When it comes to checking 301 redirects have been implemented correctly, there are a multitude of ways to do this including Ayima’s excellent Redirect Checker, Screaming Frog and Neils Bosma’s SEO Tools for Excel. However, it gets a little complicated when you have thousands of URLs and it gets really complicated when they go through multiple hop redirects.

What is a Multiple Hop Redirect

A multiple hop (or multi-hop for short) redirect is where a URL is redirected to another URL which in turn redirects again to another URL.

Multiple Hop URLs

These can not only be tiresome but they can also have a negative impact on your websites SEO performance – especially during the launch of a new one.

Also, it can be very problematic documenting URLs that are going through multi-hops and I don’t know about you, but I hate checking thinks manually so that’s why I have built this nifty little piece of Excel (powered by the excellent SEO Tools for Excel) that allows you to automatically check 5 levels of 301 redirects.

How to use the Multi-Hop 301 Redirect Checker

Firstly, for this to work, you need to ensure you have SEO Tools for Excel installed. If not, you can download here.

Secondly you will need to download the Multi-Hop 301 Redirect Checker Excel file. Remember to Enable Editing to actually enable formulas in the document.

Once you have both of these working, ensure you have the URLs that you want to check in a single-column list in excel and then:

1. Copy your list (CTRL+C)
2. Go to the Multi-Hop Checker Excel file and select cell B12 (the first cell underneath the heading Original URL)
3. Paste your list into the table (CTRL+V).

Now, depending on your system and the number of URLs you are checking, this could happen very quickly or it could freeze your Excel up for a while as this is a very memory intensive process.  Don’t be alarmed if your Excel “white screens”; simply go make a cup of tea or browse other topics on my blog such as Log In To Multiple Google Analytics Accounts or Facebook Accounts Without Having To Log Out, 1and1: The Most Hated Domain & Hosting Provider and Short Term Site Case Study: Geordie Shore

Some Additional Redirect Checker Tips

One thing that I have found is extremely annoying with an Excel workbook like this is when you change one cell and the entire sheet runs again!  To counter this, I simply copy the contents of the table and paste as Text that way you retain your data, but you don’t have to slow down excel everytime you sort your columns.

You can also use the sort function in the Excel file to sort by response code helping you easily create an actionable list of initial status code whether it is a 404 (Not Found) or a 302 (Temporary) redirect etc.

Some Common Multi-Hop Redirect Checker Uses

A few people who have tested this document for me have used to check:

• A list of shortened URLs to find out their eventual landing URL
• A list of tracking URLs to find out if their landing URL was correct
• A list of mutli-hop URLs to ascertain where they eventually landed.

Feedback & Comments

Please feel free to leave a comment below if you encounter any problems with the multi-hop redirect checker or if you have any questions.  I hope this saves you as much time as it did me.

If you were nowhere near Twitter today, then you missed an important lesson in how Social Media can truly impact the day-to-day lives of everyone.

Today, the official HMV account – @HMVTweets – was taken under the sole ownership of Poppy Rose, the Online Marketing & Social Media Planner at HMV to announce live what exactly was happening at the ailing high-street and online retailer.

HMV Tweets #hmvXFactorFiring

Twitter literally exploded with this news and within 30 minutes of the tweets being made, the official Twitter account amassed thousands of new users and the hashtag used (#HMVXFactorFiring) was the third most trending topic worldwide.

It also brought about the #FailWhale – something not seen for a very long time since Twitter improved their server infrastructure.

Poppy Rose’s Reasoning?

Essentially, Poppy Rose was pissed at how badly HMV had performed within the Social Media spectrum. Senior management, according to Poppy Rose, simply did not value Social Media. She also felt that she had to speak out. Split over several tweets, Poppy Rose said:

Just to set something straight, I did not ‘hijack’ the hmv twitter account. I actually assumed sole responsibility of Twitter & Facebook over two years ago, as an intern. When asked (this afternoon), I gladly provided the password to head office. I also set another member of staff up as a manager on Facebook, and removed myself from the admin list. I didn’t resist any requests to cooperate.

Since my internship started, I worked tirelessly to educate the business of the importance of Social Media – not as a short-term commercial tool, but as a tool to build and strengthen the customer relationship, and to gain invaluable real-time feedback from the consumers that have kept us going for over 91 years. While many colleagues understood and supported this, it was the more senior members of staff who never seemed to grasp its importance.

