I have a serious issue with the internet technology sector as it exists today. Specifically, I take issue with the way startup culture is venerated in digital circles. In pursuit of ‘innovation’, technology startups are seen as the biggest value creators of the digital economy. The technology media is almost exclusively focused on reporting what is happening with Silicon Valley startups,  startup founders are depicted as modern day heroes, startup culture is seen as the guiding model for running a business, and massive industry events have become evangelical gatherings of startup believers where they can engage in the worship of everything even vaguely associated with technology startups. And I think all of that is very wrong. Worse than wrong – it’s dangerous and damaging. Any idiot can start a company (and many do). Being a startup founder or an entrepreneur is not an accomplishment in any way, shape or form. Building a sustainable business, that’s the real challenge. The emergence of the mobile app ecosystem has given rise to a plethora of startups – literally millions – whose initial founding idea was “let’s build an app!” The startup itself is the raison d’etre of many a fledgling business, and that is a very bad way to start a company intent on any semblance of longevity at all. But what about all those super successful app startups, you say? The Instagrams, Foursquares, Paths, and Pinterests of this world? There’s a word to describe those: lucky. For every technology startup that makes it, tens of thousands of others (quite literally) fail to achieve anything other than a spectacular waste of venture capitalist’s money. The VCs don’t mind much though, because they’re playing a numbers game. For every 50 million they waste on disastrous startups, they only need one startup to actually succeed and make them 100 million when it gets sold to Google or Facebook or Yahoo or any one of the other technology giants that beat the odds and actually made it big. I would argue that the ones that actually do manage to get bought out and make a pretty buck are not necessarily indicators of success either. We are, after all, experiencing the second internet bubble, with astoundingly unrealistic valuations for technology companies resulting in painfully inflated prices for startups. It is ignorance being fed by naivety disguised as optimism and enthusiasm. A hollow, self-perpetuating machine where startup founders get bought out and become venture capitalists driving a new generation of meaningless startups founded by the next batch of intoxicated twenty-something ignorami. At some stage the money will run out, the stock values will plummet to realistic levels, and it will all come tumbling down. Afterwards we’ll look at this whole episode with profound levels of embarrassment and 20-20 hindsight. In the meantime, you can do your bit to prepare for the inevitable collapse of Bubble 2.0. First of all, don’t buy in to the startup hype. Don’t get caught up in the founder-buyout-VC-founder cycle. Instead, focus on solving real problems. Focus on doing great work that delivers real value for your customers, whoever they are. Avoid the cult-like startup worshipping events like the Web Summit and SxSW, and instead listen to people who have resisted the lure of the quick buy-out and managed to build sustainable businesses. They might not be able to show triple-digit month-on-month growth figures, but these people are the real engines of the digital economy. And they’re not necessarily founders, CEOs, or MDs themselves. The people that add the real value to the technology sector are the ones that are quietly getting on with things, doing great work for their customers, and not getting high inhaling the evanescent vapours of Silicon Valley sycophancy. Also take care to avoid the secondary fallout from the industry’s startup-veneration, such as the astonishingly ignorant ‘common wisdom’ around employee productivity outlined here, which leads to factory-like coding sweatshops that results in burnt out employees and the release of sub-par bug-ridden products. Instead you would do well to foster a great working environment where staff feel appreciated and empowered and where creativity can thrive. Free massages, pool tables, and on-site dry-cleaning services are not requirements for a great company – often those perks are just fluff to hide a lack of substance and intended purely to lure in job-hopping talent from other startups. And that sort of employee, chasing the ‘next big thing’, is not the type of staff member you should be courting. Don’t believe the hype. Startups are not where the majority of the technology industry’s value is created – established businesses are where much of the innovation actually emerges from. And startup culture is not the standard by which technology companies should be measured – in fact startup culture, with its focus on hype-driven vacuity and short term gain, can be anathema to sustainable business operations. Focus on substance and real value, and you’ll survive the oncoming collapse of the second internet bubble just fine.

