On Friday the 4th annual DANI Awards took place, celebrating the best in the digital industry in Northern Ireland. For me the awards are one of the highlights of the year, where so many of my friends and colleagues in the local digital industry get together to have a great time. This year it was extra special for me, as I was shortlisted for the final award to be handed out that evening: Digital Industries Person of the Year. It was between myself, Louise McCartan from Search Scientist, and Victoria Hutchinson from Ardmore. As you can deduce from my smug grin on the following photo, I won. Photo credit: Darren Kidd / Press Eye Being awarded such recognition for what I love doing is pretty awesome, but – as with everything in life – it’s never a purely self made achievement. In my 17 years of working in the digital industry, so many people have helped me out and given me such great support, advice, and opportunities, it would be impossible for me to thank them all. Nonetheless, whilst commiting the unforgiveable sin of leaving out so many that should be mentioned, I do want to highlight a few people who’ve been there for me over the years and without who I’d never have come this far. First and foremost I want to thank the team – past and present – at The Tomorrow Lab and the Pierce Partnership who are arguably the best collection of industry experts out there and who I’ve enjoyed working with immensely. Next a big shout out to everyone involved in the Digital Exchange networking group, who’ve had to endure more than a few of my rants, and who welcomed this vocal and slightly obnoxious immigrant warmly in to their midst. The lovely folks from the Ulster University‘s DMC programme, you’re all awesome and it’s my honour and privilege to contribute, however modestly, to the education of the next crop of digital marketing superstars. There’s so many more to mention, but the list would go on forever and I’d still manage to leave out names that deserve thanks, so I’ll just conclude with the most important people in my life: my friends who keep me honest, my family – Mom, Dad, Marlies, Monica, and Jackson – who always got my back, and my wife Alison, who is the reason for everything I do. Ever since I arrived here a bit more than five years ago, Northern Ireland has been incredibly welcoming and kind to me. This wee country punches way above its weight, and I’m immensely proud to call it my home. Northern Ireland has brought out the best in me, and I’m nowhere near done yet. :) Onwards and upwards!

My entire career in SEO and digital marketing has been spent either working in-house at large organisations or as part of agency teams. And I’ve come to realise that, regardless of the qualities of the boss I work for (and right now I work for a truly great boss), I still don’t like having a boss. So the problem is not with the bosses – the problem is with me. On top of that, in about two years the big Four-Oh will arrive and, as a result, I feel a sense of urgency about the direction my career is heading. Am I doing the thing I really want to be doing? Am I playing it too safe? One thing I want to avoid is to get old and look back with regrets about chances not taken, opportunities not pursued. So I’m taking my chances and, following in the footsteps of many SEOs and digital marketers in recent times, am starting my own business. As of July 10th I will be officially self-employed and trading under the name Polemic Digital, which I thought was rather fitting for me. My services will be almost purely SEO focused, as that’s what I love doing most and, truth be told, I’m not much good at anything else. Polemic: 1. A controversial argument, especially one refuting or attacking a specific doctrine. 2. A person engaged in or inclined to controversy, argument, or refutation. As Polemic Digital I will offer technical SEO audits, strategic SEO planning, and SEO training. And if I have an issue with my boss, I can argue with myself about it (something which I’m prone to do anyway). While many digital marketers are moving away from the SEO label, it’s a label I embrace wholeheartedly. SEO is and will continue to be a cornerstone of all digital marketing, and it’s not something our industry should be ashamed of. I will unhesitatingly call myself a SEO specialist and firmly nail my colours to that mast. Over the next two months I’ll be handing things over to the team at The Tomorrow Lab. I’m immensely proud of the team I have built there – I’ve recruited each and every team member personally, and I’m totally confident that they will continue to grow and prosper and move ahead to great things, no longer encumbered by the crazy Dutchman at the helm. This BarryAdams.co.uk website will be moved to its new domain polemicdigital.com, and expanded in to an official business site of sorts. For those of you who like reading my rants, don’t worry – I will continue to rant as usual, and all of my existing rants will move across to the new domain name. Not a single swear word will be lost! It’s an exciting new adventure I’m embarking on, and the last few years working for Pierce Communications / The Tomorrow Lab have given me the confidence to make this bold new leap. I want to wish the teams at The Tomorrow Lab and its sister companies Brand Etiquette and Pierce Printellect all the best, and express my gratitude for the years of camaraderie and collaboration. It’s been jolly good fun, and we’ll definitely stay in touch – Northern Ireland is a small place after all. Onwards and upwards!

