You are currently browsing the monthly archive for January, 2008.
Have you just been paid? Have you had a great month, learning lots of new things, extra responsibility, more clients, more success etc. Is your career moving forward in a thrilling, roller coaster ride with a great local employer with opportunities and benefits to match?
If so, why on earth on you reading this?
If not, and you’re thinking of a change then why not consider one of these super vacancies:
Product Manager (Maternity cover)
Online Marketing Executive £20k
e-Commerce manager West Yorkshire £30k
If these aren’t for you then please visit our main site, www.seovacancies.co.uk; where we have lots of new and fresh SEO, PPC and SEM jobs for your “viewing pleasure”.
In one respect the Google Sandbox is very similar to Father Christmas / Santa Claus… No; I don’t imagine for a second that Google will try and force their way down your chimney….. But many people do dispute whether it/him exists 
Having a nosy around the web today I found the following links that might be of interest to those not familiar with the phenomenon (Sandbox – not the big man with the beard).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sandbox_Effect
http://www.seochat.com/c/a/Google-Optimization-Help/Google-Sandbox-Frequently-Asked-Questions/
I’ll leave it up to you to decide one way or the other but comments are always welcome.
The perception is that the sandbox is an effort to prevent spam websites achieving a high ranking soon after launch – of course this can cause problems for legitimate sites trying to gain a credible presence very quickly.
The Google Sandbox filter is like a probationary period for a website. During this time, affected websites may perform badly in Google organic search listings against the more competitive terms.
There are many theories regarding this. One theory concerning the Google Sandbox is that it effectively extends the normal backlink ageing process, meaning that acquired backlinks offer reduced benefit for an extended period of time until the trustworthiness of any new website is established by Google.
More recently, some SEO experts dispute the existence of the Sandbox, preferring the theory that a new website has poor initial ranking purely due to a lack of trusted inbound links. Let’s not forget to consider bad SEO too.
Scotland is a beautiful place, great cities, a thriving economy, super people and great scenery – surely the key elements for a brilliant place to live?
Of course, you’ll need a job once you are there…. Guess what we have…. SEO and PPC Jobs in Scotland!!
Account Manager – SEM / PPC – online advertising – Edinburgh
Search Executive – SEM – paid search marketing – Edinburgh
PPC (Pay per Click) Consultant – Scotland
SEO Consultant – Search Executive
Maybe you’re currently living in Scotland or are actively looking for SEO, PPC or SEM jobs in Scotland….. Could your next job be here?
At a recent Pubcon meeting Matt Cutts, Google anti spam engineer gives tips for SEO in 2008. He mentions some interesting themes including:
· High quality content as a starting base
· Personalisation and demographic areas to be targeted
· Mobile internet
We all know how important quality, keyword rich text content is to a website but how often do we see a clients website that lies static for long periods of time? Look to provide Google with lots of interesting and well set out relevant information to your websites subject matter. Blogging is a fantastic way to do this both as website content and also from external websites.
Matt Cutts also mentions WordPress and how good the WordPress latest Blogging technology shows up really well within Google searches. WordPress 2.3 is well worth a look and in our next newsletter we will be providing you with some helpful hints about how to Blog best with WordPress.
Demographic targeting for websites within Google can be aided dramatically by Google’s Local Business tool. It’s been about for a while but is an excellent feature to provide a mapped search listing within Google results for when a potential customer searches for a particular business or product in an individual demographic area. Local business search results can often be seen across different search results listings in Google and are excellent if you or your customers want a link to your website as well as address information.
Mobile internet has for long now been touted as the future but it’s well and truly here. Travelling business people, holiday makers and today’s youth all use their mobile phones to access the internet. Having access to the World Wide Web direct from your mobile is invaluable for working whilst on the train or looking for tickets or sights whilst on vacation. It’s particularly handy when in areas with a poor internet connection and for SEO it’s important to ensure that your websites are optimised for inclusion on mobile internet searches.
If you have an interesting point about SEO or would like to express yourself within one of SEOvacancies.co.uk newsletters then please email us.
Click here for some cool videos providing advice and answers to questions direct from Google engineers:http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=matt+cutts+google&search=Search
Whilst everybody is more than welcome on this site, it has been designed as an extension to our main job board – www.seovacancies.com. To this end, I thought I would highlight a selection of our current vacancies for your viewing pleasure. The links take you straight to the site where you can view the job detail and search for other roles that could be of interest. It also includes an RSS feed for you to keep an eye open for your next dream job:
Web Designer - Florida $Excellent
SEO Consultant – Surrey UK – £Excellent
SEO Executive - Award Winning Agency – London UK
SEO Consultant – nr Nottingham UK £25k
Business Development Manager – nr Brighton £Exc
Online Directory Coordinator – UK/USA/Canada
SEO/PPC Consultant – Milton Keynes, Bucks, UK £27k
SEO Specialist – Florida USA $neg
PPC Consultant – Edinburgh / Scotland £Excellent
SEO Consultant – Bedfordshire UK £22k
Affiliates Executive – West Midlands £19k
Campaign Tactician – Florida, USA $open
New vacancies are being added every day so please bookmark us and tell your friends!
