Today I spoke at SES NYC, my first speaking slot at a conference and what better place to present, than in New York City.  SES is a great conference and I have always wanted to speak at one of these events.

In the presentation, I shared my experience of working freelance and the relationships I formed last year which still exist today.  People in the search industry are very welcoming and it is one of the best industries I have worked in.  I am pleased to be a blogger for State of Search  and the Search London event I organise has grown from strength to strength, all from relationship building. (past meetups are on http://www.meetup.com/search-london/)

Please find below my presentation which is on slideshare.  I hope you enjoyed it today, please feel free to chat/email/tweet me if you have any questions about the presentation or about search in general.

The Search London event today takes place at Google Campus in Shoreditch.   

This post is part of an experiment!

If you are here, it is likely to be because of a relationship.

We have written this to prove the value of relationship building. If you are in SEO, we believe this is where your focus should be right now.

You may not think that Google and SEO are a match made up in heaven, but  it is.  Google is supporting this event Search London. The first Search London evening meetup was sponsored by Google  back in January 2011 and the first day time event is taking place at Google campus, so they are fully behind us.

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March is a special month for Search London, it is the first time we are hosting a day time and an evening event and will be on the theme “Entrepreneurship and Content Marketing”.   I have been lucky to see the meetup group grow from strength to strength and  as of writing this post, there are now 1189 members.  There is also a Search London organising team which now comprises of 6 of us, including new member, Russell McAthy who joined us early this year.

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Thank you everyone for attending the Search London meetup which took place on Tuesday, January 22nd.

Pierre Far gave a great presentation about Google’s Smartphone Recommendations site. Jon Quinton from SEO Gadget presented a site audit in 10 minutes, quick work !

We would really like to get your feedback from the event, a few people have responded but we would like to hear from as many as you as possible.  Please complete this quick survey »

Thank you again to SEOgadget for sponsoring the drinks, bar food and snooker table, it was a fantastic evening.  I hope to see many of you at the next event we are organising in March. We are just confirming the evening venue and then will announce it to you all

Below are a few photos from the January event:

This is the last in the series of “SEO Predictions” from those who I met when I was in Europe in June 2012.  Elena lives in Florence and writes about many places to visit in the city and surrounding area on her site Io amo Firenze. The site means “I love Florence” and visitors will too once they visit this city in the heart of the Tuscan countryside.  I asked the web marketing consultant  about what she thought would happen to SEO this year.

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Just over a week ago, I looked at my site through another laptop that had javascript turned off.  I found a lot of spam content in the header part of SEO Jo Blogs.  It was visible in the code as well and  did not look pretty.  As the site had been built via wordpress, I went into my header.php section and removed the spam content.  However, there was also a problem with the theme and now I can no longer use that – hence the fact I have changed the theme back to its original version when I launched in February 2009.

If your site has been hacked, here are a few tips on what to do:

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I have recently been asked about what it is like to run my own meetup group, Search London.  SEOGadget are sponsoring my next event on Tuesday and I wrote a post on their blog about “Never Underestimate the Value of Networking”   I have been the organiser of Search London for just over 2 years and in that time the number of attendees has grown from 200 to over 1100.  It has been a fantastic 2 years and 2013 will see Search London continue to grow. I have really enjoyed being the organiser of this meetup group and I encourage anyone with a passion in a particular field to set up and run one too.  Here are some of my tips on how to run your own meetup group:

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I met Andre Alpar from AKM3 while I was in Germany last year as part of the Euro 2012 State of Search Roadshow.  Andre is certainly a busy guy, he has a English podcast, is one Partner of AKM3 and also has an online cigar store.  I asked Andre (remotely) about what he thought 2013 means for search.

Looking back at 2012, what has been the major change in SEO that you have experienced?

Two things were very easy to observe. One is internationalization – many of our clients are active in many countries. That made us, as an agency, diversify, so we can deliver high-quality content and link marketing campaigns in 20 countries now.  Another major change was a very strong shift to quality which came through Panda and Penguin, both being massive updates.

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2013 was going to be a great year for the website SEO Jo Blogs.  It turns 4 years old next month. However, last Thursday I found out both this site and my travel site (using wordpress themes) had been hacked into due to the themes I was using.  I will write a blog post about how I found this out later, I just wanted to let everyone know that this current theme is only temporary. I really liked the old theme wpzoom- but unfortunately it was hacked into.  If anyone can recommend a great theme they have used before, let me know.

I met Giuseppe Pastore, an Italian SEO consultant while I was in Rome  last year as part of the Euro 2012 State of Search Roadshow.  Giuseppe has his own blog en.posizionamentozen writing in English and Italian (and putting all us English speaking people to shame).  I wanted to find out from Giuseppe about his search predictions 2013.

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