Yesterday afternoon, after months of preparation, Bas van den Beld finally flicked the switch and State of Search became State of Digital. Originally State of Search was founded as a blog about SEO and social media, but it quickly evolved to incorporate much more than that. Bas managed to gather an eclectic team of expert bloggers (and somehow I managed to hitch a ride as well), and the topics covered ranged from the basics of blogger outreach all the way to formulating digital strategies and building agency teams. As a result the State of Search brand no longer accurately encapsulated what the site was about. In fact, the perception of the blog as SEO-focused was becoming a hindrance, holding us back from expanding the site in the direction Bas has envisaged. So Bas decided on a rebrand, and State of Digital was born. This site is much more than just a 2.0 version of State of Search, as it has a much wider scope and ambition. Bas explains it in detail here: “State of Digital isn’t just a website or just a blog. It is a platform which will help get people forward. […] You could summarise the direction we want the site to go in, in these key points: Getting the right content to the right people at the right time Getting organisations to the next level in digital marketing Getting people from different backgrounds in their jobs talking on the same level and looking in the same direction when it comes to Digital Marketing” I’m exceptionally proud to be part of the editorial team of State of Digital. I hope we can continue to grow the site’s value through great content and expert advice, and educate digital marketers across the globe to become better professionals and help their careers flourish.

You have to feel sorry for the engineers behind Google+. When it was first launched, many people (myself included) felt that Google had finally mastered social media. Here was a robust social platform that copied many popular features from public favourites Facebook and Twitter and added a range of newfangled goodies like Hangouts and Circles that made it more attractive. And on the surface of things, it all seemed to go well for Google+. The launch was a global news event, and initial growth numbers were amazing (before we found out that most of those figures were utterly farcical). The digital community embraced Google+ wholeheartedly, and because all of our colleagues and peers were active G+ users we felt it would just be a matter of time before our non-digital friends and family would also embrace Google’s social platform. That didn’t happen, of course. As the hype died down, we soon began to realise that the general public stayed away from Google+ almost entirely. Google kept hinting at usage figures that indicated Google+ should be bigger than Twitter, and some studies claimed it could even outstrip Facebook. But in our hearts we knew this was all a lie. Most of our friends and family outside the industry were on Facebook and some even on Twitter. But almost none were active on Google+, despite the stellar numbers emerging from Mountain View. Something was amiss. The fanfare with which Google+ was announced soon died down to a soft murmur of sporadic tweaks and increasingly ridiculous user figures that seemed plucked from thin air. Then the mistakes began to pile up, from the initial error on insisting on real names and, later on, the colossal mistake of forcing all YouTube accounts on to Google+. After this, things got quiet. Very quiet. We didn’t hear much about Google+, and the platform wasn’t being developed further. The first suspicions that it was destined for an early grave began to emerge. The sudden departure of Google+ chief Vic Gundotra was surely a sign of the platform’s impending doom. Since then, the nails continued to be hammered in to Google+’s coffin with alarming frequency: from the relevation of the platform’s disastrous usage numbers to the spinoffs of Photos, Streams and Hangouts in to separate apps, the deletion of Google+ Author snippets from search results, the notable absence of Google+ mentions at official Google events, and the lower priority of the Plus button. Yet where Google has previously shown remarkably little restraint in killing off some of its failed children (Buzz, Wave, Reader, to name but a few), Google+ has yet to face the official axe. Despite the increasing obviousness of the platform’s imminent demise, Google has refused to pull the plug. It’s still there, a slowly decomposing zombie, a husk of a platform that serves as a continuous reminder of the potential it failed to live up to. It is a long, drawn-out death that must surely be painful for the engineers that birthed the platform and those that continue to work on it today. When will Google finally show mercy to its decaying offspring and put Google+ out of its misery?

