Back from China & Off to Seattle

Well I got back into Guelph yesterday morning and spent the day learning more about the “restructuring” that happened at my work. While I currently have my job I lost 95% of my team due to “cutbacks” and am left wondering what the future will hold for me and the rest of the team.

Anyways on a positive note China was eventful and fun, met up with the Jianfei Zhu, who is the Yao Ming of the search world. Also had some really good meetings with Alibaba/Yahoo! China and maybe will end up sending some of my ex-team members into China to help Alibaba/Yahoo! China succeed on their SEO goals. The trip was a little long and I am glad to be back but sadly I have only 2 days here in Guelph and I have to fly off to Search Marketing Expo in Seattle.

Seattle is a city I haven’t spent much time in but will be good to go up for this event as it’s the first SMX and it should be very educational and full of interesting people. Will have a chance to meet up with Matt Cutts again at the event, it’s been a awhile since we met face to face as being in Asia all I could do was email with him.

As for Guelph it is getting warmer and prettier all the time, I am looking forward to this summer being able to walk around and enjoy some of the outdoor activities. I haven’t fully moved into my home yet, also my stuff from Singapore hasn’t arrived so won’t post any photos of my place just yet. Hopefully this month my stuff will arrive and my home will be ready to have a nice housewarming party as well as take some photos.

To all my ex-staff and to the editors and writers, I will do my best to help you find work within the industry as your knowledge is very valuable and if I had my own company setup in Canada I would be happy to take some of you in myself. The next 2 months you all will have many offers but take your time and don’t rush into the first job your offered. As while change is always difficult this might just be a really great chance to focus and find that dream job. If anyone has interest to work in China, either for copy writing, editing or SEO please drop me an email, but note that while it’s a job it is not going to pay a lot of money but will be a great personal and working experience.

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Search Engine Strategies China

I am back in China for the next 10 days, will be speaking at SES China on the Advanced SEO track, my presentation will be posted here once its finished. I am really looking forward to meeting up with some old friends at this year’s event. This will mark the 2nd year for SES in China and thanks to Inway and TimeV sure it will have many more years of great success.

Later today will be fun as I will meet up with several executives from the largest Internet company in China for some dinner and talk about the future of that company within the International marketplace. This dinner also happens to include an old friend from Singapore, she happen to leave Singapore to join this company and now landed herself a sweet directors role and an even sweet chance to meet up with me again tonight. I’ll try and post comments back from the dinner, but it should be interesting as a lot of great minds will be at the table.

Right now I am in Hangzhou but will be leaving for Xiamen on Thursday so if any other SES’ers are out there and are in HZ drop me a quick email and maybe we can grab some dinner or just say hi if we pass each other around town. I am staying at the Hyatt on the lake.

Its 6:30am here, which means its 6:30pm back in Guelph and surprisingly my body has been able to shift over to the new time zone relatively easy. Part of the easy of switching time zones came from the flight as it was non-stop from Toronto to Shanghai which meant it didn’t really feel like you where traveling. But sadly the flight was on Air Canada and boy even though I was flying “Executive First Class” it was far far from first class service.

To give you a basic idea of how old and poor the service was our leading stewardess was cerebrating her 40th year flying with Air Canada this week. Makes me almost embarrassed to say that I used to date a leading stewardess, but she was far away from doing anything for 40 years and looked far better then the staff Air Canada pulled out of the retirement home and gave a uniform to.

On a funny note related to domain/company names, the gentlemen sitting beside me on the flight was the CEO of a company which I thought was a really cool name, eSteve (ie electronic steve) or at least that is how I read his company name. Turns out it’s really Esteve and is a pharma company based in Spain. He did laugh when I told him I thought is company was eSteve and he said that it’s very often people don’t know how to pronounce the name. Got me thinking about eStephen.com, but sadly some damn domain parker has registered it so not much chance of getting that one anytime soon.

Ok its off to have some breakfast and then a quick nap so that I can make it though the day as want to make sure I am fresh and alert for tonight’s dinner.

