I love England and have yet to find a better country than Old Blighty in my travels, but it’s always nice to get a change of scenery once in a while. I’ve therefore decided to move over to the US for a bit, to help Tony with the expansion of Ayima US. Having already visited Raleigh in North Carolina several times, I’m really looking forward to the new challenge.

Ayima US has already built a strong customer base and revenue stream, which we’re now looking to expand and build upon. With New York just an hour away and good connections from RDU to the West coast, I’m also looking forward to taking a more active role in US conferences and meet-ups once again.

This is not a permanent move and I’ll be travelling back to the UK regularly, with the next trip back planned for Think Visibility in September.

If you’re an SEO based in North Carolina, I look forward to meeting you at some stage (if there isn’t already such a gathering, expect LondonSEO.org to make an appearance in Raleigh ). Also if you work for a medium-to-large sized company based in the US, feel free to contact me if you’re interested in becoming a client of Ayima.

Ayima is in the final stages of hiring its next SEO Consultant, to join our unbeatable team of experts. If you’d like to join the growing Ayima family, we’d love to hear from you. So if you’re currently a freelance, agency or in-house SEO looking to work on some of the world’s biggest SEO accounts, drop us an email with your CV as soon as you can!

===== UPDATE =====

This role has now been filled. For other SEO Consultancy Jobs, check out SEOGadget.co.uk

As I write to you from my hotel room in Australia, I can’t help but reflect on how crazy the last few months have been. The week before MJ, Mike, Jane and I flew out for SMX Sydney, our long time friend Tony Spencer came to visit the Ayima office. After a number of chats with the corporate Mikes, Tony agreed to join the Ayima family and launch our new US office. I’ve known Tony since SES San Jose 2006, chatting in-between the dozens of Tequila shots that Ekky plied me with in an effort to recruit me into PartyGaming. It’s a fantastically exciting move for our company and I’m really looking forward to working with him again after our time at PG.

I’m so proud of what Ayima has achieved in such a short time, having some of the UK’s largest companies on our client list after just 2 years in business. It just goes to show what happens when you have a solid strategy and proven results in the toughest of markets. I’m positive that our US operation will be as successful, probably more so, as our UK business.

It was also great to visit Australia for the first time, I’ve met some wonderful people and caught up with old industry friends. Congratulations to Barry, Lisa and Dave for making SMX Sydney a must-attend event in the conference calendar, which rivalled and in many ways outpaced a lot of the major US conferences.

I’m happy to announce 2 new ventures that I’m very excited about.

Firstly, after leaving my in-house role at PartyGaming, I have now partnered up with some brilliant SEOs, to form a new consultancy. The company is called Ayima Search Marketing, please don’t ask me what “Ayima” means though . I work alongside Mike Nott, who is a fantastic SEO, but likes to keep a low profile. We’ve also just hired a very talented young SEO, who most Black Hats will know from his plethora of free SEO scripts which many have used or adapted at some point. Ayima specialises in offering a level of SEO that is not currently found in the UK, as well as providing on-site support (it’s like having your own in-house team). Although our team has a strong background in Black Hat SEO, we provide best-practice services to clients and use our darker knowledge to understand on-site and competitor issues to a degree unlike any other.

The second piece of news is my new role as Editor of Sphinn, a forum and community site launched by Danny Sullivan and the crew at Third Door Media. In order to dedicate enough time to my new position, I have decided to step down as Forums Editor at Search Engine Watch. Danny started SEW back in 1997, which he later sold to JupiterMedia (now Incisive Media) and left in 2006. After he departed from SEW, Search Engine Land was born along with SMX conferences and now Sphinn. It’s sad that I’m leaving SEW after my brief spell as an Editor, although I really look forward to playing a key role in building and developing Sphinn.

Lastly, if you’ve tried to email me recently without reply, please try again. I’ve changed email addresses (although the old one should now forward on), as well as buying my first home which proved very time consuming.

