It has been a crazy week this week. It started with a “day off” on Monday because of a national holiday here in The Netherlands. Somehow we have adopted the idea of “2nd holiday days”, we celebrate an extra day of Eastern, Christmas and in this case Pentecost, or as we call it “Pinksteren”.

Now for somebody who works for a boss these days are great, an extra “free” day off. For somebody who works independently it is horrible. You lose a day. And the work you are supposed to do doesn’t wait. It just becomes more so an ‘extra’ day is just a postponement of what you were supposed to do that day, which you then have to do the days following. You lose time, it is as simple as that.

In this case the free day however was well spent. My oldest daughter (she is the middle one, I also have an older son and a younger daughter) turned four this week and she had her very first children-party. Which definitely was worth it.

But in the end this week had three working days for me, because I don’t work on Fridays (I spent that day with the kids). One of these days I was on a conference in Amsterdam so actually sitting down behind my computer and getting work done was two days, almost, because there were some appointments too. And off course Tuesday I did the radioshow, this time with guest Jon Henshaw from Raventools, which I think was one of the best shows we have ever done.

So a ‘short’ week. But that week turned out to be pretty successful, especially for State of Search. It was one of the most successful ones for State of Search ever. And I was very proud to see there wasn’t much I had to do for that. This week several bloggers posted a few pieces of gold on the website. Just take a look at these:

• Schema.org – What does it really mean for us – by Peter Young
• We’re doing Google’s job for them – by Barry Adams
• Link Building – You Can’t Always Get What You Want – by Annabel Hodges
• Brand SEO, Information Retrieval and Ecommerce – by Nichola Stott
• How to Use Xenu for the basis of a SEO Campaign – by Sam Murray

And then I am leaving out some great posts from the week before (I think Sam Crocker with his “Future of SEO” post has already won the post of the month). I myself posted a few too which attracted a lot of attention, but these posts were all rocking. That resulted in almost 20.000 visitors this week to all these posts. State of Search is “Going Sky High.”

But more important than the numbers I saw on the backend was what everybody could see at the front end: the quality of content. That was acknowledged by a lot of people sharing that content and some people actually expressing themselves in that matter:

This is what makes me really proud and happy. And even more because it is an acknowledgement of the quality of the bloggers on State of Search.

All in all, this short week turned out to be pretty darn successful.

From Bas van den Beld Bas van den Beld: Speaker, Trainer, Moderator and writer

It’s that time of the year again: SES London is this week! It is the biggest search conference in Europe and I always love going there. I’ve only missed one show in the past years because my youngest daughter was born.

For the second time I will be speaking at SES London. On Wednesday morning (11am) I will be speaking on the panel “Marketing to the European Union“. I will be in the panel with some very big names in the industry: Mikkel deMib Svendsen, Ciaran Norris and Kristjan Mar Hauksson. The panel is lead by international search expert Andy Atkins-Krüger.

Andy asked me to talk about search in Holland (The Netherlands). I will try to give an insight on what can make or brake your success when trying to reach the Dutch online market. I won’t give away too much here, but it will most probably be both entertaining and informative!

I will also be working on State of Search coverage, we have bloggers doing live coverage of the event and I will be doing some interviews and we’ll try to do our radioshow coming from SES.

Are you also going to be at SES London? Come say hi!

Not going but thinking of going? Do come! And use the discount I can give you. Register online and to use the following priority code: SPG20LON. It will give you 20% off!

See you there!!?

From Bas van den Beld Bas van den Beld: Speaker, Trainer, Moderator and writer

Last week I got a message, if I was willing to talk to a reporter from the Czech newspaper the Prague Post. Eh Prague…? Czech..? That is not really my area, I live in the Netherlands. I did speak in Prague a few months ago, maybe that is why?

It turned out to be a short interview about the ‘dispute’ which is going in Czech between the Czech leading search engine, Seznam, and Google. You have to know that Czech is one of the few countries world wide where Google is NOT the dominant force. In Czech Seznam is the biggest. An Internet search company, Toplist, however gave out some numbers indicating that Google had surpassed Seznam. Seznam disagreed.

The newspaper wanted to talk to me about the dispute but also about local search engines in general. I do a lot of writing about European search, both on State of Search as on Searchengineland. Therefore they came to me. That was fun! I was interviewed next to friend and organizer of the SES Conferences Mike Grehan.