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What Does it Mean to be a Professional SEO?

Many people, including most of my own family, have no idea what I do or how it’s of any benefit. This is common--most people think SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is just a matter of changing some magical code on the page, and that any website can get the benefits of SEO. This general misunderstanding is also why there are so many people able to offer SEO services; the average buyer has no idea what they are buying, and they end up buying the general idea of SEO than an actual SEO product.

SEO, when done properly by professionals, is very complex and involves much more than keywords with fairy dust. I would say that most website owners are not ready for true SEO. When I ran my agency I turned away over 90% of the clients that approached me for SEO services--there is no point in taking a client’s money and giving him or her something that will never work. Yes, they might be very happy to be #1 for their company name. You might be pretty tickled to have them think you are the king of SEO. But does it really drive their business forward?

Within my industry I have held true to the idea of “do it right, do it for long term, and do it for the right reasons.” I add the last one in because I have had offers from companies that have the right process the right long term goals but the methods of monetization go against my better judgment. I am very proud to say that in 10 years I have never promoted a gambling, pornography, or pill website.

Keeping this focus has given me less market share, but I have had some of the bigger companies come knocking on my door asking for my expertise: Alibaba, Dell, eBay, Expedia, Global Sources, Microsoft, Tesco--even the almighty Google has come looking for my services. But keeping a selective nature also means I don’t make the insane amounts that the "fairy dust" SEO sellers do. It’s much more profitable and easy to have a few hundred clients that you are charging $10k a month to simply change some META data once in a while (and advise them what you read on WW the night before) than it is to manage a project that involves dozens of departments and countless employees.

Being in the industry--and working with so many companies--I have seen "fairy dust" go for as high as $150,000/month. If you look around the industry you will see a lot of the SEO world more focused on creating a blog post then doing actual SEO work. This is because skill level in this industry, for some reason, has become based on the number of blog posts you make rather then your technical expertise and experience. If I was hiring a SEO professional I’d rather hire the head of class coming out of applied mathematics of Harvard then any of the SEO bloggers.

In a lot of my public talks I relate search engine optimizers to stock brokers, and search engines to stock markets. This comparison comes from search engine optimizers having millions of people that claim they can bring in returns--like stock brokers—but a lot fail and lose clients money while others simply just live off the natural flux within the markets/search engines. There are also the day traders and the DIY SEO’ers who believe they have the system beat. Then there are the elite who can not only to guarantee returns but are already making enough money themselves that the only reason they take on a client is to be able to make even more money using their personal formula for success. The formula for success in stock markets, like search engines, fundamentally never changes; and, it’s simply based on what the client wants to invest and how much they want to get back out.

The only real difference between a stock broker and an SEO is that, unlike a stock market, a search engine is a 100% mathematical puzzle--ultimately there are no unknowns in the search engines, so a true SEO professional has no reason for failure. While I don’t claim to know everything about the ranking formulas at Google I do know that there is a set formula, and with the right set of people (note to self: hire some ex-WWII code breakers) the formula can be fully understood. But for now I just live off of 10 years experience in dealing with the formula. Although you may never see my name on the Internet if you use Google you have definitely seen my work.

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Interesting time for SEO in Asia

Well as I am about to say goodbye to the SEO industry in Asia, I’ve had a few last minute attempts to keep me here but I am really looking forward to life back home in Canada. Also have to give a big “sorry man” to my buddy Ash over at Mc Donald’s as finally after about a year of working from within he’s been able to get the management of Mc Donald’s ready for SEO, but again sorry man, I need to head back.

I have really enjoyed being part of the SEO building blocks within Asia and while I’ve seen many of those blocks falling back down I really hope that with the increasing level of professionally organized events like ad:tech and Search Engine Strategies in the region it will bring the needed professionalism for this area to succeed. If not we’ll have a new acronym referencing in the Asian Internet advertising world as they’ll end up combing SEO and SEM into one large MLM system or maybe it will just earn the nickname PPF, Pay Per Fraud.