I hoped that today’s actions would finally show them the true power and importance of Social Media, and I hope they’re finally listening. 

Was Poppy Rose Brave?

Personally, I think she was very brave. She was about to be sacked from a company she quite clearly loved and was proud to work for. Poppy also felt the need to tell the correct version of events. Remember, HMV staff were under contract to not divulge what was happening “behind closed doors” whilst the appointed administrators, Deloitte, were assessing the stricken businesses assets and trying to figure out if the business could be saved.

Poppy was certainly very brave to not only voice her opinions, but to do it via the official HMV account, that took some major guts. It was certainly the finest podium to voice her concerns.

Was Poppy Rose Stupid?

Again, personally, I think Poppy may have done herself a little bit of harm. Yes, she’s shown she has guts but she has also shown that when faced with the capabilities, she is a potentially disruptive voice.

I don’t doubt she will now be noticed in the Social Media sphere as a saint, a woman of ethic and pride, but she will also be remembered as the one who might get out of control when the chips are down.

I know a few companies who would not be comfortable of having Poppy Rose in charge of their social media accounts on the off chance things go wrong and Poppy goes rogue.

Was Poppy Rose Clever?

I highly doubt that her intention was to utilise the HMV Twitter account for her own ends, but I think Poppy has inadvertently got herself noticed as a passionate social market whose sole aim was to get users interacting with her brand.

It’s such a shame that this passion was clearly not felt by senior management as this has been a fantastic case study for how Social Media can reach users.

Poppy Rose will no doubt be approached to speak at conferences, interviewed by newspapers and most certainly consulted on how to help secure social media accounts to stop brands suffering the same meltdown.

On Wednesday 16^th January 2013, leading superstores Tesco & Iceland recalled their top-selling beefburgers, such as the Tesco Finest range, after it was found that the beef content was 29% horsemeat. Obviously, this is huge news in the UK as horsemeat is a big no no for most people and the mere thought of using horses for meat is horrifying.

However, it did not stop the nation taking to their favourite social media platforms with some of the finest quips and wordsplay I have seen for a long time! Many of the one-liners would make Tim Vine jealous.

By utilising social media, the jokes are out there instantly as opposed to historically texting your mate or back in the day before mobile communications, telling your mate down the pub!

Some of the best include:

@Spireite72 for https://twitter.com/spireite72/status/291459320799952897

@bradshawcg for https://twitter.com/bradshawcg/status/291468964188536832

@AndrewAllsop for https://twitter.com/AndrewAllsop/status/291516295579586561

@JedAyeGeordie for https://twitter.com/JedAyeGeordie/status/291492774929391616

@bensteed_ for https://twitter.com/bensteed_/status/291516926583255040

@Whyjay99 for https://twitter.com/Whyjay99/status/291302936913514496

@OisinOMurchu for https://twitter.com/OisinOMurchu/status/291281142861144064

@EddyAtAberdeen for https://twitter.com/EddyAtAberdeen/status/291529069663752192

@teaandcopy for https://twitter.com/TeaAndCopy/status/291262599872540672

Have you seen any others that you think are worthy of a mention? Add them to the comments section below and I will update with the best ones.

UPDATE

@davideglon for https://twitter.com/davideglon/status/291548389361991680

A special mention for @rexgoldsmith for a flurry of corkers:

@rexgoldsmith for https://twitter.com/rexgoldsmith/status/291448407053172736

@rexgoldsmith for https://twitter.com/rexgoldsmith/status/291447868361961473

@rexgoldsmith for https://twitter.com/rexgoldsmith/status/291449321499533312

Imagine the scene; you need to log into your clients Google Analytics account on your company Google account but also need to log into their Google Webmaster Central account which is under a separate Google account. It’s a pain isn’t it?

Whether you are a self-employed SEO, an in-house SEO or an agency-based SEO, I’m sure you’ve had to do this. You either log in and out of both accounts in the same browser or you open one in Internet Explorer and the other in Firefox to stop you having to login and out of both of them.

The buck doesn’t even stop with Google, what about other social media profiles you have for Clients’ Facebook accounts for example. The logging in and logging out dance becomes tiresome!

As an online marketing consultant at a leading digital marketing agency, this is a problem I’ve encountered for 5 long years – more so with the expansion of our company and the continual increase in clients.

Thankfully, with the introduction of Google Sync, you can utilise the power of Google Chrome to get round the need to log in and out of different accounts and also avoid the potential risks of posting to the wrong account!

