Leeds SEO

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.