Last week I posted a blogpost advertising that we are recruiting for a Senior SEO. When I went to SAScon in Manchester last week I picked up some great tips on finding new people  (thanks Jake Langwith and the guys from MMU). But, it wasn’t before the end of the 2 day conference, when Dom and Gareth from LinkRisk gave away an Ipad Mini that I had a brainwave; why not offer a iPad mini to whoever recommends the successful candidate. Everyone wants an ipad mini, basically job matchmaking with a technology benefit (an Ipad Mini).

So that’s what we are offering: Whoever recommends the candidate that is successfully employed by Verve Search Ltd as Senior SEO get’s a Ipad Mini. 

So, if you know anyone that are looking to move roles please pass on the following  Senior SEO job spec

The job in a nutshell: Senior SEO, minimum 2 years experience (and yes I do call that senior), up to 35k per annum + bonuses (plural). The job is based in Surbiton (must work from our office), it’s only 20 min from Waterloo (heck of a lot quicker than commuting IN to central London).

Image source: apple.com

T&C’s: We are giving away 1 ipad mini only. The ipad mini will be given to the person that recommends or passes on the details of the successful applicant for the Senior SEO position (posted on June 3rd on the Verve Search blog). Successful Applicant = person that get’s hired. 

Verve Search is currently recruiting for a Senior SEO Consultant to join our rapidly growing team. Are you passionate about SEO and looking for a new challenge this might be the place for you.

Verve Search is a rapidly growing SEO & Content Marketing agency, in fact in the last year we have grown from 8 to 18 people, in what seems like a blink of an eye. We are really passionate about SEO, and are proud to say we are an award winning SEO agency (this year we have made the shortlist in 4 categories at the European Search Awards).  We are are not your bog standard SEO agency, we don’t say yes to all clients that come our way, and although we want to grow we really believe that quality is essential. We take great pride in our approach and creativity and don’t have any sales or new business department. What we do is digital growth, in terms of traffic and conversions, using the mediums and creativity it takes to be ahead.

We also believe strongly in individual people, people makes agencies after all, and we treat ALL our employees with the respect and care they deserve. At Verve you will not be expected to work overtime, you are very unlikely to have to ASK for a pay-rise. You will also get to go to events, and conferences, blog, tweet etc We believe creativity and a rested mind is crucial for making a good SEO/Traffic Grower/Inbound marketer/Ninja, or whatever you want to call yourself, and to be the best agency, we need people that will do their best and are happy in their job.

Enough about us and how great we are, about you:

- The person we are looking for needs to have at least 2 years’ experience in SEO, whether that’s in house or agency side.

- Proven search engine rankings results (+ traffic and conversions)

- You need to have solid understanding and ideally experience dealing with all technical SEO areas; from diagnosis to documentation and how to fix it. From server errors, canonicalisation and pagination to dealing with best practise for international SEO.

- Knowledge of HTML/CSS

- You must also be experienced in working in a team, managing projects as well as dealing with clients.

- Solid Google Analytics knowledge (from setting up, using analytics for reporting  as well as more advanced analytics like using filters, advanced segments and so on

- Be Awesome with Excel

- Knowledge of leading SEO tools (Moz, Linkdex, Brightedge or similar)

- Be Creative and have a sense of humour

- Ideally have seen Star Wars (At least The Empire Strikes Back, and no, the new series does not count). Obviously this is not a must, or is it?

NB! Yes we are based in Surbiton (which is 20 min from Waterloo), not Shoreditch, Soho or Charlotte Street! If you got offered a seat on a rocket ship, would you ask; “where does this rocket ship take off from?” Heck no, you would care about where it’s going!

If I still have your attention, here’s the numeration details:

Salary: up to 35k per annum
Extras: Company Bonus Scheme (profit based)

Interested? Please send your CV, along with a covering email/letter to jobs@vervesearch.com

**********************PLEASE NO RECRUITMENT AGENCIES*****************************

My job requires me to be involved in both the technical and content ends of SEO. Regardless of what department you’re working in, you will come across the term PageRank (PR) every single day. Despite what we may tell ourselves, it is still the most tempting indicator to use while analysing the quality of a website. And a lot of webmasters and bloggers have realised this—and what are they doing?

A PR 4 website may look perfectly fine, but don’t be fooled. I only came across this while searching how to “fake Google page rank” myself, but it can be done. What webmasters do is set a redirect to another high PR link until Google announces a PR update. Guess what—your new PR n/a blog just went to a PR 7 in a few months. I’m sure Google will find a way to fix this bug, and I’m also sure that blackhats will find a way to get around it again. But that’s not the point.

The point is that you shouldn’t judge a website by its PR alone. There are also ways to spot a fake PR website.

