I’m leaving Distilled at the end of this week to pursue a career that will hopefully exist somewhere between freelance copy-writing and environmentalism. I’ve written a bit more about all that at the end of this post (along with a few other bits and bobs), but the main purpose of this post is to talk a little about some of the skills I’ve picked up while at Distilled. Skills that I’m pretty sure will come in useful for my new career… the next few years… the rest of my life. These aren’t in any particular order.

1. Writing for the web

I was reading through some of my old university essays the other day and boy has my writing changed. No longer the hyperbolic ruminations that go nowhere, my writing these days is crisp and clear. I wish I’d written those essays in the same way. The university of life, eh?

2. Writing for different audiences

From detailed, technical reports that aim to make the most complex of subjects understandable, through to informal blog posts that seek to entertain, working at Distilled has given me the chance to improve my writing skills across a broad range of areas.

3. Keeping up to date

Online marketing must be one of, if not the most fast-moving industry out there. Staying on top of news and how it affects your day to day work is quite the challenge. On top of that, it’s important to stay aware of what’s generally happening online.

4. Crowd-sourcing and Collaboration

The wisdom of crowds (apart from being a fascinating book) is something I’ve really learned to value during my time here. Working in such an intelligent and creative hotspot as Distilled means you don’t have to look too far for ideas or solutions, as long as you’re not afraid to ask. I’ll miss it.

5. Teamwork

This is a similar point to above. My time at Distilled has taught me how rewarding it is to work as part of a team that trusts and relies upon each other implicitly. What’s been even more exciting is watching this team grow over the last two years, somehow without diluting that trust and reliability. Trust means everyone becomes way more confident in their decisions and actions which, in turn, leads to a much higher quality of work.

6. Eat lots of fruit

When I first started at Distilled, Duncan (with his line-manager hat on), asked me to suggest anything I’d like for the office. I put forward the idea of a weekly fruit box. Two years on, I’ve only had one proper cold and have learned that an apple at 3 in the afternoon can go a long way towards curing that afternoon slump.

7. When there’s a problem, deal with it

I think this is actually part of my contract. If we ever think there’s been a problem, or there’s one approaching, Distilled likes us to pick up the phone and deal with it. Best. Advice. Ever. Even though I still find it scary sometimes, more often than not the problem is nothing more than a misunderstanding- so much easier to fix by talking it through than by letting it escalate over back and forth emails.

8. Look at the bigger picture

By this, I mean remember to keep in mind your overall objectives and have a strategy in place to achieve them (this is relevant to any part of your life actually, but I’m talking about online marketing projects). I’m the first to admit I haven’t quite mastered this yet. I still tend to get stuck in too deep and forget to look at the bottom line. However, I’m much better than I was and, fortunately, I have worked among people that excel at it.

9. Ask questions

There’s too much information to know everything, so ask questions. Srsly. Again, it can be a scary thing to do if you’re talking with someone who’s using lots of industry lingo, but more often than not, they’ll know much less about the subject than they seem to.

10. Be Transparent

I can’t imagine what it would be like to work at a company where you refuse to tell the client anything they want to know. It must cause many sleepless nights. Going forwards, I plan to keep this as a main tenet of all parts of my life (except that secret underground lair with the Lucy-mobile).

11. Creativity

Humans are creative. It’s one of our main selling points. Working at Distilled has allowed me to flex and build my creative muscles into the rippling biceps you see today. Allow yourself time and head-space to think creatively about problems, challenges or simply whatever you’re doing (whether it seems broken or not).

As for what I’m doing next…. I know I want to move into the “green scene”, but apart from that I’m still very much deciding. I’m volunteering and interning with four different organisations- Transition Town Brixton (near where I live), Project Dirt (an online environmental community), 10:10 (an epic campaign that kicked off in the summer and seeks to get people to reduce their carbon emissions by 10% in 2010) and Brockwell Park Community Greenhouses (who grow lots of things and do lots with the local community). So that’s going to keep me busy. I’m pretty sure that I’ll start leaning towards one area over another as time goes on and then, bingo- I’ll try and make it a career!

Alongside that, I’ll be doing as much freelance copywriting as I can get my hands on, both because I love it (honestly, I really do) and to pay the rent! If you have any work going, I’m still taking stuff on so please do get in touch. I have a writing website but it’s very much a work in progress!

I owe Distilled big time for many things and want to say an enormous thank you to Will and Duncan for being the best bosses ever.

Oh, and look! There’s a Distilled SEO job going!

I’ll still be around. I’ve made some awesome friends while I’ve been here (and, of course, there’s Tom- wait, what? You didn’t know?!) and I am genuinely excited about the future of Distilled and the search industry in general, so I’ll stay in touch. But, for now, so long and thanks for all the links.