I was very pleasantly surprised this morning when I learned that this humble blog has been shortlisted for the Best Blog award at the upcoming 2013 UK Search Awards. Looking at the other nominations, I’m deeply honoured to be listed in such distinguished company. I’ve been a fan of nearly all of the blogs on the shortlist, and have in the past contributed guest articles to two other nominated blogs: Holistic Search and the Koozai blog. Martin Macdonald’s excellent personal blog as well as Receptional’s outstanding blog are also on the list, ensuring my chances of actually winning the award are optimistically described as ‘slim to none’. Still to be nominated is a huge honour, and I will definitely be attending the award ceremony in London in November – if only to catch up and share drinks & stories with my many friends in the UK search industry. It also means I will have to take this wee personal space more seriously in the future. I’ll endeavour to publish more worthy content here – though I’ll keep my best stuff reserved for State of Digital, as always. :)

Earlier this week I had the opportunity to speak at SMX London about schema.org structured data and rich snippets. I’ve written about rich snippets before on The Tomorrow Lab blog, and in my SMX session I spoke about some of the ‘forgotten’ schemas that can trigger rich snippets. In the same session Bastian Grimm spoke about microdata and rich snippets [slides] and quoted research from Searchmetrics that showed how 66% of Google search results include some form of rich snippet that’s enabled by structured data, but only 0.3% of websites actually implement it. The same research indicated that, despite Google’s claims to the contrary, there are strong indications that implementing Schema.org on your website can help improve your rankings in Google. This was also confirmed by Sam Quincy, the third speaker in our session, who showed a very interesting case study of implementing the recipe mark-up for Duncan Hines, resulting in a rather substantial improvement in rankings and traffic: [Source] All in all this makes Schema.org a very interesting SEO opportunity for websites to set themselves apart from their competitors and claim a greater share of visibility in Google’s search results. This was my first time speaking at the SMX conference, and it was a real treat. It’s the world’s leading search marketing conference series, and for good reason: there were many great speakers providing expert insights and the whole two-day event was very well organised. I also got to catch up with many of my friends in the SEO industry, and meet plenty of new people as well. I even managed to get my picture taken with two Googlers – John Mueller and Maile Ohye – without spontaneously combusting. Flanked by John Mueller and Maile Ohye I’m looking forward to next year!

As an industry, SEO is obsessed with tactics. We focus most on what works now and look forward to new tactics that can help us deliver better results. Our tactical perspective helps us cut through the clutter and get things done, but it also comes with a downside: At its core, SEO is a reactive industry; always running to stay in line with the web, catching up with trends rather than set them. Often what we call a ‘SEO strategy’ is in fact simply a collection of tactics in service of a long-term vision. Such a strategy assumes that the current landscape of SEO remains fundamentally unchanged. But true strategic thinking is so much more than that. If we want to think about SEO with a proper strategic mind-set, we need to understand not only SEO as it exists today, but also where it will be heading in the future. And that means we need to understand the various forces that have an impact on SEO, and foresee how those forces can change the practice and purpose of SEO. This sort of forward-looking strategic thinking is mostly absent from the day-to-day discourse on SEO, and I hope to change that to some degree with this article. Here I want to outline some of the key forces for change that can affect SEO, and engage in some speculative thinking about what SEO will look like in the near future as a result of these changes. The model I use to think strategically about the driving forces for change is PESTLE. This model categorises the various forces in to six main areas: Political Economic Social Technological Legal Environmental Using this model we can describe the potential drivers of change that affect both how SEO is done and its purpose of connecting business and consumers. Political Political factors determine the extent to which governments may influence the industry. These factors tend to result in legal factors later down the line, as new laws are introduced and existing laws changed to accommodate the changing technological and social landscape. Sometimes political factors are more overtly influential. We saw in 2013 how political manoeuvring had a profound impact on the search industry, when extensive lobbying in Washington resulted in the almost complete dismissal of the FTC’s antitrust case against Google. More recently, Indiana’s adoption of a ‘religious freedom’ bill has impacted the state’s economic situation, as several large companies have made changes to their internal policies and procedures as a result. Similar legislation is on the table in Northern Ireland, a country whose private sector is immensely dependent on foreign investors which may withdraw if such a law was passed. When you want to embrace a strategic vision of SEO, you need to keep the political landscape in mind. One potential factor is the possibility of a change of guard in the White House, where the current Democratic pro-Google administration could be replaced by a Republican government in 2016 that has a less positive relationship with Silicon Valley, and which might introduce legislation that hinders how Google and other search engines do business. Economic Economic factors are the result of an economy’s performance that directly impacts the industry and has resonating long term effects. In the case of SEO, one of the key economic drivers for change is the growing purchasing power of consumers in second and third world countries, which can drive a greater embrace of search technologies and open new markets for international SEO. Other long