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Goodbye Victoria, Hello Florida

The empty apartment is a shell of its former cave-like self. Two dozen or so boxes wait in three desolate stacks, one stack heading to Fort Lauderdale, another to the local homeless shelter and the third into storage in my business partner’s basement in the faint hope I return to the Pacific North West someday. It is a strange and scary feeling to leave this warm and terribly comfortable cacoon which has been so very good to me.

I have Led Zeppelin’s “Immigrant Song” playing in the back of my brain. Actually, I only have the first two lines repeating over and over again…

“I come from the land of the ice and snow, from the midnight sun where the hot springs blow…”

I have lived in Victoria,  British Columbia, Canada for the past 15 years. Victoria was one of those out-of-the-way places where the practices of SEO and SEM were pioneered by people like Todd Friesen, Ross Dunn, Richard Zwicky, Jennifer Slegg, Dave Davies and myself.  It is a beautiful, tiny city at the southern end of a long, thin island off the west coast of Canada. The Pacific ocean marks the western, southern and eastern borders of the city and some of the few remaining stands of ancient old-growth temperate rainforest (in the world) grows just sixty miles north of me. This is a special place and it would be wrong to leave it without marking my own passage.

I am truly going to miss this place. This is the town that gave me my career and allowed me to flourish in the flakey blur that passes for my reality. With three major Canadian universities, two colleges and a slew of technical schools, this is one of the smartest cities in the world. I know I am going to miss the levels of intelligence, compassion and understanding present in Victoria. (Victoria is a place where one never has to explain the principles of Keynesian economics as I find myself doing often lately when away)

I am sitting at my desk which is the last of the funiture to be descembled waiting for my business partner to pick me up for a meeting with our banker. Making a life altering move presents a lot of challenges, the least of which involve actually going somewhere. I’ve had to figure out how to keep my own business alive while giving WebmasterRadio.FM 100% of my focus. I’ve had to make sure the social projects I founded and fostered surrounding the homeless and the hungry are taken care of and will continue to operate in my abscense. I’ve had to make sure my friends understand that I love them and hope to see them all again someday in a vague and apparently distant future. I need to make sure my two employees understand that though the cat is away, the mice have got to get the work done without the safety net of my supervision.

So, why am I doing this? Last week I had lunch with the president of a major SEO firm from the Pacific North West. While eating, her husband asked me, “Jim, you can have any job you want in this industry. Why are you moving to Florida and stepping back from SEO?”

That’s a good question. It’s not that I am bored. Far from it… I am still caught up in the magic and wonder of our industry. Every day I learn new things about search and our society. I have enjoyed what I consider some of the best series of gigs in the search marketing sector for over ten years now. Why in Gaia’s name would I even think about making such a move?

For the past five years, I have seen my role in the community change from “head SEO” at a major search marketing shop to what I consider some sort of search journalism. Working with WebmasterRadio.FM is search journalism. This move will also allow me to get far more involved in the practice of SEO, this time under the tutelage of another of the originals, Daron Babin, aka: SEGuru. With a growing online radio network and exciting plans for the future, WebmasterRadio.FM needs a couple good SEOs.

More importantly, WebmasterRadio.FM presents the opportunities to learn and grow I need to feel I am moving forward in my career and in my life. I came to this town to attend the University of Victoria but never intended to stay longer than four or five years. Today, after a decade and a half, is my last full day on the Island.

When ever I delivered a speech or lecture in this town, I would open with a jolly, “Hello Victoria”. Today, as I write what is likely the last long column in a search related blog in this town I write with a small tear in my eye, “Goodbye Victoria”.

Thanks for all the memories. I’ll be back again someday, I’m just not exactly sure when.

“Whale Wars” host Capt. Paul Watson of the Sea Shepherd on Rainmaker Today!

Captain Paul Watson, founder and President of the direct action environmental group, The Sea Shepherd Conservation Society (SSCS), will be a guest on RainMaker today on WebmasterRadio.FM.