One thing I have learnt quickly in this game is that it is always the best prepared candidate that gets the job. It is impossible to predict what questions will be thrown at you but a bit of preparation and research can go a long way. I came across this post today from http://forums.seo.ph/showthread.php?t=201 and had to share it here, sample interview questions to really test your knowledge and help you clinch that dream job:
1. What SEO results can you show?
2. What do you believe are important things to take into consideration when optimising a site?
3. Who do you respect in the industry?
4. What web analytics programs are you familiar with?
5. List On-Page SEO factors
6. List 5 link building techniques.
7. What is page segmentation? (Ever heard of VIPS?)
8. What’s the difference between PageRank and ToolBar PageRank?
9. What is Latent Semantic Analysis (LSI – Indexing)?
10. What is Phrase Based Indexing and Retrieval and what roles does it play?
11. What is sandbox?
12. How long does it take to get out of sandbox?
13. How can you track your rankings?
14. What services does the wordtracker offer, and how do they relate to seo?
15. What are the common factors between google/yahoo/msn?
16. How can you keep your PPC bids from cannibalizing your search efforts on other (non pay per click) search engines?
17. What percentage of your pay per click budget should go to each search engine?
18. Does either Google Adwords or Overture work better for your particular product or service? Or, perhaps neither one is appropriate from a return on investment (ROI) perspective.
19. Give me a description of your general SEO experience.
20. Do you currently do SEO on your own sites and give me some examples. Do you operate any blogs? Do you currently do any freelance work and do you plan on continuing it?
22. Where do you think the SEO industry is headed?
23. What industry sites, blogs, and forums do you regularly read?
24. Have you attended any search related conferences?
25. What SEO tools do you regularly use?
25. What SEO areas are you weak and strong in, and give examples of both.
26. What areas do you think are currently the most important in organically ranking a site?
28. What kind of strategies do you normally implement for backlinks? What do you think about link buying, link bait, and other specific backlink strategies?
29. What are your thoughts on the direction of Web 2.0 technologies with regards to SEO?
blogs, rss, podcasting
30. Are you familiar with search arbitrage?
31. Are you familiar with enterprise web analytics and what packages are your familiar with?
32. Are you familiar with A/B testing and multivariate testing?
33. Do you have experience in email marketing, banner advertising, other types of media buys and other forms of online advertising?
34. Are you experienced in managing PPC campaigns? To what extent and on what platforms?
35. Do you have experience in bid management tools, API tools, and click fraud issues?
36. Do you have experience in extensive competitive analysis and what techniques do you use?
37. What technologies are you familiar with? (We primarily use HTML, CSS, ASP, .net, PHP, SQL, and JavaScript)
38. Why are you moving from your current position and/or leaving any current projects?
39. Do you know who Matt Cutts is?
44. In Google Lore – what are ‘Hilltop’ Florida’ and ‘Big Daddy’?
45. What changes did you make and what ranking effect did it have?
46. What is sticky content?
Hope these help!
As a industry, I personally regard SEO/PPC in the UK as being in it’s infancy. Certainly there are many established and professional agencies and freelancers etc that offer this service already but I feel it still has a long way to go.
To be more precise, I guess I should say that I think it is yet to be recognised as a career of choice by many. Countless academic institutions offer great degrees or similar with multimedia and computer based content but unless I am mistaken (and please correct me if I am wrong), the concepts of SEO only ever play a very small part of this (I’m not including SEO training companies in this).
This is my impression of the UK marketplace as it stands, I appreciate that the industry in the USA is far more established although I’d be keen to know if it has yet become an chosen career choice for those leaving academia…. Those living across the pond, please let us have your thoughts…..
Personally, I think SEO has a great future – if I didn’t, then www.seovacancies.com wouldn’t exist but please let me have your thoughts. Do you feel you can move up the career ladder in your current role or maybe onto bigger and better things within the industry……. Or are you an SEO who does it for the love and not the money and hasn’t really thought about what they will be doing in 10year time.
What about PPC? Why pay for results when you can achieve them organically? A controversial statement maybe but I’d welcome views from both sides of the fence!
Good Web Designers can be difficult to find – that unique blend of creative design combined with an uncanny ability to design eye catching and sticky websites.. If you live in Florida and feel this is you and you have strong PhotoShop, Dreamweaver and XHTML/CSS skills then maybe you should follow this link:
Hot off the press today; two new SEO Jobs for some lucky person to get their teeth into…..
SEO Consultant – Award Winning Agency – London £Excellent
SEO Consultant – Surrey based holiday Company (client side)
Have a look, pass the details onto somebody you know?
Looked at your CV recently?
Considering looking for work soon?
If the answer is “yes” then you may want to have another look at your CV.
Does it really sell you and list your key achievements? One of the biggest criticisms recruiters have when looking at a CV is the lack of demonstrable results or responsibilities.
Which of the following sounds better:
“PPC Account Manager responsible for growing and managing client accounts” or “PPC Account Manager with responsibility for 7 of our 10 largest clients, managing monthly revenues in excess of £100,000”
They could be both the same person; which has more impact and is likely to secure that all important interview?
How about another…..
“Since joining I have played a key role in achieving high search engine rankings for our clients’ keywords” or “Application of on and off page SEO to achieve page 1 rankings on Google, Yahoo and MSN for some of the most competitive keywords in our clients markets, examples include “seo vacancies” and “ppc jobs”.
Never lie on your CV, but always take pride in your achievements and never been ashamed to highlight them. You may think you can keep this detail for the actual interview but if you never get to this stage because of your CV how will your prospective employer ever find out?
Why not have another look at your CV – are you really selling yourself?