I was recently asked by Incisive to start writing a column for In-House SEM in the SearchEngineWatch Experts section. My first article looking at brand protection went live a few days ago, and I should be writing a new article at least once a fortnight. You can find a list of articles that I write from my Bio page, although I highly recommend subscribing to the SEW Experts RSS Feed. And before you mention it; yes I do look stupid in that photo, no I’m not smiling and yes I did take the picture using my Mac webcam rather then getting a professional to do it.

Places you’ll find me:
SearchEngineWatch Experts – As above.
SearchEngineWatch Forums – Spending a lot of time here due to my new responsibilities as the Admin.
Search Engine Roundtable – I feel guilty for not putting more of an effort in for Barry on his site, although most of my forum time is spent looking after SEW. I’ll try to get posting here again soon.
SEO Blokes – I need to post here more often, I think we all do really.
evilgreenmonkey – Sorry I haven’t written much SEO stuff, you’ll find some good content on my SEW Experts column though and I should have some more white/grey/dark-grey hat posts coming here soon.
LondonSEO.org – I only post event news on this site, although any UK SEO/PPC/Affiliate guru should get their arses along to these events. They’re free and you meet loads of cool people (don’t worry, I don’t include myself as “cool people”).

When I’m not working 14 hours a day, I use Lee Odden’s marvellous blog list in Google Reader (it helps my karma) to keep up on the industry news. I’m also impressed with the kingdom that my mate Rand is building for himself over at SEOmoz. Rand has a bit of the Charlies Angels thing going on over there, I’m sure he only hires pretty people. The mozzers always had a big following, although I’m starting to find people who only ever read stuff posted by moz HQ. I think that Scott will be the first mozzer to use his power for evil, tempting readers into a spiral of eBooks, self-help courses and getting links to his network of MFA sites.

Right, I’m off to look for an office, an apartment and a hangover cure that works.

It was officially announced yesterday that Elisabeth plans to step down from her role as Editor at Search Engine Watch on Friday, to concentrate on her new career in the travel sector. I couldn’t believe it when I was first told over the phone, although the reasons for her departure became clear to me when I found out about the fantastic oppurtunity ahead of her. I’ve had the honour of sitting on SES conference panels, which Elis has moderated, and the passion and knowledge she has shown for the travel vertical is unequivocal. There’s no doubt that Zonder will be a big hit with her on-board to manage their online marketing.

Elis was the person who gave me the oppurtunity to moderate on SEW, she also provided the solid backbone from which the forum grew and that the moderators took inspiration from. Her senior role at a promising start-up will no doubt require a lot of time and work, although I have been told that she will still be hanging out in the forums when she can – just not so prominently.

After chatting with Rory (MD at Incisive) and Rebecca (Editor-in-Chief of SEW/ClickZ), I was thrilled to be offered the chance manage the Search Engine Watch forums after Elisabeth’s departure. As Elis said, the forum is her baby, and I really appreciate that she is entrusting it to me.

I officially begin my role as SEW Forums Editor on Monday and am currently building a list of ideas for how the forums could evolve. Hopefully my close proximity to Incisive Media’s headquarters in London will aid in progressing the development of the site. If you’ve got idea’s of your own for the forum, I’d love to hear your suggestions

Oh, and you know where to go when looking for vacation rentals now, don’t you!

After receiving some wise advise from a friend, I’ve taken the step to move all of my search ramblings under my evilgreenmonkey brand. SearchMarketPro and Ecommerce-Weekly will both be moved into evilgreenmonkey, which should mean more content in one place.

Sorry for the lack of newsletters so far, I’m currently working on some big projects which I’ll let you all know more about a little later. Those on my mailing list should be getting some more ramblings from me (and Guest Authors) very soon.

The projects I’m working on basically involve some Affiliate Marketing (thanks to help from Andre), and also coding a new web analytics software in PHP aimed purely at SEMs. The app will include the usual visitor reporting along with some more interesting data such as naming and tracking individuals (combine personal/order data with visit data), SEO competitor analysis, search result scraping though proxies and eventually PPC competitor monitoring. It will also integrate dynamically created robots.txt, block lists for rogue spiders/competitors and URL re-writes depending on who/what the visitor is. Any feature requests/suggestions are obviously more than welcome.