1. Matt, a colleague of mine, introduced me to Wayback Machine. This handy tool shows you how a webpage appeared to look like in the past. Authoritative websites have more frequent archives, like every month or so. If you come across a PR 5 whose earliest archive is a month ago, and it looked like absolute crap, then there’s something fishy going on.

2. Do a site search to find how many pages are being indexed. A PR 4 blog will definitely have more than 10 posts. Google search “site:” followed by the website URL, as shown below:

3. Check the age of domain. If a blogger is doing everything correct, it isn’t impossible to achieve a PR 4 within a year, but definitely improbable. A PR 4 domain registered in February 2013, however, is obviously fake.

4. Check other metrics. Open Site Explorer shows you the MozRank, MozTrust, and Domain Authority of pages. Although these can be faked as well, i.e. the amount of outbound versus inbound links, they are still a better judge of a website quality.

5. I believe that social interaction has more influence than it ever has, especially after Penguin 2.0. I can guarantee that a PR 4 and above has some sort of community built around it, or is part of something bigger. You will find that authoritative travel bloggers know each other, regularly comment and interact as if it was natural. Well, it IS natural. A PR 4 website with no social links, no comments, no community, just post after post is most likely fake.

By combining these checks, you can identify 99% of websites that are faking their PR. For link building purposes, this can definitely save your client’s rankings. It may look good in a report, but it isn’t doing any good for SEO in the long-run.

How To Find The Key Words For Your Research

Regardless of whether you are selling shoes or a marketing agency, the foundations of your success lie here, in the keyword research.  The keyword search is the one tool that determines what people are searching for and how it relates to your brand. In SEO it is an invaluable tool to help you discover what your customers are searching for. Today any site owner who hasn’t done any keyword research, is really going to miss out! Do you rank for the keyword that is pivotal for your business?

Ranking for the right keyword is the make or break for many companies, Keyword research cuts out a lot of the detective work that will help you discover what people are searching for. Not only does keyword research give you an idea of what people are searching for but actually the language they are using to search as well. A very useful insight when it comes to including these words on your site or blog.

Here’s how to get the best from your research:

• Identify the landing pages. This is your first port of call when searching for a keyword. Once you have identified what your homepages are then the next step is simple.

• Rough Keyword Research, this is where you will discover the simplest form of keywords that people will be searching for. Don’t forget to search for the long tail keywords. If somebody is searching for ‘dress’ then you can safely assume they are just browsing. However, if they searched for ‘Stella McCartney Saskia dress size 8’ – here is a customer desperate to buy, as a retailer this is not an opportunity you would want to miss! Long tail keywords are pivotal when it comes to discovering what consumers are looking for, imperative as these days more and more businesses are online and a faster pace of life and the ‘I want it now’ attitude of today’s consumers see online shopping at an all-time high.  If you can find the right search terms that your buyers are using then you have hit the rankings jackpot.

• Place each keyword in a system such as Google Keyword Checker; this will give you a guide as to the popularity of the keyword chosen. Once you have established the search volume of each keyword then you need to start to weed out the lower volume search words. You can also find out the words that Google ‘hint’ might be a valuable option for you to use as a keyword.

• The next stage is combining list #2 which consists of all these valuable keywords and establishing who the competition is and where they stand in terms of searches. Look at a list of competitors and search their Meta titles and landing pages for search terms that you haven’t discovered yet.

• By putting these words through the keyword search again and you can finally draw up a final list of keywords with a good search volume and then checking them against the level of competition and here you have your final list and the start of a successful campaign!

Searching for realistic search terms is as important as discovering the keywords themselves. If you can add a ‘human voice’ to the keywords then this automatically makes them sound more trustworthy, something that a consumer will believe. Without this valuable tool then your site will never gain the ranking you need to be successful. No savvy SEO would neglect the keywords. To get a true impression of what key words you need you have to have an understanding of your site and test and retest the keywords. Be realistic and never forget the power of the long tail keyword and believe in the terms you are searching for. This is the only way you can really get a taste of the true value of a search.

We are extremely excited to share the news that Verve Search has been shortlisted in 4 categories at this years European Search Awards in Barcelona.

We are shortlisted in 3 categories with our client Miinto (Denmark, Norway & Sweden) for SEO services which we named “The Organic Viking Invasion” :

“Best Use of Search Retail”
“Best Pan European Campaign” and
“Best SEO Campaign”

The last category we have been shortlisted for is “Best Low Budget Campaign” four the “Eyes of the World” Social/SEO campaign for Taxiadvertising.com,

The last year has been very exciting for Verve Search and we have seen an immense growth, both in terms of employees and clients. We are very lucky to work with some awesome brands and truly brilliant in-house teams.

We are looking forward to the awards in Barcelona and crossing our fingers we come back with several awards.