I had been really fortunate so far in meeting 10 SEOs for the Euro 2012 State of Search Roadshow.  My luck spread with me to Rome where I met Giuseppe Pastore, an Italian SEO specialist.  We met up in Cavour, near the Colosseum and ate traditional Roman food while we talked about search in Italy, the UK and in general.

The beginning

Giuseppe first started working in SEO in his free time in 2008 when he  built and optimised his own websites.  It was not until 2 years later that he started working in SEO as a career.  He quit his job, moved to a Rome and has never looked back since.

KPIs for clients

Giuseppe tracks organic traffic and conversion where relevant. Some of his clients still want to monitor rankings and therefore he does report on these KPIs to his clients.  He has set up goals for his clients through GA and tries to encourage them to focus on that instead of rankings.

Link building and development

I wanted to find out about the link building Giuseppe carries out for his clients.  Like many SEOs, he engages in blogger outreach and guest posting on third party sites. And like many SEOs it can be very time consuming, but it is important to have natural links.  Link builders used to be focused on exact match anchor text but we all now this is dangerous and can have negative effects on your site.

Giuseppe is trying to collate opinions about anchor text on my SEO blog so get in touch with him if you want to share your thoughts on this subject.

SEO outside of work

Giuseppe has been busy in the SEO community.  He recently submitted a post on SEOmoz  called How Twitter’s Bad SEO Affects Your Brand Reputation Management, through his account and then as the content was so good, the blog was promoted to the main page of SEOmoz.  Giuseppe was certainly busy responding to all the comments he received when the post went live on 5^th of July.  He has also guest posted for Search Engine Journal.  Guest posting has benefited his site, He is now number 2 in google.it for “seo specialist”.

The future of SEO

I always like to ask SEOs what they think the future has in stall for SEO.  Giuseppe thinks there will be a new skill set required for those that work in search. Before you had to be really good at technical SEO but now as content is becoming more important, content marketing will develop into social. Those that work in SEO have to be very social online using Twitter and Facebook and this will be even more important if these SEOs want to succeed in search.

The full interview is available on State of Search.