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Having spoken about online news at the Pro Training Seminar last month, and given this week’s discussion about Rupert Murdoch’s plans for his online properties, I felt that I should offer some comment on his plans, and the direction that online news is taking.

SkyNews Australia broadcast a 40 minute interview with Murdoch last week. Throughout much of the interview – talking about Australian and global politics – he comes across as sensible, interesting, educated about issues and aware of the boundaries of his knowledge.

However, when the conversation is about NewsCorp’s online activities, Murdoch simply brushes aside the important questions with short, vague answers that mostly fail to stand up to a little logical thought. He varies between looking confused, and looking happy with himself (particularly when he remembers to mention ‘the blog websites‘ and talks about behaviour of the ‘search people‘.)

I stole this image from a NewsCorp website

I’ve tried different ways of presenting his argument and different ways of looking at what he proposes, but there is no logical thread to the discussion. This makes analysis hard, until you realise that an important distinction is being blurred by the conversation.

There are three distinct topics here:

1. Whether people are stealing your content
2. Whether search engines should index your URLs and link to you on relevant search result pages
3. Whether your websites should charge users for content.

These should be dealt with seperately from each other. There is not as much interplay between these questions as the intertwining of various discussion makes out.

1 – Are people stealing your content?

If people are republishing your articles, this is almost certainly ‘content theft’ (copyright infringement) and – though not always easy to overcome – should undoubtedly be pursued. Whatever the business model behind publishing content, this will usually be affected when the content can be read elsewhere.

Don’t put up with anyone who steals content.

2 – Should search engines index your URLs?

Murdoch suggests that people who visit via search engines don’t become regular readers. He says that he’d like to have fewer visitors to each site (in favour of having a core of paying subscribers) and also suggest that his sites are disadvantaged when search visitors arrive because the sites can’t collect data about ‘who they are or where they are’.

However: assuming that a certain percentage of visitors from each source will convert into regular visitors, and assuming that the marginal cost of showing a web page to one person is exceptionally low, there’s very little reason not to allow traffic from search engines.

Is there an overlap between these first two questions? Do search engines publish so much article content that it could be considered a substitute for visiting the source site? Obviously not. In fact, a lot of the time I don’t think this is even what Murdoch means by ‘theft ‘ – at times he broadly seems to mean that by being a popular portal that leads to many destinations, Google is ’stealing’ advertising from publishers. Maybe.

Despite all this, Murdoch seems keen to press ahead on removing his sites from Google (he also mentioned Microsoft and Ask.com as similar sites) with the expectation that people will find the sites through other routes and become regular direct visitors.

3 – Should users pay for the site content?

Did you notice that the last answer doesn’t need to mention pay-walls etc? This is a separate issue, and one that should mainly be decided on economic factors, by asking the question: “can we maximise long-term profit of a site by charging to access content, or by allowing free access to content and generating revenue through adverts and other sources?”

So what’s going to happen?

There’s the possibility that NewsCorp properties might be exclusively indexed by one search engine (discussed by Jason Calcanis) and it’s likely that even if surrounded by incompetent Yes-men, Murdoch won’t just give up 44% of the new users and 100,000 clicks per minute to his sites.

This might all be an elaborate ruse – whilst we’re all confused by a bloke who makes the logic leaps of a drunken grandfather and talks about these topics with little apparent confidence in his own authority, he could be busy negotiating some exceptionally savvy deals.

He’s done it before, and might just be about to do it again. There’s a lot riding on it, and a lot of people lined up all with the same idea: let’s just wait and see.

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Distilled are recruiting an individual with a 1 – 2 years SEO experience or a technical individual with an exceptional track record in delivering client projects.

Image via Jonathan W – Flickr

Who would win, a pirate or a ninja? Give evidence to support your claim.

This is the last question in the online application given to potential candidates for our latest SEO Consultant role.

Every time we put out a job advert we get comments about how much people enjoyed filling in the application. A typical application process involves emailing someone your CV and hoping, but when people spend the time to complete our slightly strange set of questions, we feel like we learnt much more about their skills and how they might fit into our team.

If you’ve read enough already you should read up on pirates and ninjas and complete our application form.

SEO Consultant job with Distilled

Thanks to many of you who read our blog we have built up a great reputation within the industry. This means that currently we have more people wanting to work with us than (to use a Will’ism) you can shake a stick at. So despite the economic doom and gloom we are once again looking to hire more people to join our SEO team to allow us to take on more clients

We have spent a lot of time working out how we can best deliver SEO projects, and whilst we know we can still improve we are now in a great position to take on another SEO Consultant who can add real value to our business and to our clients.