Google Sync

Google Chrome comes with a fantastic setting called Google Sync. Primarily used to allow you to different browser sessions on different machines (using the tabs you have left open at work on your home PC for example), it can also be used to add several accounts allowing you to use each of their Google properties separately.

Set Up Google Sync

Chrome Setup Control Settings

Below I’ll document how to set this up to make your life so much easier.

1. Go to your Settings in Google Chrome via the top right Customise and Control section.
2. Navigate to the panel called Users and select Add New User
3. Choose a picture and a name your user. Personally, I use one of the cartoon characters for my personal account and the coloured heads for company accounts.
4. A new window will open asking you to sign in to your Google account.  Sing in with the account that you intend to use with this User account.

Using Google Sync

Google Sync Userlist

Once you’ve set all of your accounts up, all you simply need to do is click the icon in the top left of the browser and select the account you require.

A new window will open and you simply need to visit any website that you associate with that account, be it Google Analytics, Facebook or any other social website and sign in as that account.

By saving passwords or utilising “remember me” facilities, you will never have to log back into the accounts again.

Summary

I’ve used this for several of my personal and company accounts as well as side projects where this has come in so handy such as multiple YouTube accounts, Facebook company accounts where I don’t want a personal account associated, Google Places, Google Merchant Center – all sorts!  Now you can use Google Chrome to quickly and easily switch between your  accounts without having to log in and out ever again!

Also, a special hat tip to Dan Hoggan for introducing this to me.

Now, this is something that I don’t normally use this blog for but good causes deserve great exposure.

For those of you who remember my endeavours earlier in the year, I ran 10k for Sports Relief and I’ve decided to run a new challenge on Sunday, 14th October 2012 – the Newcastle Stampede

Barb Wire & Tunnels – The Newcastle Stampede

What is the Newcastle Stampede

The Newcastle Stampede is a 10k assault course designed by the Royal Marines at Newcastle Racecourse involving lots of water, lots of mud and lots of obstacles and is aimed at raising money for the British Heart Foundation.

The challenge will be immense and I’m hoping to finish the course in under an hour but I suspect it will be a gruelling feat.

Please Help & Donate

It would be fantastic if you could donate even a few pounds to this great cause as it will spur me and my girlfriend @ConnellJento complete this course as fast as possible whilst having a bloody good time doing so.

Help The British Heart Foundation – CLICK HERE to Donate

–          The clean promotional version:  http://www.newcastlestampede.com/gallery.php

–          The hardcore versions: http://www.flickr.com/photos/tsg_photo_gallery/sets/72157627250610756/

–          http://www.flickr.com/photos/giftedserenitybox/sets/72157625447907996/

(Images kindly borrowed from Technology Services Group’s Flickr set)

As you may know, duplicate content can seriously harm your websites rankings if your content is attributed to another domain or sub-domain.  There are multiple ways this can happen, but I recently encountered a scenario with one my own domains where a sub-domain I had not created was actually out-ranking the www. version of the website.  This introduced me to the concept of ghost sub-domains.

The subdomain in question was not a simple mistype of www but an English dictionary word – Orange – and the website affected was a mobile telecommunications website so I can see how this could have occurred, but once again I had not set up the subdomain so I was puzzled as to how the sub-domain existed.

.htaccess 301 Redirect

My first port of call was install a redirect via the .htaccess file.  This worked fine and redirected all subdomains to the sub-domain of my choice (www.):

RewriteEngine On

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www\.

RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.domain.com/$1 [R=301,L]

A small note regarding WordPress users – the .htaccess is sometimes generated in a non-standard way and a plugin called WP Htaccess Control was required on some of my WordPress installs to override the one in the root folder.

However, this caused me to think of potential problems with ranking sub-domains that were carrying penalties that were since removed. So I decided against this option unless it was a completely clean domain.

Default Wildcard (*) DNS Configuration

However, I am currently hosted with Heart Internet and for all they offer amazing customer service, up-time etc, they have a flaw (at least from an SEO standpoint) in their internal configurations.

Their configuration for DNS settings automatically creates a wildcard DNS setting that will resolve any sub-domain that is created to your domain name allowing anyone to create a sub-domain version of your website.  Again, I’m known for looking at things in a “how can I exploit this” way (e.g. Google Analytics Bombing) so my first thought went to ways of how this could be exploited for nefarious deeds by ranking a sub-domain on a powerful website with a unexpected and none-work-safe sub-domain.  Childish I know, but that’s how I roll.

