Last week I had the pleasure of attending the second Friends of Search conference in Amsterdam. I was a speaker at last year’s inaugural event, and I liked it so much I promised I’d be back as an attendee for the next edition. As it turned out, the organisers asked me back as a panelist…
Conferences
Learn Inbound January 2015; an Awesome Start
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…
Google’s Emphasis on Mobile / 2014 Web Summit / Brand Sentiment and SEO
Time for another roundup of my writings across the web. It’s been a while so there’s plenty to cover. In October of last year Google introduced a new feature to Webmaster Tools to analyse the mobile user experience of your website, which coincided with their announcement that mobile UX would become a ranking factor on…
Shortlisted for Digital Industries Person of the Year
The DANI Awards, now in their 4th year, are Northern Ireland’s celebration of local digital talent. In a short amount of time the DANI Awards have grown to be a renowned event that sets the NI digital scene abuzz. After winning two DANI Awards with Pierce Communications in 2012, we didn’t submit any projects for…
The Google-Shaped Web
I first learned about Toxoplasma a few years ago on the blog of Peter Watts, author of my favourite SF novel of all time (‘Blindsight’, which also features what is arguably the scariest and most plausible concept of vampirism). Reading about this parasite made me feel distinctly uncomfortable, as chances are I am one of…
Using Schema.org for Rich Snippets – #SMX London
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…
The Importance of UX Design – #Beltech14
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…
Friends of Search 2014
Last week the inaugural Friends of Search conference took place in Amsterdam, and I was honoured to be asked to speak there. In front of a few hundred of the best and brightest search marketers in the Netherlands I gave a talk about personalised search – and specifically, about why personalised search results can be a…
2013 Conference Roundup: January – June
In the first six months of this year I’ve been lucky enough to speak at a variety of conferences and events. It started off in January with a talk at the monthly Monaghan Ecommerce Meetup, where I spoke about the future of SEO: Fast-forward a few months to the start of conference season, and at…
Outsmarting Google / Fighting Sexism / SEO Distributed
I was sent a review copy of Evan Bailyn’s book Outsmarting Google. While the book’s subtitle was a bit too optimistic and the content a bit light on technical details for my taste, I did find it a solid introduction to effective SEO tactics. State of Search: Book Review – Outsmarting Google Some aspects of…