Watson is, by far, the most active and open direct action environmental activist on Earth. In 1986, Watson’s society made international headlines by effectively shutting down the Icelandic whaling industry by scuttling half of their whaling fleet and destroying the whale processing station.

Since then Watson has remained in the news regularly by consistently standing up to environmental abusers on the ocean, ice and land. This year, Watson began hosting Whale Wars on the Discovery Network.

Captain Paul Watson joins Daron and Brandy live on the air from aboard the M/Y Steve Irwin near Antarctica where SSCS is documenting the Japanese Whaling Fleet’s activities in the Southern Ocean Whale Sanctuary.

Last Major SEO Rift Healed

Search engine optimization has existed as an online marketing service for almost fifteen years. In that time, a strong and vibrant community has formed amongst SEO specialists. Like all communities, the SEO sector has had its share of internal arguments and conflict but within such a small and highly communicative community, minor rifts can be amplified to magnificent proportions.

By far the longest standing rift in the SEO community has been that of the IHELPYOU.com/FORUMS community vs. all SEOs they perceived as black-hat practitioners. For the past seven or eight years, the members at IHelpYou.com/Forums have made it their life missions to “out” and harass SEOs using techniques they did not agree with. White-hat vigilantism led to insults, name-calling, guilt by association and sustained bombardment, the fate of those who fell under IHelpYou.com/Forum’s watchful eyes. Led by forum owner Doug Heil, the membership at IHelpYou.com/Forums have managed to piss a lot of people off. An awful lot of people.

Read more

Danny and Daron on SearchCast – 7PM eastern, 4PM pacific

Today’s Daily SearchCast with Danny Sullivan promises to be extra fun when Danny is joined by WebmasterRadio.FM owner and SEGuru, Daron Babin. The show airs live at 7pm eastern (4pm pacific).

Covering an enormous segment of whatever search marketing news Danny finds interesting at the time of the live episode, SearchCast is one of the most popular shows on the WebmasterRadio.FM network.

Check out all of Danny Sullivan’s SearchCasts on-demand via podcast.

Bryan Eisenberg of FutureNow on Rainmaker today

Check out the Rainmaker show this afternoon at 6PM eastern (3PM pacific) to hear bestselling author, Bryan Eisenberg’s conversation with Daron and Brandy.

Discussing Bryan’s new book, “Always Be Testing”, the segment is the second half of a far longer interview which aired in early August.

Click here to hear Rainmaker episodes on-demand in our podcast channel.

Breaking: Google updates code to handle dynamic URLs

Join host Daron Babin on SEO Rockstars at 4pm EST for a discussion about the recent post by Google announcing that they now can handle dynamic URLs.

But it’s not all rosy news, Google also states that “static URLs might have a slight advantage in terms of clickthrough rates” and that “dynamic URLs should be favored over hiding parameters to make them look static.”

What does this mean? What’s the impact? What will it do to the industry? Join us today to find out!

Don’t be afraid of China

On SEO Rockstars today at 4pm EST, Daron will be interviewing Grace Su, CEO of Tyloon.

Tyloon is the only multilingual yellow pages and local search engine allowing you to search 15-million US businesses in English, Spanish, Chinese and more.

China had 220 million broadband users, making it the country with the largest number of people online, however it is still situated for monstrous growth as 81% of the population has not yet gotten online. China has an almost 90% market penetration by foreign companies in the high tech sector, despite assumptions by those in the west that China can be a difficult place to conduct business.

Daron and Grace will be discussing way to help companies looking to expand their search engine marketing into the Chinese market and the state of search marketing in China.

Kevin Ryan of Search Engine Strategies addresses rumors and bannings

Kevin Ryan, VP Global Content Director of Search Engine Strategies and Search Engine Watch sat down with Daron Babin as the SES New York show floor was closing to discuss rumors of members of the search community being banned (such as Rand Fishkin) from Search Engine Strategies and what the future holds for upcoming SES programming.

Kevin Ryan discusses SES Rumors and Rand Fishkin being banned

Photo from SEOmoz.org

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