I’m unsure if this is prevalent with other hosts, but in order to stop any sub-domain resolving on your domain, remove the wild card DNS record and all should be fine.

I hope this helps remove any headaches for you.

If you didn’t know already I am a Geordie, so the launch of MTV’s Geordie Shore had me both intrigued and fearful of the mockery they would make of a very proud City.  It also set off alarm bells in the internet marketer in me that there was an opportunity to be made with this so I followed my own advice of planning for an emerging market and decided to setup www.geordieshore.org.uk.

MTV: Creators of Geordie Shore

The Plan

Geordie Shore was to be launched on the 24th May 2011 and was announced around late April 2011 by MTV.  It was around this time that I bought the best TLD that was available in what I believe to be the order of priority for exact match domain names.

There were to be 6 episodes aired once every week so I had a timeframe of 1 month to set the site up and generate authority and 6 weeks to monetise the website.

Setting Up The Domain

On the 27th April 2011, I setup a simple WordPress installation with my preferred plug-ins and ensured that I had a fully working, professional looking website within a few hours that was optimised for several core terms I envisaged would generate traffic ahead of a TV launch:

• “Geordie Shore News”
•  “Geordie Shore House”
• “Geordie Shore Cast”
• “Geordie Shore Trailer”
• Etc

Because of the vanity nature of the program, I created individual cast member pages and a photo gallery page.  Aside from those, the rest of the site was to be driven by News articles.

Setting up simple things such as Google Alerts for announcements in high authority publications allowed me to quickly research, write and post articles that were of interest to users to place on the website as well as adding images to a gallery that I configured with the help of Alex Moss.

And that was it – I was set to be reactive and watch the traffic come pouring in. I just needed to drive some interest and rankings!

The Geordie Shore Fan Site Facebook Fan Page

Promotion

I setup a Facebook Fan group and a Twitter account to help promote each article that was published as well as calling in favours from friends to retweet/repost wherever they felt the need.

Due to the nature of the Exact Match Domain and the very low competitiveness of the searches I started ranking instantly for a lot of short/mid/long keyphrases.  I never built a single link to the website – I let these modes of promotion help initial traffic.

The Stats: Pre-Launch

The first episode for Geordie Shore was due to air on the 24th May 2011 and I had been working hard on populating the website and ensuring internal linking and anchor text was as optimised as possible.

I had also been posting several custom made news posts to provide stories that would be of interest to potential fans of the shows – all of course promoted via Facebook and Twitter.

Rankings

On the 21st of May 2011 – the weekend before the first episode aired, I had achieved several high rankings. These were amongst MTV’s official website for Geordie Shore as well as tabloid press websites.

Pre-Launch Traffic

Traffic

From the 27th April 2011 to 25th May 2011 (a day after the first episode aired), the Geordie Shore website received over 12,233 visits through all mediums, with a total of 933 different keyphrases via Organic:

The Stats: The Series

The series ran for a total of six weeks, airing every Tuesday night at 10pm.  Once the initial interest for the series had died down, traffic did drop considerably, only spike on or around show times.  This was, I thought, a little surprising, but none the less the website was generating traffic and interest from users.

Rankings

By the end of the series the competition had stepped up massively in terms of newspaper interest and celebrity magazine articles appearing in the SERPs.  This however, did not overly affect my target rankings.

Series Traffic

Traffic

During the time span of the entire series (24th May – 28th June 2011), the website had attracted 50,282 visitors through all mediums, with a total of 3,799 individual keyphrases via Organic.

The Stats: The Aftermath

As you can imagine, once the series died down, the traffic began to dip heavily. Interest in the series began to dissipate along with interest in the cast despite two bonus episodes being aired in August.

Rankings

The rankings had time to really come to fruition and it’s fair to say that it is the perfect base for the upcoming 2nd series that is due to start in 2012.  Currently, the rankings are:

The Aftermath Traffic

Traffic

Since the end of the series, traffic has fallen considerabley (as expected); during the time period of 28th Jun 2011 to the 25th October 2011 the website had attracted 52,357 visitors through all mediums, with a total of 5,128 individual keyphrases via Organic:

Monetisation

As you can expect, maintaining a fan website like this was not much work. I spent around 10 hours on this website in total.