See an extract of the article below. The entire article you can read here. I wrote a bigger article on the matter on State of Search to describe what is going on in Czech.

From Bas van den Beld Bas van den Beld: Speaker, Trainer, Moderator and writer

State of Search, the website I founded only two months ago because I wanted to write in depth content, has been nominated for best SEO Blog!

It was kind of a surprise for all of us I think, but last week I noticed that at the Search & Social Web Awards there was one nomination among the 22 nominees for best SEO Blog who had never been there before: State of Search! We are ‘battling’ with great sites like Searchengineland, Dave Naylor’s blog and Searchenginepeople. All great blogs so we are first and foremost very proud of the nomination! Only two months in and then this, its a recognition for all the efforts we have put in there. Thanks to the bloggersteam at State of Search we made this nomination. But… off course we would like as many votes as possible to at least take a shot at victory. And for that we need you help!

What can you do? First of all, go here: and vote for us! You have to fill in quite the questionnaire (but a tip: you can skip things ). Second, you can spread the word! Retweet, mail, use Facebook, get your friends involved and help us get the votes! Much appreciated!

Some of the best State of Search posts are:

10 Ways to Increase your Twitter Followers & 10 Essential Tools to do it

From Bas van den Beld Bas van den Beld: Speaker, Trainer, Moderator and writer

As you know I have been working on Searchcowboys for the past 1,5 years. Only a short while ago I announced that I would stop doing that. After building up the brand to where it is now I wanted more time for all my other initiatives.

Last week I launched one of these other initiatives: State of Search. A website (blog) about the world of search. I launched this site with amongst others Lisa Myers and the help of other friends like Roy and Louis. At State of Search we try to take a look at the “why” in search. It’s not a news-site, its about the why of the news and how to react on it.

It might suprise some that I started a new initiative this soon after leaving Searchcowboys. After all, one of the reasons I left Searchcowboys was that I wanted more time. Let me explain.

Why I left

Running a website like Searchcowboys takes a lot of time. Especially if you look at the format of the site, and its sister-sites. Every day I was not only responsible for the marketing of the site (promotion through all sorts of channels, from Twitter to personal encounters) but also responsible for creating most of the content of the website. This meant 6 to 7 articles each day. Because on Friday I am with my kids that meant that Thursdays were even more crowded because I had to fill the site for the day after also. To get the articles I off course had to read a lot of other articles to select what I wanted to write about and then write these articles. You can maybe imagine that this costed me several hours a day.

Meanwhile I also wrote for Searchengineland, Searchenginewatch and was asked to do some other things for other sites. And I also had a day-job to fulfill, I have to make some money… So I decided to make more time for myself. One of the things I wasn’t going to do anymore was Searchcowboys. It was a difficult decision, but the best one to take.

So why  State of Search?

If you stop at one blog and start another, doesn’t that make you just shift places and don’t gain any time? Well, no, its not that simple. State of Search is a blog with a completely different angle, its not news-focussed at all and the articles are more in depth. On top of that, which is very important to me, it doesn’t take me hours a day. I don’t even have to write one article a day. I just want good content. And that saves me a whole lot of time.

Why not do this on Searchcowboys?

I was chief editor at Searchcowboys, so why not do this there? As said, Searchcowboys has a specific format. The way the site is set up, it is made for shorter posts and more posts, just like the other cowboys-sites. Maybe I could have changed that but I believe that is the way for Searchcowboys to go, also because it is so connected to the other sites in the network, which all have the same format. My contract even said that the site had to be in line with the cowboys-format. Even if that wasn’t the case though I still think Searchcowboys has to much of a news-image. It just isn’t the right place for these kind of articles. Maybe the new editors will think differently, from what I’ve learned from their posts they are looking at it with a different angle. I wish them all the best with that and hope they will keep the brand high, I worked hard for that after all!

Take a look

I wanted a place of my own where I could place the in depth articles. That was State of Search. Off course I invite you all to take a look at State of Search. You will find some high quality content there. We now are publishing some good stuff and will be doing that in different formats in the upcoming period. So put it in your RSS-Reader and start following it, also on Twitter off course!

As for the radio-show: we decided it was best to also rebrand that to State of Search, so there is no confusion about who is where and doing what. So tune in next week for the new show!

From Bas van den Beld Bas van den Beld: Speaker, Trainer, Moderator and writer