term economic factors are things like employment and inflation, which can have massive impact on consumer spending and, thus, on what types of searches are popular. For example, in a strong economy with a vibrant middle class, searches for holidays and luxury items will be more popular than in an impoverished economy where wealth is concentrated in a small elite and the bulk of the population has little spending power. Understanding how a country’s current and future economic status can impact how you do SEO is crucial to anticipating your target market’s search intent and ensuring your client’s websites are ahead of the curve. Social One of the more profound drivers of change in the SEO industry, social factors include aspects like cultural trends and population demographics. In recent years we have seen the 45-54 demographic become increasingly active online, which has resulted in all kinds of changes in search behaviour. For example, much of the growth of online activity in these older demographics is due to their embrace of tablet computing. This digital empowerment of the older generations has given rise to new markets online and changed the profitability of existing markets. Additionally, the growing international popularity of holidays like Halloween – previously a mostly American affair – has also opened up a range of possibilities in European markets. You’ll also want to keep an eye on the cultural landscape and anticipate the popularity of certain movies and TV shows, as these can have a profound impact on consumer behaviour. Not only will new markets appear as cultural phenomena wax and wane, existing niches can change as a result as well. The comics industry for example has experienced a revival in the wake of the massively popular superhero movies. Lastly, social and cultural factors influence how much traction a piece of content might achieve online. By tapping in to developing cultural trends you can generate stronger results from linkbait and clickbait. Technological Most often when we think about long term drivers for change in SEO, we only see technological factors at work. Indeed, technology plays a huge part in how we do SEO. Yet most SEOs barely look beyond the obvious drivers for change, such as the adoption of mobile computing and search engines’ carrot & stick approach to semantic markup. There is so much more to the technological realm that affects SEO and its long term future, and this requires a broad perspective that looks at wider technological trends. These then need to be interpreted within the context of SEO – primarily, how they impact the very purpose of online search itself. Technologies like wearables and embedded devices will fundamentally change the way we search for information online, and that means the very foundation of SEO can be affected. This is of course exactly where search engines are headed, changing in to information providers rather than doorways to the world wide web. In fact, as technology continues to miniaturise and integrate in to our daily lives, the web itself will fade to the background and consumers will increasingly rely on intermediate platforms like Google and Facebook to provide all their informational and transactional requirements. The concept of a SERP will at some stage become obsolete, and the SEO industry will have to adapt and embrace new ways of organically introducing client sites in their target audience’s information streams. The intermediary platforms intend for you to use advertising as the primary medium for that, and it’ll be challenging for SEOs to find ways of circumventing such commercial frameworks in favour of unpaid & earned channels. Legal You don’t have to look far to see legal ramifications for the SEO industry. From relatively small factors like the ASA’s insistence on declarations of sponsorships for bloggers (which applies to most forms of blogger outreach), to the ongoing antitrust litigation against Google in Europe, there are profound legal consequences to how SEO is done and how it will exist in the future. If, for example, Google were to be heavily penalised in Europe for antitrust infringements, we could see a drastically altered search landscape. At the lower end of the impact scale we will see changes to how Google presents search results to European users. At the higher (and unlikelier) end, Google may opt to withdraw from Europe entirely, which will be nothing short of a foundational shift for SEO as we will suddenly have to change focus on whichever search engines emerge to fill the void. Data protection law has also emerged as a powerful driver for change, as this can impact how search engines are allowed to personalise results for users. All things considered, it pays to keep a close eye on the courts and anticipating the effects of new legislation and landmark decisions. Environmental While it may appear on the surface of things that the online realm has little to do with environmental issues, this is assuredly not the case. The way increased awareness of climate change has altered consumer behaviour is profound, as with the embrace of ‘organic food’ trends in affluent populations. Additionally, environmental factors can reverberate powerfully through political, economic, and legal factors to create fundamental shifts in how business is done online on regional, national, and international levels. Just one look at how hurricane Katrina impacted on the New Orleans area shows you exactly how devastating environmental factors can be. While it may seem callous to look at how this impacts your industry, it’s nonetheless essential to keep such factors in mind when outlining a long term vision for your client’s SEO – especially if your target market is in a climatically unstable region. Further Reading If the above has peaked your interest in developing a proper long term strategic vision for SEO, further information on the PESTLE approach to strategic management can be found on pestleanalysis.com. I encourage you all to think more broadly about the ever-changing world and how the SEO industry must also change with it. Embracing change is at the heart of SEO, and rather than wait for things to happen we should be anticipating what comes next and preparing for it accordingly. After all, chance favours only the prepared mind.