The right candidate will have a couple of years of experience either working in an SEO environment or an exceptional candidate with experience in an analytical role. We are looking for a candidate that we can fast track into a role leading SEO projects. You will need a passion for the internet, a proven record delivering projects, a strong work ethic and a spark that sets you apart from the competition.

The exact day to day role will depend on the person hired but will involve a fair bit of strategy for our clients along with the nitty gritty of execution. Link building, keyword research, analytics analysis, content creation, conversion rate optimisation and anything else to help our clients will form part of your weekly tasks. This sits nicely alongside regular team meetings, exciting internal projects and – of course – beer o’clock every Friday.

For the right candidate this will be an ideal position to expand your SEO skills and take on responsibility for delivering client projects. Not only does this role offer the opportunity to join Distilled at an exciting time, but if you’re someone who never wants to stop learning – you’ll fit right in.

The role is in our office in Central London, 35 hours / week with a starting salary between £26k and £28k.

If this role sounds like your dream ticket, then please fill out the following questions, and if you are successful we’ll be in touch.

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One of the most frequent questions we get asked, both at Distilled and SEOmoz Q&A, is how a business should set up their website(s) to target multiple countries or multiple languages.

The majority of the questions boil down to whether a site is better being on one big global website (.com) or whether there should be a website (local top level domain) for each country. To help us answer this question, we wanted to take a look at the distribution of generic and local top level domains across the various regions – the theory being that generic domains are likely to be targeting multiple countries or languages, and that local tlds have been optimised for the local region.

To get some relevant data, we ran a couple of experiments.

First we took 50 random keyphrases (which were harder to generate than you might think!). We then looked at the top 10 results for these in Google UK, US, Australia and New Zealand.

We then pushed all the keyphrases through Google Translate to translate them into Dutch, German, French, Spanish and Italian. With our translations in hand, we queried the relevant “foreign” Google (NL, DE, FR, ES and IT) and looked at the top 10 results for each.

The following graph shows the split between generic TLDs and local TLDs across the 4 English-speaking countries we looked at. There probably isn’t much of a surprise here:

It’s worth pointing out that this experiment was run during the prolonged period of rubbish in the UK search engines. For this reason, this is the last you will hear of the UK results! On that note we are also ignoring the US results based on the fact that the .com has become synonymous with “American” and the .us local domain is all but irrelevant.

You get two interesting graphs when you look at the spread of generic vs local domains ranking in Google NZ and Google AU:

Generic Vs Local TLDs in Google NZ

Across the first page of SERPS in the sample keywords, there is a definite trend towards more local TLDs at the top of the results. In the Australian SERPS, 75% of sites that ranked in position 1 have a local TLD, compared with only 25% ranking in position 10. You can draw your own conclusions, though please note there is a big difference between correlation and causation, ‘nuff said.

The next interesting data point arose when we compared the distribution of generic and local domains across the translated keywords:

Immediately, it looks like there is something different with the French and Spanish results. They both have a much higher percentage of generic domains than I would expect and also a much higher percentage of generic domains than you see in NL, IT and DE.

My best guess as to why this is the case is that historically it was much harder to purchase .fr and .es domains due to tight restrictions on registrations. This graph, sourced via dnjournal shows what happened when the restrictions were lifted in 2004.

Number of French domains owned over time

Obviously, by that point there were a lot of generic (mainly .com) domains targeting the French market. These domains will have built up history, trust, links, etc., and many a webmaster will have stuck with a .com rather than switching to a .fr. It’s worth noting that these generic domains, contrary to our hypothesis, are targeting one language rather than targeting a global market with multiple languages.

Take a look at the results for “apprendre le php”. The entire first page is full of generic domains entirely in French.

Compare this with the results for “php leren” in Dutch, where only one of the top 10 results is a generic domain.

If we could look again at the SERPS and plot the number of sites with a single language (even if they are on a generic .com domain) then I’m sure we would see an even more compelling graph with the majority of sites being single language.

I think this is the crux of the matter. Rather than talking about generic vs local tlds, we should be talking about whether you should have one website targeting each country or one big global site that holds all your content and targets all the relevant countries.

I would always vote that having one website per country will – in the long run – out perform one generic site targeting all the relevant countries and languages.

Things are never that simple, however, and as I’m sure you’re all aware, you can’t always have one site with a single language per country. There are many countries where many languages are spoken, i.e., Belgium has three official languages. In this example, I would set up one website targeting Belgium, and within the site I would have a folder for each of the three official languages.

