Comments on Andrew R H Girdwood: Defending SES: The UK is not behind the US in Sear...

Hi Andy,now let me defend my assessment :-)I was n...

2008-07-18T12:25:00.000+01:00

Hi Andy,

now let me defend my assessment :-)

I was not relating to the skills and practices applied towards SEO by professionals in Europe. I was referring to the state of Google & Co. in terms of their search engine algorithm ... and how you can address them.

From my observation the options available and the pressure that SEs put on the market are different. Take Universal or Base... they are still not here (at least in Germany) with the full impact that they have in the US. Now that means that if I am a company (let`s say Yellow Pages) and I am looking at my SEO strategy I should be aware that I need to address what is happening in the US if I want to address what`s coming.

Looking forward to your assessment (even if I had a major delay) ;-)

Cheers,
Jaron Schaechter

I got really annoyed by the Frederick Marckini int...

2008-02-29T22:02:00.000Z

I got really annoyed by the Frederick Marckini interview Greg Jarboe did for SEW, where he was like "in the UK everyone is a long way behind on SEO".

<sarcasm>
That would be precisely why a lot of people and businesses in the US keep whinging about the serps and discussion forums being over represented by UK websites and talent?
</sarcasm>

Full agreement there, Andy - in terms of required ...

2008-02-27T17:22:00.000Z

Full agreement there, Andy - in terms of required sophistication I can see no difference between US and EU based SEOs, with the latter having the advantage of working in multi lingual market spaces, as has been pointed out already.

There is some merit to this view however on the technical front: Because ranking algorithms aren't quite as advanced in non-English environments (e.g. stemming, stop word definition, etc.), applied search engine optimization in the European field actually is still a lot more rudimentary. Though that's more like 1999 than 2006 in our experience!
This doesn't, however, imply that EU SEOs aren't up-to-date with what's going on elsewhere, quite the contrary in fact. Obviously, their networking will focus on other areas and people, though, which may add to the confusion on this score.

Great piece Andy, and I absolutely agree it is mor...

2008-02-27T12:25:00.000Z

Great piece Andy, and I absolutely agree it is more to do with the Culture of the events.

I think this is predominantly tied to geography. There is no doubt that a visit to SES New York/San Jose/Chicago (or Danny's US SMX events for that matter) will demonstrate more knowledge sharing but I believe this is because most US SEMs don't really operate outside of their US state and therefore don't seem many of the other speakers as competitors. This creates a more open environment for sharing.

For me, more of the value at the London event come from the networking and grabbing people where they're not on the stage.

Richard