I discovered a bit of an anomaly with Google today. Like many people I do ego searches now and again to see how my websites and social media profiles rank on Google. For the past year and a half, my website www.barryadams.co.uk has been the primary search results for the ‘barry adams’ search query on google.co.uk. Before I launched barryadams.co.uk I had the same website on a different domain: www.greatwebsitesblog.com. When I bought the barryadams.co.uk domain name, I thought I’d try a wee experiment to see if I could change domains without having to 301-redirect every URL. So I simply pointed it to the same hosting environment where I had my www.greatwebsitesblog.com site, changed settings in WordPress to make www.barryadams.co.uk the site’s primary address (including rel=canonical tags on all pages), and submitted a Change of Address notice in Google Webmaster Tools: And almost immediately it worked. Over the next few weeks all my old listings in Google search results pointing to www.greatwebsitesblog.com were replaced with the same listings pointing to www.barryadams.co.uk. On top of that it accomplished my primary goal: the www.barryadams.co.uk site started to rank for search queries on my own name. And that way it stayed for a year and a half. Until this morning, when I did another ego search and found this as the number one result instead: This despite the fact the site has had a rel=canonical tag pointing to www.barryadams.co.uk since August 2011, despite the fact that I submitted a Change of Address notice then too, and despite the fact that all my social profiles list the new domain as my personal website. It seems Google has rewound time and decided that the old domain name should really be shown instead of the new one. I then checked how my site showed up in Google’s SERPs for a number of keywords that have been sending me solid traffic the last wee while: Nothing wrong there, all results are shown with my new domain name. So it’s only my own ego-search that results in the old domain name. Now I thought I took good care in changing all my social profile and links to point to the new barryadams.co.uk domain name when I made the switch, but due to some historic guest blogs and defunct website profiles I still have a few mentions point to the old greatwebsitesblog.com domain. Yet overall, barryadams.co.uk has been a much more actively promoted domain, and as a result has established a stronger backlink profile: Even the number of ‘barry adams’ anchor texts are now in favour of the new domain: So I’m not really sure why Google has decided to revert back to my old domain on ‘branded’ searches for my name, yet kept the new domain on generic searches for content. All I can think of is that there must be some old profile link somewhere that outweighs all the new ones, and thus manages to skew Google’s SERPs for my name to the old domain. Maybe this old profile on Search Engine People is the culprit: What I learned: I thought I’d discovered a straightforward way to move a site across domains without having to use 301-redirects, by simply pointing the new domain name to the existing site and implementing rel=canonical tags and a Change of Address notice in Google Webmaster Tools. However, it looks like Google takes those hints only temporarily in to account, and after a while the slate is wiped clean and a domain name will rank on its own merits for specific search queries. So it’s best to just stick with 301-redirects, as these seem to be of a more permanent nature. Update: Fili Wiese pointed out that the Google Support page on the Change of Address feature clearly states that ‘changes will stay in effect for 180 days’. So yes, it’s definitely a temporary effect.