(This article was originally published in the Belfast Telegraph on 3 June 2010. It’s been modified slightly for this blog.) In his forthcoming book The Shallows author Nicholas Carr argues that surfing the web has a negative impact on how we think. He quotes research stating that exposure to bite-sized chunks of information, from short videos and blog posts to tweets and Facebook updates, trains our brain to prefer this type of information. As a result we are losing the ability to focus on a single thing for longer periods of time. This is not a new argument – in an article for The Atlantic magazine in 2008 titled “Is Google making us stupid?” Carr laid out the groundwork for his upcoming book. In a recent blog post Carr outlines a specific aspect of how the nature of the internet affects how we consume information: Links embedded in a text distract us from fully reading and comprehending the text. Instead of linking to other web pages from within the text, Carr wants us to start putting links at the bottom of a piece of online content. As with his original article for the Atlantic, this latest blog post has not gone unnoticed by his critics. Clay Shirky, another notable author and web guru, stands firmly on the opposite side of the debate, claiming that the internet is a force for good. The web, he argues, allows for a wider spread of information than ever before, and has enabled an entirely new means of engaging with politics and society. As a web professional spending close to 10 hours a day online, saying bad things about the internet runs counter to my livelihood. Yet I too cannot deny the fact that my mind works differently now than it did 15 years ago when I discovered the internet. Many of the symptoms outlined by Carr are eerily familiar to me, such as the big gaps between short- and long-term memories and an increasing inability to concentrate on a single thing for a long stretch of time. I’m not sure if this is an entirely bad thing, though. The internet works in a certain way, and perhaps our brains are adapting to this online landscape to allow us to perform better in it. We’re developing new skills and new ways of thinking so we can deal more effectively with a globally connected world. Perhaps this type of hypercharged multitasking mindset is exactly what we need to succeed in modern times. But at the same time I share some of Carr’s concerns that maybe we are losing something in the process. The question, then, is whether what we stand to gain measures up to what we might lose.

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 anyway! The evening before the event most of the speakers and organisers got together and shared a few drinks & nibbles, and this is when I finally met Michael King aka iPullRank. Mike and I have had our share of disagreements over the years, and this seemed a good opportunity to put all that behind us and instead bond over beers and cheesy selfies. Kicking it with @badams pic.twitter.com/JYcKeINHYI — MyCool King (@iPullRank) February 18, 2015 The next day Michael kicked the conference off with his keynote about where SEO is heading, and how to get ahead of the game. His key takeaway: don’t focus on catching up with Google, instead focus on maximising your value for the user. That’s where Google is heading, so you need to already be there when the search engine gets clever enough to properly enforce its user-centric approach. Following Michael was a presentation from a Google guy who spoke, unsurprisingly, about ads. Once again Google’s effective use of double-speak and propaganda tactics was made clear in how the Googler equated ‘search’ with ‘advertising’, never once mentioning organic search. It’s a subtle game Google is playing, but it sure is effective. All in all that talk was entirely forgettable and probably the least interesting of the whole day. That one blip was more than made up for by Richard Baxter‘s awesome talk about ‘the aggregation of marginal gains’. He made an analogy between SEO and Formula 1, where small improvements made along the way result in a massive uplift at the end. Richard listed numerous small SEO tweaks you can use to squeeze every bit of performance out of a website. Next up was Cindy Krum, who’s title of ‘mobile marketing evangelist’ is entirely appropriate. Her talk about mobile SEO had a whole load of useful stats and actionable tips, including one I’d not heard before: using the Vary HTTP header for dynamically served content. Mobile SEO ranking factors from @Suzzicks at #FOS15: pic.twitter.com/luKkFKk4d5 — Barry Adams (@badams) February 19, 2015 Another stand-out talk for me was Ian Lurie‘s presentation about strategic thinking for SEO. So many SEOs believe they have a strategy for their clients, but all they really have is a collection of tactics. Ian clarified what a strategy actually is and how you go about formulating one. With the right strategy in place, success in SEO is much more likely and you can avoid many of the pitfalls that befall those who just follow the latest hypes. Another talk later on the day that I really enjoyed was Pascal Fantou‘s ‘tweak geeks’, where he showed a number of technical tricks and Google Analytics hacks that can really wreak havoc with your competitors. I wouldn’t necessarily recommend using these hacks, of course, but they’re very interesting to test for, ahum, research purposes. Mwhahahaha. The superb Lisa Myers gave a strong talk about creative campaigns, showing a number of examples of successful linkbait using creative thinking and fresh angles. This was a very valuable talk for me, as so many speakers only dive in to the theory – Lisa showed actual real-world case studies, demonstrating the true effectiveness of what her agency does. At the end of the day we had a panel discussion where I got to contribute modestly to the day, answering questions from our moderator Bas van den Beld as well as from the audience together with Ian Lurie and Lisa Myers. I had at least one noteworthy contribution to that panel, best summarised by Dennis Sievers’s tweet: Best SEO tool? Common fucking sense, according to @badams #fos15 — Dennis Sievers (@resiever) February 19, 2015 Afterwards the evening’s proceedings began with free beers at the venue’s bar. Suffice to say it was another late one, with special thanks to David, Ruud, and Jan-Willem. Friends of Search 2016 is definitely on my agenda once again – if it’s half as good as the 2015 edition, it’ll be worth every penny.

(This article was originally published in the Belfast Telegraph on 30 March 2010. It’s been modified slightly for this blog.) Last week I received a surprising email from Facebook entitled ‘Your Weekly Facebook Page Update’. It contained an overview of all the Facebook pages I am an admin of, with statistics on the number of new fans, wall posts and visits to the page. Those of us who use Facebook and other social media sites in a professional capacity have been aching for reliable metrics to judge the success of our social media marketing campaigns. Facebook launched its Insights tool in late 2007 as a means for page admins to gather data on what happened on their pages and get some basic demographical data on the composition of their fan base. However, since then there’s been remarkably little movement by Facebook on the analytics front. This latest move is an indication that Facebook is starting to take the professional use of their social media platform more seriously, and can be seen as an outreach to social media marketers. The fact that several professional web analytics vendors such as Omniture and WebTrends have recently announced new Facebook tracking features, makes this latest move from Facebook just that little bit juicier. Perhaps Facebook is trying to pave the way for its own (paid) analytics package, that will hopefully allow admins to gain deeper insights in to how visitors reach their pages and how they interact with it. This will hopefully help take a lot of the guesswork out of social media marketing, and allow clients of social media marketers to demand clearer ROI on their investment.

When my wife and I went on our honeymoon to New Zealand last month, one of the things we wanted to see were dolphins. One of my wife’s life-long wishes is to swim with dolphins. In between all the rugby and sight-seeing, we managed to do two boat trips that had a chance of spotting dolphins. Alas, the playful sea-mammals decided to avoid us and were nowhere to be found. Today, inspired by a group of fellow internet marketers, I signed up to the WWF The Panda Made Me Do It campaign. Aside from the wonderful irony of the name – which only SEOs could truly appreciate – it’s a great cause and, most of all, it allowed me to ‘adopt a dolphin’ as a gift to my wife. It’s not the same as seeing them in the wild, but I think she’ll appreciate the gesture. I would like to urge you to sign up for the campaign as well. Our environment and wildlife are incredibly precious, and a small (monthly) donation will go a long way to preserve it, both for ourselves in the present and for future generations.