During the entire time that the website was live, I had chosen to monetise the website with good ole Google AdSense.  Whilst it’s not the best advertising network of choice, it is by far the easiest and most user friendly to implement.

One of the biggest things that people who setup AdSense do not do is create a specific Ad Unit and assign it to a channel.  The benefits of doing this allow you to see which advert area performs the best over a period of time and whether moving the ad unit to a better position may be more beneficial to you as a website.

AdSense Placement and Positioning

Positioning

Following the advice of Google on how best to position Google AdSense, I placed several adverts around the site in prominent positions.

The purpose of this positioning was to ensure that the adverts were well above the fold of any user visiting the website and were in such prominent positions that a user could easily identify them and visit the websites if the adverts were of interest to them.  Remember, don’t covertly blend your adverts, entice the user to click the advert or other tricks that may jeopardise your AdSense account.

Summary

• Over the course of a 6 month period, I drove over 112,000 visitors to the website through various marketing channels such as Twitter, Facebook and Organic search mediums including Google Image Search.  Small compared to other sites, but a decent return on time investment.
• Average Page views per visit were around 3.03%, helping serve over 790,000 adverts throughout the website. The average bounce rate was around 53% due to the high vanity elements involved through the website.
• The most popular page on the website was the Geordie Shore Nuts Magazine Photoshoot page.  This received over 71,000 pages views equating to 21% of the websites total page views.
• Facebook received over 300 fans, despite being a fan website.

What Would I Do Differently?

Looking back over the campaign, I wish I had spent more time on it during the six week period the show was on.  I watched the show and, unfortunately, I was not a fan once I watched the first episode – this made me lose passion in the project.

Ideas for growth would have been:

• Episode reviews. These would be written the very same night along with targeted distribution to take advantage of easy rankings and QDF signals.
• In depth biographies
• Targeted affiliate campaigns. My idea was to have a permanent Sky TV affiliate advert present to promote Sky TV since Geordie Shore was only viewable on MTV – a Sky only channel at the time. (Sky actually refused my request to join their program as I did not match their brand criteria).
• A much stronger link building campaign.  Due to little-to-no budget, I was limited in avenues, but blogger outreach and article distribution
• Paid Advertising. Possibly through the AdWords or FacebookAds could have yielded better results. I do think the website was not strong enough for that kind of investment
• Google News syndication.  I had toyed with the idea of guest writers – people who had more passion for the show. Again, this was limited due to budget.

I hope this gives you an insight into how to quickly set up a reactive website, plan a strategy and to monetise the website. All you need is to act upon the ideas that we all have when we see something announced – don’t leave it to someone else!

** UPDATE **

Due to clause 8.1 of the Terms Of Service for Google AdSense, I have removed all facts and figures of my CTR for AdSense. Apologies, but I kind of like my AdSense account.

With the start of the English Premier League now behind us the race has been on to capture sign ups to fantasy football leagues by many organisations including Sky Sports, The Sun and the official fantasy football of the Premier League.

I’ve been using the official Premier League for over 4 years now (with over 2 million other players) and during my usual recycling of passwords I was unable to access my account and I have had to request a new password. I’ve been unable to receive these despite direct emails to their support group and countless retries. During this time I was trying to find ways to at least access my team so I could create a new team and I discovered a flaw in the recent redesign of the Premier Leagues Fantasy Football website – a redesign that didn’t exactly go off without a hitch!.

Access Users Real Names

As part of the sign up process you are asked to create a team name and join leagues that are organised by companies, organisations and friends alike. When you join a league you allow your name to be seen by others in that league. Unfortunately you are able to see the names of other users of PremierLeague.com in other leagues – even without an account!

An example of a Fantasy Football league showing real names of users

By following a specific URL (e.g. http://fantasy.premierleague.com/my-leagues/474803/standings/) you can access any league currently setup on PremierLeague.com and gain access to the personal names by changing the league ID.

The PremierLeague.com’s privacy policy (which you cannot link to on their new website strangely enough) states:

8. Any personal information which you submit will be controlled in accordance with The Premier League’s privacy policy and all UK legislation governing the same. For the avoidance of doubt, we will not disclose your personal information to any other Player unless a) this is restricted to those details in clause 19-20, or b) if we are required to do so by a competent authority or court within the United Kingdom.

Despite the above clause you can quite clearly gain access to personal information.