Believe it or not, yesterday I found myself attending an ‘inbound marketing’ event. If you know me, you’ll know I despise that phrase and have an almost allergic reaction to it. Yet there I was, an audience member at an event organised by the Learn Inbound community of marketers in Ireland. Headed up by HubSpot’s Siobhán McGinty and the Digital Marketing Institute’s Mark Scully, Learn Inbound held their inaugural event in Dublin yesterday evening, and I made the trek down to attend it. This was not done on a whim – it takes quite a lot to overcome my innate revulsion for ‘inbound marketing’. But I’ve been following Mark Scully on Twitter for a while and find his views and content to be outstanding. And then there was the speaking roster. For a very first event, Siobhán and Mark sure managed to get some great speakers: Matthew Barby, one of the digital industry’s brightest young talents, Stephen Kenwright, head of search at Branded3, and Aleyda Solis, who really needs no introduction. Matthew kicked things off with a great talk about effective content marketing for SMEs, running us through his process. He showed us a range of tools as well, and it wouldn’t be the last time that evening that BuzzSumo got mentioned. What I especially liked about Matthew’s talk was when he talked about building a content delivery team. So many organisations go through the motions of developing a content marketing plan, but then fail to deliver on it. Matthew’s talk didn’t shy away from that and he managed to show us the value of putting a delivery team in place. Next up was Stephen Kenwright, a well-known figure in the industry, who gave us an entertaining and highly insightful talk about how your content marketing should align with your SEO efforts. Stephen almost didn’t get to the event, courtesy of endless flight delays, but after nine hours at the airport his flight managed to take off just in time for him to make it. Some of his key points were not to chase after keywords, but after the consumer – i.e. don’t let keywords dictate your SEO, but distil the actual search intent from your keyword research and let that drive your content. Using the Google Search Quality Guidelines as his touchstones, Stephen showed how focusing on user intent and tapping in to your expertise allows small businesses to compete with big organisations in SEO. Last but definitely not least was Aleyda Solis, who gave a great talk about SEO for small businesses and showcased a whole range of tools and tactics that SMBs can leverage to improve their visibility in search. She too demonstrated that you don’t need huge budgets to win in search, but you do need to be smart and use all the opportunities at your disposal. I especially liked her tip on agile marketing: being able to outmanoeuvre big companies by adopting an agile and iterative approach to your marketing efforts. Big businesses can rarely make quick changes to their website, so as a small business you can respond much quicker and test things out at a vastly greater speed. That gives you a competitive advantage over the big boys. The event concluded with a great Q&A where the attendees got the opportunity to ask some in-depth questions to the panel. Then we were rushed out of the building by an angry security guard who was miffed the event had overrun a bit. I really enjoyed the event and it was great to catch up with Aleyda, as well as meet Mark & Siobhán, Matthew, and Stephen. I’ve been to paid conferences that were less well organised and informative. There are three more Learn Inbound events in the planning for 2015, with the next one scheduled for April 15th. The speakers for it are already announced, and none other than Richard Baxter is on the panel. I’m definitely not missing the opportunity to heckle him.

Most web hosting packages come with some form of free web statistics software like AWStats or Webalizer. But these are merely web statistics – lists, numbers, and if you’re lucky a few graphs. These statistics don’t really tell you anything about how visitors are using your website. Good web analytics software goes one step further. It takes the same data as web statistics but unleashes clever analysis on it that tells you a great deal more. Additionally, usually through embedded JavaScript tags that are added to every page on your website, web analytics software can tell you things about visitor behavior and the effectiveness of your site that mere web statistics could never reveal. If you’re new to the web and/or can’t afford an expensive web analytics package like WebTrends or Unica, the best place to start is Google Analytics. This free (!) service allows you to gain a wealth of valuable insight into user activity on your site. Most importantly, with a service like Google Analytics you can derive actionable insights that tell you what part of your site needs to be improved. Iif you want to learn more about web analytics I highly recommend Avinash Kaushik’s blog. Avinash is an analytics guru at Google and considered one of the chief visionaries in the field.

