?

*hangs head in shame*

It’s the name game – Hannah Bo Banna Banana Fanna Foe Fanna Fee Fie Moe Manna; or sometimes Hannah Bo Banna Stick a Lanna Fie Fanna Hannah.

I picked Hannah_Bo_Banna on some social networks because the infinitely more sensible Hannah_S was taken and I wanted something I could remember easily.

It’s a bit embarrassing when I introduce myself and feel the need to qualify that I am indeed Bo Banna ?

The people behind Ms Montana have a lot to answer for. It’s opened up a whole new world of pain for girls called Hannah across the globe – Hannah Banana was bad enough.

Had any other insurance companies spamming your blog recently?

Ha! Nope, I think that they’re steering clear of me now. I think in retrospect it was an honest mistake as I’ve not seen any evidence of it elsewhere and lots bloggers picked up the meerkat thang. Now I just get the regular spam.

Tell us a little about your theatrical endeavours.

Since 16 I’ve been a member of various amateur theatre groups in my local area. One such theatre group ask me back every now and again (even though it’s a youth theatre and strictly speaking I’m far too old).

I did a production of Crave by Sarah Kane this year, which we’re taking to the Woking Drama Festival; and I’m hoping to get cast in a production of Talking Heads by Alan Bennett (cross everything – including your eyes) which will be on in the Autumn.

You can often be found at LondonSEO events, commenting and posting on SEOmoz and of course on LeedsSEO. What are the best things you’ve learned from the SEO community?

As a complete novice I learnt pretty much everything I know from the kind and extremely patient peeps on SEOmoz and at the LondonSEO drink-a-thons. I love the share and share alike mentality of the people involved in the industry.

Best things? Probably Google Analytics tricks from RobBothan, tips to help solve international SEO problems from Lisa Myers (nee Ditlefsen), how best to deal with low quality content without losing rankings from Rob, Tom and the gang at Distilled.

A special mention also has to go to Rishi for being perhaps the most helpful person on the planet.

There’s tons more people who helped me over the last year and a half. You’re all fab.

How do you feel when Google offers up “gravy train lyrics” when you search for “gravy train”?

We’d have gotten away with it if it weren’t for that pesky band!

If you were a Simpsons character, which one would you be?

My brother would say I was most like chain-smoking Selma Bouvier, or perhaps Troy McClure the washed up actor. He’s very supportive

Tea or coffee?

Tricky. I drink both, but to be honest I don’t really like the taste of either. I like the taste of sugary milk. So latte’s rock, and when I make tea, I just show it the bag – if it looks like chicken soup – that’s perfect.

If the Internet was shutdown, what would you do?

Shutdown permanently? I’d get really good at pool, then hustle for a living.

What is your number one tip for people learning about online marketing?

Go get yourself involved – online and offline. SEOmoz is an amazing community, and the people there are incredibly generous. Once you’ve got to know people there, you can then start following them on twitter and other social networks. Likewise, go to the meet ups. It’s not nearly as scary as it might seem. Everyone’s very friendly.

Thanks for the great SEO.BIO-banna Hannah. If you’d like to get to know her better, why not follow her on twitter.

It seems that Stu and I are alternating from female to male (and Stu is getting all the girls), so I have hand-selected Social Media and SEO expert Ciarán Norris.

Give us a brief history of you life in SEO/Social Media.

I spent seven years working in online publishing (at Centaur & RBI) and when I got to RBI I worked on a major site relaunch: hours were spent on branding and the like but after we moved to our new domain traffic from Google fell off a cliff.

I took myself along to SES London to find out what could be done (yep, we’d used a 302!) and after becoming part of the first ever search marketing team at RBI, moved to eyefall, which became Altogether, and the rest is history.

You recently moved from Alltogether to Mindshare. What were you proudest moments with Alltogether?

There are probably three:

• winning the IMA Award for Best Viral for Do The Test, which was a collaboration with WCRS (they created it, we spread it)
• being part of the winning pitch team on Sony, which was a massive deal for Altogether
• (on a personal level) giving SEO training to BBC journalists – as a frustrated hack, it doesn’t get much better than that

What have your first days at Mindshare been like?

A fun blur – 2.5 days in the office, then went to speak at Online Marketing Show before flying to Amsterdam to meet our main client (Nike) and the guys who run SocialMedia8, the agency that my new division is partnering with.

Have you bagged yourself some free Nikes yet?

Not free, but I was lucky enough to get a tasty discount on a pair of Nike Tennis – an lost classic in my eyes, and the some of the most comfortable trainers ever made.

Your personal site currently ranks #5 for Ciaran and #6 for Ciarán on google.co.uk (#7 and #10 on google.com). How are you planning to push out that actor and those baby name sites?

I’ve never really taken my personal SEO as seriously as I probably should do. To be honest I’ve not really thought about it but am open to suggestions.

ST: On his about page Ciarán says:

I’m also trying to improve my rank for the words Ciaran & Ciarán. Yes, I really am that exciting.

You are a regular blogger and cover topics from social media to lost gloves. What motivates you to write?

I’m a frustrated journo. I used to write for the NUS paper at university and have loved writing since I was a child.

Blogging has truly been a revolutionary development for me because even if no-one reads my stuff, I just love writing it. And I think gloves tell stories which probably makes me a little strange.

It is clear you love The Guardian just a little too much. Have you ever sought out opportunities to work with them?

I think they’re an amazing brand, with an incredible set-up. I’d love to work with them in some capacity at some point, but to be honest they seem to be doing quite fine without me.

What really is exciting me though is helping out the people behind Brownswood, Gilles Peterson’s record label, to make sense of the web. Anyone who’s read any of my music posts will know that I think Gilles is the 21st Century’s John Peel and someone the BBC don’t appreciate anywhere near as much as they should.

You have a have built up good relationships with many other top SEOs and are always around at social events. How do you think this has helped you in your work?

Immeasurably. The help & assistance that people are willing to share never ceases to amaze me.

If you were a Transformer, which one would you be?

Bumblebee.

Tea or coffee?

Tea. It’s God’s drink. Coffee is the devil’s sweat.

If you could do any job other than working online, what would you do?

Running a second hand book & record store on a beach somewhere I reckon.

What are the top SEO and social media tips you find yourself giving most often to clients?

SEO – think about what people would actually call your products and avoid jargon. Social media – why should anyone care? Put yourself in the consumers’ shoes and you might come up with something worthwhile.

Thanks Ciarán for a great BIO. If you aren’t already, why not follow him on Twitter to get to know him better!