Getting up this morning, I’d intended to write about tonight’s 2015 DANI Awards, which I felt privileged to judge and be a part of. I’d also intended to write about this blog’s shortlisting for the Blog Awards Ireland 2015 and encourage public voting. But all of that flew right out the window when I heard of the passing of Dana Lookadoo. I can’t lay claim to any sort of close relationship with Dana. Like many in the SEO industry, I knew her only from afar. I first got to know her through the SEO Training Dojo where we discussed SEO and all things digital. Dana would be especially active on our shared Skype group chat, where her wit and intellect brightened up every day. We emailed a few times and chatted on social media about SEO and related matters, but no more. Yet I felt, like so many others, that she was a powerful and bright presence in our industry and community. When Dana suffered a severe cycling accident in 2013, we all held our breath. But she survived, and began a long and tortuous road to recovery. She found solace in her faith during this time, something which is entirely alien to me, but it gave her strength and courage and for that I can only be grateful. A private Facebook group was created to keep up to date on Dana’s progress, offer support and advice, and provide financial aid where possible. I’d like to think Dana drew a lot of strength and encouragement from that group, from our continued messages of support and love, showing how much we all cared about her. Unfortunately Dana’s journey of recovery was full of pain and countless setbacks, and when her trickle of Facebook postings faded to an almost complete silence, many feared the worst. Though we still hoped, and prayed – each in our own way – that she might bounce back and emerge stronger than ever. Alas, that was not meant to be. Dana Lookadoo passed away on Monday, and yesterday her husband Ed broke the news on the private Facebook group. The SEO industry mourns her today. All who knew her, even from afar, will miss her presence greatly. There is talk of a scholarship to be set up in her name, and when I’ve details I’ll update with ways to donate to it. Rest peacefully, Dana. Your pain has gone away, but ours has just begun. The world is slightly less bright without you in it. Update: the website for the Dana Lookadoo Memorial Scholarship Fund is now live. Donation details can be found there.

This often happens when those that designed and implemented the site’s navigation lost sight of its true purpose: to help users find their way through the website. Sometimes the navigation is rendered in Flash or JavaScript, ensuring that it won’t work properly in all browsers and that search engines won’t be able to use the navigation to find all the pages on your website. This will cause all kinds of long term problems with your site’s visibility in search engines and usability for visitors. When you decide on the navigation of your website you need to keep its purpose in mind. Navigation is meant to be used by visitors to find content on your site. Here are some tips on creating a good navigation structure for your site: The navigation on your site need to be clear and visible. If you hide your navigation among other loud design elements, users won’t be able to find it right away. Keep the list of items short and use submenus to divide your content into logical structures. If you have a lot of content spread over many different pages, think hard about a good, sensible structure that results in short lists of navigation items. Consider the order of your navigation items. What are the most important pages you want your visitors to see? Put those higher in the navigation. If you have content you feel is critical for your users to see, don’t hide it deep in your navigation tree but give it a prominent place. Use plain HTML for your navigation. Don’t hide your navigation in slick JavaScript or Flash-applications. It’s OK to use images and mouse-overs, as long as you can accomplish it with plain HTML and CSS. If you insist on JavaScript or Flash, know that a percentage of your site’s visitors won’t be able to use it properly. Indicate the current page. Users always need to know where they are on your site. You can accomplish this by indicating in your navigation what the current page is. You can use highlighted text, a different background, or any other visual way of indicating where the user is in your overall site navigation. Don’t hide pages from your navigation. Every page on your site should be a part of your navigation structure. If you really want to hide a page from the regular site navigation, ask yourself what that page’s purpose is and why you really want to hide it. Your site’s navigation alone isn’t sufficient. Also link to the content on your site from within the text. When you do this, try to use the same link names as in your navigation structure, so that users won’t be confused as to where they’re going when they click on that link. Always keep in mind that navigation exists to help your users find what they’re looking for. It should never be a hindrance. It’s OK to sacrifice the ‘cool’-factor. First and foremost your website’s navigation needs to do its job properly. If you have a tip of your own for creating great website navigation, please leave a comment!