Whilst I think this the data is informative and useful, it’s worth pointing out that there are some definite flaws that could invalidate the data. Firstly, to save time we chose to use Google translate to translate the 50 source keywords. We would never recommend a client uses anything other than a native speaker to do keyword research, but I think in this case the impact on the results was probably negligible. Secondly – and certainly more likely to have had an impact – we only looked at a sample of 50 keywords in each language. Only with a dramatically increased sample size can we really be confident that what we are seeing isn’t just a random quirk of the data that was chosen. Having said that, personally I’m inclined to trust the data (which is possibly because it agrees with what I already thought!).

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One day many years ago, I was wandering around alt.forest.urban when I saw a mysterious thread. I followed the thread down a long, winding, very dark path, the recollection of which sends shudders through me. Just when I felt most lost and desperate, I posted, “What kind of morally depraved place is this?” A kindly veteran user saw this and, taking pity on such a n00b as I, replied, “Do not worry. The internet is a vast place, filled with all manner of man and beast, but remember: it, too, has its own morality.” He then shared with me many a fable, demonstrating the internet’s nature with the wisdom and patience of the most learned of users. His handle was aSEOp, and what follows are a few of his tales:

The Quack Frog

A FROG once upon a time came forth from his home in the marsh and proclaimed to all the beasts that he was a learned site designer, skilled in the use of scripting, markup languages and Flash and able to create beautiful pages for any type of client.  A Fox asked him, “How can you pretend to design for others, when on your site you have animated .gifs?’

Physician, heal thyself!

The Hare and the Tortoise

A HARE one day ridiculed the slow pace at which the Tortoise’s band’s MySpace fanbase was growing. The Tortoise replied, laughing:  “Though you have courted controversy to gain fame swiftly as the wind, I wager I will beat you in long-term career sustainability.”  The Hare, believing her assertion to be simply impossible, assented to the proposal; and they agreed that the Fox should choose the terms and the timeframe.  On the day appointed the two started building popularity together.  The Tortoise never for a moment stopped practicing and writing songs, but went on with a slow but steady pace straight to a single-record contract but a lucrative career as a jingle writer.  The Hare had one of those tapes stolen and released following token legal resistence, got into fistfights with paparazzi and got a multi-record deal, though none of the records sold well, nor were any singles downloaded.  At last, he bounced from one celebrity reality show to another, while Tortoise earned massive royalties for writing the shows’ theme tunes.

Slow and steady wins the race.

The Vixen and the Lioness

A VIXEN who was checking how her investment in link farming was paying off in her Google rankings, came across a Lioness’s website which ranked higher, though it only had a few links to it. “Why such airs, haughty dame, over so few links?” sneered the Vixen in an email to the Lioness. “Look at my numerous links here, and imagine, if you are able, how a proud website author should feel.” The Lioness gave her a squelching reply, saying calmly, “Yes, just look at that beautiful collection. What are they? Spam! I’ve only a few, but remember, those few are from pages that pass a lot of juice.”

Quality is better than quantity.

The Peasant and the Apple Tree

A PEASANT had in his garden website which made no money but only served as a social networking site for the sparrows and grasshoppers.  He resolved to shut it down, and made a bold announcement to that effect.  The grasshoppers and sparrows entreated him not to remove the site that gave them so much pleasure, but to spare it, and they would in turn big him up in various other online communitites and lighten his labours. He paid no attention to their request, but set a deadline for the site’s termination.  When he looked at the site carefully, however, he found a massive user database.  Having looked at the in-depth information contained therein, he threw out his plans, and looking on the site as sacred, took great care to exploit the database for marketing purposes.

Self-interest alone moves some.

The Hart in the Ox-Stall

A HART desperately wanting free internet access discovered an unsecured wireless network signal coming from a stable, and buried itself in the connection, leaving nothing to be seen but the bandwidth he was using.  Soon after the neighbours  asked why the internet connection was so slow.  The stable boys, who had been resting after their dinner, looked round the computer files, but could see nothing and went away.  Shortly afterwards the master came in, and looking round, saw that something unusual had taken place.  He pointed to the bandwidth being used: “Who’s using the connection?”  And when the stable boys came to look they discovered the Hart, and soon made an end of him.  He thus learnt that…

Nothing escapes the master’s eye.

A PEASANT had in his garden website which made no money but

only served as a social networking site for the sparrows and grasshoppers.  He

resolved to shut it down, and made a

bold announcement to that effect.  The grasshoppers and sparrows

entreated him not to remove the site that gave them so much pleasure, but

to spare it, and they would in turn big him up in various other online communitites and lighten his labours. He paid no attention to their request, but set a deadline for the site’s termination.  When he looked at the site carefully, however, he found a massive user database.  Having looked at the

in-depth information contained therein, he threw out his plans, and looking on the site as

sacred, took great care to exploit the database for marketing purposes.

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