19. The winners’ names will be published on the Site by the 28th day of the month following the month in respect of which the Monthly Prize is awarded in respect of winners of Monthly Prizes and by Friday 22nd June 2012 in respect of the winner of the Winner’s Prize; or alternatively winner’s names can be obtained by sending a stamped self-addressed envelope to Fantasy Premier League, The Premier League, 30 Gloucester Place, London W1U 8PL.

20. Subject always to terms 30-34 below, Players’ names and addresses and the winners’ photographic images and their comments relating to any Prize may be used without limitation for future promotional, marketing and publicity purposes of The Premier League in any and all media worldwide without notice to them and without any fee being paid.

It’s not a full-blown privacy leak, but when coupled with the team names of certain users, it could be embarrassing given the questionable nature of some of the team names involved.

** UPDATE **  The source of this is not a glitch, nor an error on Googles behalf; it is in fact my error.  The cause of this is a result of Adblock Plus.  Why did it block the titles?  It blocks anything with the URL https://adwords.google.co as per the screenshot below:

Adblock Plus block Google Keyword Tool

Just a quick post from me this evening, but carrying out a search for Keyword Tool in Google resulted in the following SERP being delivered

Google SERP Result - UX Error

As you can see, the listing headers have disappeared and this is making the results unclickable.

This is a pretty big UX breakdown in my opinion as there is physically no other way I can get to those top two results other than to:

• Copy and paste the URL. This would, however, be hard to do with a longer URL (such as Malcolm Coles result).
• Navigate using the keyboard by taking advantage of Google Accessible View.

Imagine if this happenned to a clients website – the potential loss to traffic and visitors is very much up for debate.

Is this a glitch? I still get the result regardless of what browser or platform I use.

Recruitment Agencies: Superheroes Apply Within

Every sector has specialisms; web development is no different.  Unfortunately, many recruitment agencies have yet to grasp the difference between web development and web marketing.

I regularly get job opportunities throughout the UK, and I ignore the majority.  Why? Firstly, I am very, very happy at my current employer. Secondly, the majority of job offers are completely misguided, insulting and would require super human feats of skill – all for a drop in wages; The reason? Recruitment agencies still not getting the difference!

Here is an excerpt from a recent job offering I received at the opposite end of the country to me. A job offering, might I add, from a recruitment company that I have never spoken to:

seeking 3 X Front end developers ((X)HTML, CSS, Jquery) on an initial 3 months contract for an ever growing company in xxxxxxxx, London.

The successful Front end developer(s) ((X)HTML, CSS, Jquery) will be building/creating web pages in (X)HTML, CSS and Jquery from Photoshop files.

Essential key skills / experience:

• Strong knowledge of (X)HTML, CSS, JQuery
• W3C Web Standards
• Experience in creating public facing sites on multiple browsers
• Experience in UI design skills would be an advantage
• Experience in Photoshop, Adobe suit, etc. Would be an advantage
• SEO and PPC would be an advantage

Did you spot the super human part of the job they requested?  Yep, “SEO and PPC would be an advantage”

An Increasing Problem

I am seeing more and more of this being slid in to job offers. Is it a case of buzzword bingo or are they actually looking for someone with proficient skills in SEO and PPC and if so, what part of the implementation stage are they looking for? Are they looking for someone who is proficient in creating SEO friendly web applications and websites, someone with experience of creating PPC landing pages or are they looking for someone to manage an SEO campaign or PPC campaign?

I know a lot of web developers who are fluent in the art of SEO and/or PPC but the majority will admit that they don’t get too involved – they simply ensure their designs and solutions do not hinder SEO efforts. They most certainly don’t co-ordinate and optimise entire websites as they build them.  People who work solely as an SEO or PPC marketer know that these are two very different animals.

I admit that recruitment agencies have a tough job. They often have to make a turd sound like the next best thing since sliced bread. However, that’s about as far as my defence of recruitment agencies go.  I’ve been on both sides of the table when it comes to job interviews and there is nothing more disheartening than being fed a lie by the recruiter about a position/candidate.  That’s why I know the ones I trust and the ones I don’t.

In my eyes, search engine optimisation is a skill that can be complimented heavily by experience in web development.  It’s the avenue I took when I first started out as an SEO and it has come in handy when liaising with web developers.  However, they are simply two different disciplines and unless you are an in-house web developer working within a team I honestly hope you are superhero as you will burn out – and fast!

(Photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/niallkennedy/523823960/)