But do you really? Is it necessary to be on every social media site and shout your message as loud as you can in to as many microphones as you can find? Social media websites are not ends in and of themselves – they are a means to an end. For most users social media sites are channels to connect with friends, relatives and colleagues, to read relevant news and keep up to date with stuff that interests them. Sites like Facebook and Twitter are the digital equivalent of conversations with friends and acquaintances. This means that commercial messages aren’t really welcome. It’s important to realise that on social media websites the user controls the content – what they read, what they share, what they ignore. Commercial messages are considered interruptive and unwelcome. That’s why as a company, when you do decide to build your presence on Twitter or Facebook or any other social media website, you need to adapt your voice to the medium. People who are interested in Ford cars don’t want to read loads of hyped sales tweets straight out of car dealer brochures. What they might be interested in is advance information about upcoming Ford cars, inside knowledge of Ford’s R&D, or just to see a human face behind that monolithic corporate image. The people at Ford know this, so their Twitter account isn’t just a faceless PR machine. It’s run by actual people who have conversations with their followers and provide tweets that are interesting. This has proven to be a successful approach for them – the Ford Twitter account has over 25 thousand followers. On Facebook the overall tone is even more informal and social. Where Twitter is becoming a networking tool, people ‘hang out’ on Facebook with friends and family. That’s why success on Facebook depends mostly on how you approach your audience. While some companies have the benefit of a corporate image that lends itself well to Facebook (Nike for example whose various FB pages boast tens of thousands of fans), for other companies it can be quite challenging to build a strong presence. They key is to deliver what your fans want. Nike uses Facebook to share cool videos, ask for user input, and launch contests where participants can win great swag. If all you’re pushing on Facebook is the same sales material as you send by email, you’re not on the right track. Get personal, be authentic, and ask for feedback. Listen to your fans and give them what they ask for. When you do decide to start tweeting or build a Facebook page, make sure you define for yourself what you want to get out of it. Your goal can be anything from fuzzy marketing stuff like brand-building to solid ROI metrics such as more visitors to your website that convert in to customers. Sometimes you’ll find that a certain popular social media site just doesn’t work for you. And that’s OK. Social media sites, for all the hype surrounding them, are just channels that you can use for the benefit of your company’s bottom line. If you can’t get any value out of them, don’t use them. For every social media site that you think can add value, ask yourself the following questions: Is my target audience present? And do they want to hear what I have to say? As long as you set your expectations and manage your social media presence accordingly, you’ll be OK. Just don’t be social for social’s sake. Whatever you do with social media, make sure it means something. UPDATE 16 Feb: I came across an excellent case study from Microsoft Advertising on how they successfully deployed social media. It’s a great read and definitely worth your while: » Microsoft Social Media White Paper – Learn & Earn [PDF]

As of today, Google has started showing credit card affiliate links in its (UK) search results. Do a search for ‘compare credit cards’ on Google and chances are you’ll see a box below the ads, and above the first organic result, with some credit card deals on which Google earns an affiliate commission: There are several other similar types of comparison ads active now. This is yet another example of Google injecting certain functionality directly in to its own search results that are basically copies of services offered by other websites. Some examples of recent times: Local: Websites who offered maps and driving directions took a huge hit, as did local business directories, when Google Maps became the default option in search. Travel: Travel comparison sites are bracing for more pain now that Google has implemented Flight Search, and is putting hotel booking forms straight in its SERPs. Finance: Search for a stock ticker and Google will try to guide you to its own finance site. Also, in the USA users can compare mortgages using Google’s platforms and never need to visit mortgage comparison websites ever again. Retail: Shopping comparison sites are dying because Google’s own shopping platform is taking over all the action. All