But wait, it’s not all that bad, as I do have to give props out to Marc as even though he’s been recruited to manage SEO for a large American company he’s kept true to his routes and is staying in the Philippines to grow and support the SEO/Internet community there. I just wish other SEOs in Asia could follow in his morals and professional conduct, I won’t bad mouth anyone directly but you know who you are. To those people all I say is, think past tomorrow and realize that being able to read SEO for Dummies and blog on topics your read on other peoples websites doesn’t equal education and/or being part of an industry.

Even with this goodbye I will always be a part of the SEO industry in Asia, while no longer day-to-day, whenever possible you will still see at the events and you know I am always there to help, just drop me an email or Skype me.

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How to Rank Better in Google

This blog wasn’t started to talk about Google/SEO/SEM but I added this category and will post relevant information periodically.

With my job the most common question I get is “How can I get my website to rank better in Google” and while I always try and help those who really have a good message, product or service I don’t have enough time to teach/help everyone.

That is why in the last few years I have been helping the masses by speaking publicly at events like Search Engine Strategies, ad:tech and one of my favorite venues eComXpo University.

This year’s eComXpo University will open March 20 and again this year I will be giving a presentation on the subject of SEO.

I really like the idea of eComXpo University as it gives the chance for a lot of webmasters and SEO’s from places outside of the main stream markets like the US and the UK to have access to experienced professionals within the industry. I hope that in the future more and more conferences offer an online/live webcast version, as the developing search markets really need this level of support.

I will be giving the presentation entitled “How to Rank Better in Google” and it explains the top things that a webmaster or Search Engine Optimizer can do to rank better in Google. Topics include IP addresses, domain names, GEO targeting, text link building, homepage links, site maps and advanced SEO content structure/navigation.

Now while general admission into eComXpo is free, to access the university section will cost you $49 and considering what you will learn from not only myself but from all the other presentations this will be the best $49 you can ever spend. But since it does cost money and since I know some of the SEO world doesn’t have access to credit cards and maybe some are just starting out and $49 is not something they can afford, for these people and these people only I offer my corporate pass to access the university presentations.

Please if you can afford the $49, please register at http://www.ecomxpo.com/ as they offer a great service and are a great part of the future of the industry.

To help ensure that this offer isn’t taken advantage of I haven’t posted the pass details publicly, but they are available if you send me an email to [email protected] with the reason why you can’t afford the $49. I read mail daily and will reply quickly and you will be sent the pass details. Also sorry, no pass details will be sent to email addresses from free/public email providers.

No email addresses and no email will be kept, used to reply to you other then to send you the pass details, no email will be sold to anyone, or given to anyone and after my reply to you your email address will be purged from my server.

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My Blog Was Hijacked

Well this being my first blog and my love to play with all the neat tools at Google lead me down a path that ended in great failure. I ended up hijacking my own blog within Google and Gwelf.com was transformed into 404 error page.

It freaked me out, had to give some engineers at Google an after hours call but within 4 hours they called me back with a working solution. Leave it to me to find a flaw within the wonderful world of Blogger, I guess they took Blogger out of BETA a little too soon.

I won’t comment on how exactly I hijacked the blog as at present Google hasn’t been able to fix this problem within its system and they’ve taken my case into a private support group. Lucky for me, Google was able to fix my problem as I was both the hacker and the blog owner, had I only been the blog owner then the engineers at Google wouldn’t have been able to help and it would have gotten even more messy involving Google account managers.

The reason for Google’s and my non-public disclosure on this is there are at present 34,361 websites that are vulnerable and generally the web is full of great people but give just a few the power to cause problems and we might just see 30,000+ more AdSense websites spring up overnight, or worse 30,000+ websites all selling “blue pills”.

So I send big thanks out to Jonathan and the rest of the engineering team at Google for helping get access back to my blog and if anyone here has had their blog hijacked and is looking for the solution please contact Google directly, you can reference my blog Gwelf.com and its case file #121996221. If there is no reply from Google, please feel free to contact me and I will send you the steps needed to regain control of your blog.

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