Author Archives: Bas van den Beld

  • 26
    Apr 10
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State of Search got nominated! Vote for best SEO blog!

Category:State of Search Tags : 

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!
Search & Social Awards

Some of the best State of Search posts are:

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

  • 25
    Apr 10
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This week: going to Manchester for Sascon

Category:speaking Tags : 

This week is another week of traveling. Conference season continues with a trip to Manchester this week. Although right here, in my ‘home town’ (I don’t live there anymore, but it still feels like home) Amsterdam one of the best conferences in Europe takes place: The Next Web. This conference I used to cover for Dutch Cowboys a few years ago and it really is a great conference, which is organize by a ‘few good men’ Patrick, Boris and Arjen. Anyone in the Netherlands this week I urge them to go and buy a ticket and head over to the conference. But as said, I won’t be there myself. If you want to meet up with me, I will be in Manchester this week. There I will be speaking at SASCON, a conference which is organized by a group of Manchester SEOs who believe that the north of England also needs a good conference. And by the looks of it, they have succeeded. The line up of speakers is very very good, they even got Joost de Valk :). I will be discussing international search. In my talk I will be looking at the differences within Europe, in the line of what I wrote about before on Searchengineland and something which will be published there this Tuesday. I’m very much looking forward to the conference. Be sure to check out what we write on State of Search and listen to our radioshow which we’ll be trying to do from Manchester this week!

  • 21
    Apr 10
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I got interviewed (in Dutch ;) ) on the future of Search

Category:Interview Tags : 

A couple of weeks ago I spoke at the B2B Marketing Forum on the changes we are seeing with the SERPS and how we should act on it. The subject was all about the future, where are the search engines going. After that session I got interviewed by a Dutch people search engine, 123 people. You can find the interview below. They also wrote out the entire interview here. The interview is in Dutch so if you want to understand it and are not Dutch, here’s te version which is translated using Google Translate (which has its usual quality so you are warned…).

  • 19
    Apr 10
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Google is not always right

Category:search Tags : 

Google is the ‘best’ search engine out there, at least that is what most people believe. Why? Because Google gives back the most relevant results. Or do they? Sometimes even Google ‘messes up’ so to speak. When looking for an image to go along a post about blogging I wrote today on State of Search I found these remarkable results:

Quite remarkable is it? There must be a logical explanation, maybe its personalized search, but most probably its because there are so many people blogging about their cats. 😉

Of course I also checked this search on Bing Images (which looks much better than Google’s by the way) and to be fair: they didn’t give me the results I wanted either, but they didn’t find that much cats as Google did… It’s time for search engines to implement the user intent they have been talking about lately.

  • 13
    Apr 10
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Playing around with Google Search Stories and more

Category:Tools Tags : 

“Hell froze over” when Google decided to actually pay for an ad during the Super Bowl in the United States this year. The ad however was  an ‘oldie’, a video called ‘Parisian Love’ in which searches on Google were shown. It was a nice video which had some response to it. But Google now decided it was gonna do more with that video and gave users the opportunity to create one of those videos themselves. They created Google (YouTube) Search Stories.

By simply putting in search terms, choosing where the search should go (images, web, blogs etcetera) and choosing the music you can make your very own ‘Parisian Love‘. Something which many now have done over the past few days. And so have I…

I decided to play around a little with the functionality and create my own video. You can find the result here:

What do you think? I must say it was pretty easy to create the actual video, but there were a couple of things I didn’t like. You don’t really have much control over it. Google decides which way the ‘camera’ rolls,

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Short bio

* Highly sought-after professional keynote speaker, trainer and strategist
* Awarded European Search Personality 2015
* More than 15 years of web experience
* Award winning consultant, trainer and professional speaker
* Founder of State of Digital
* Longer bio here

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