of this is, according to Google, intended to improve the user experience. The fact that Google makes truckloads of money off of these types of ‘improvements’, and in the process kills off entire businesses, is just collateral damage. The problem is not so much with Google expanding in to other areas. A business like Google, so utterly dominant in search (especially in Europe, boasting market shares well in excess of 90% in many countries), needs to diversify its business if it intends to satisfy its shareholders’ demands for ever-growing profits. The problem is that Google uses its monopoly in search (and I dare anyone to claim that a 90% marketshare is not a monopoly) to shoehorn its way in to other business models. Google is leveraging its search monopoly to give it a huge advantage in other areas of online business. Some people say this is all perfectly fine. ‘It’s Google’s business’, they say, ‘and Google can do whatever they want’. And that is actually not true. Using a monopoly in one business to give yourself a competitive advantage in another is against the law. There are many examples of antitrust lawsuits filed over exactly these types of practices – most memorably when Microsoft used its Windows monopoly to give its Internet Explorer browser a leg up – because in every single instance of monopoly abuse it’s been shown that competition is decreased, innovation is stifled, users are given less choices, and entire businesses go bust as a result. So while at first glance all these improvements might look like they’re genuinely helpful for Google’s users, in the long term they are actually incredibly damaging and serve little purpose other than pad Google’s pockets even more. We’d all do well to keep the Microsoft example in mind. Without that successful antitrust lawsuit in the 1990’s, we’d all be using Internet Explorer. Scary thought, isn’t it?

Steve Yegge, the Google engineer that came in to recent infamy for inadvertently publicising a rant about all he perceived as being wrong with Google, has written another lengthy post, this time explaining all that is awesome about working for Google. In the first few paragraphs he touches upon something, probably unintentionally, that I feel captures perfectly what is wrong with Google. In essence, Yegge says that a company like Amazon cares about its customers, while Google cares about its employees. This is, I believe, the crux of the matter. Google, as a company founded by geeky engineers and built on the output of geeky engineers, is composed nearly entirely of said geeky engineers. In his book In The Plex Steven Levy observes that if you’re not an engineer within Google, you’re practically a second-class employee. Google has become a distributed corporate technology campus, focused heavily on making their supersmart geek employees happy. All those awesome corporate perks you hear so much about, they’re there to make sure those supergeeks are happy and love working for Google so much they’d never consider going anywhere else. The problem is that these geeks, on the whole, are not in touch with the real world in any meaningful way. Yes, the guys who build these cool Google products are all hyper-intelligent computer wizards, but that is exactly why their products fail so often. The stereotype of the geek with a superior IQ yet awkward and socially-inept is based on truth. I should know – growing up, I was one of them. On top of that, due to all the extra services Google provides on their corporate campuses, from free food to laundry to medical services, an employee only needs to leave the corporate campus to sleep. Everything else can be done right there, at the Google campus. As a result Google employees are increasingly isolated and out of touch with the real world, having to deal only with other Google people on the Google campus for 90% of their waking lives. So you end up with a company founded and run by geeks, with its focus on hiring more geeks and doing whatever it can to make them happy and productive, and resulting in increased isolation from the outside world. Inevitably it becomes a company out of touch with the real world, disconnected from real people and their real needs. This, I believe, has happened to Google. They’re a self-obsessed company focused too much on funding and maintaining their insular geek campus and keeping their geek wizards churning out cool stuff. Cool stuff for other geeks, that is. Not so much for the rest of mankind. That is why, in the long term, a company like Google is doomed to fail – unless it is capable of shedding that insular navel-gazing aspect of its corporate culture, and instead change in to an outward-looking company like Amazon whose sole purpose is to provide what its customers want. Google may be much better to work for, but Amazon is the company I’d be investing in for the long-term.