Yesterday I attended a fascinating lecture by Ben Hammersley, organised by the British council, about the future of the internet. Read my write-up of the lecture on The Tomorrow Lab blog here. There was one small blemish on this otherwise superb evening. At one point an audience member – probably not coincidentally a grey-haired man wearing a checked shirt – in the course of asking a question, referred to SEO (with venom dripping from his voice as he pronounced the acronym) as “snake-oil” and the embodiment of all that was wrong with the corporatisation of the internet. At that time I thought to myself, ‘I need to have a chat with this guy after the lecture and set him straight.’ But then, as I contemplated it a little, I changed my mind. No, I was not going to set this guy straight. I don’t need to. This was, after all, a member of a self-selected audience. This was a lecture about the internet, about digital technologies and what they can bring us. This talk was the sort of thing that would only be of interest to digital natives, to people who immerse themselves in all things digital. Because this man was part of this audience, it was exceptionally unlikely he was anything but a most avid user of the internet. Here is a man who probably types queries in to Google several times of day. Here is a man who, every time he clicks on a link on a search engine results page, reaps the outcomes of SEO again and again and again. If there was ever a type of man who should not need to be explained what SEO really is and what it can do for him, it’s this man right here. The fact that he so obviously loathed SEO and what he perceived it to stand for, can only be a symptom of a much greater ailment than a misunderstanding of what SEO is. That ailment is, of course, wilful ignorance. I don’t need to defend SEO. Its virtues and usage are demonstrated millions of times a day, every single time someone types a query in to a search box. And those who, even now, still don’t understand it – especially those who actively engage with the internet on a daily basis – are beyond redemption. If there was ever an apt time to use the phrase “not seeing the woods for the trees”, this would be it. SEO doesn’t need to be explained, or defended, or educated on. SEO simply is. It doesn’t care whether you ‘believe’ in it or not. You either use it, or you perish.

(This article was originally published in the Belfast Telegraph on 21 May 2010. It’s been modified slightly for this blog.) Google seems to have a global stranglehold on the internet search market. With market shares ranging from 60% to 95%, depending on what country you’re in, Google is the preferred search engine for users from Warsaw to Hawaii. But there are some big gaps in Google’s global dominance. Take Russia for example. A Russian company called Yandex has monopolised the Russian internet landscape for years with its own Russian-language only web portal, yandex.ru. On May 19th Yandex launched an international version of its search engine on yandex.com. Search engine professionals around the world fell on it like sharks, trying to find faults with it. We search engine optimisers love to complain, and we were fully expecting Yandex’s foray in to Google’s territory to be buggy and flawed. We were wrong. As it turns out the yandex.com search engine is good. Really good. The results Yandex provides are amazingly relevant, accurate, and spam-free. It easily beats Bing, Microsoft’s attempt to undermine Google’s dominance, and might even be better than Google. Google initially came to dominance because its results were more accurate and cleaner than those of its rivals at the time. Serious internet users quickly adopted Google as their preferred search engine, and it spread virally from there. But over the years Google has kept adding features and functionality to its engine, which have ended up cluttering and distorting their search results. Add to that the pervasive presence of ads on Google – 99% of Google’s revenue is from its advertising platforms – and you end up with a search engine that perhaps has lost a lot of its appeal. Yandex seems primed to fill Google’s shoes as the new favourite search engine for serious internet surfers. Its results are clean and accurate and lack the clutter that has come to characterise Google. It will take much more than just a strong search engine to overthrow Google. But I for one welcome the added choice and hope that Yandex, as well as Bing, can nibble at Google’s market share. Competition is good for everyone.

Last week at the inaugural BelTech conference I was allowed to go on stage and rant for a good half hour about one of my pet topics: User Experience design. I’ve never been a fan of technology for its own sake. Technological innovation should exist only to serve us, to help solve problems and improve lives. And UX design should be at the core of technology, because it results in technology designed to be used and enjoyed. In my presentation I explained some core UX concepts and hopefully showed a strong case for embedding UX design in to the foundation of every technology project, be it an app, website, or device. The whole talk was recorded so you can view it here, and the slides are embedded below. Following my talk I was joined on stage by Gareth Dunlop and Rick Monro from Fathom for a panel discussion about UX, moderated by Kainos’s Tom Gray. It proved a very fruitful session and I felt we discussed many important aspects of UX and how to embed it in business practices. I was honoured to be part of this first Belfast Technology conference, expertly organised by Aisling Events and with many superb talks and sessions. My own favourite session was without a doubt the Women in Technology panel with Mary McKenna, Emma Mulqueeny, Alaina Percival, and moderated by Sheree Atcheson. It was a powerful session where some incredibly important issues about women in the tech industry were discussed. Kainos has said this is just the first of an annual series of Belfast Technology conferences, and I’m already looking forward to next year’s edition!