Yes, the country's back in recession and we're all doomed to spend the next 10 years wandering through an economic wasteland. Or are we? Now's the time for start-ups with good ideas and great motivation to take advantage of low spending by their bigger rivals. And here's how low-budget SEO can help' SEO is Flexible .

Last week I got the chance to attend the latest BlueGlass conference in LA . I've got to admit, when heading out to the US I had high expectations for this event having heard a lot of buzz around previous conferences they've held and you might have seen my interview with Chris Winfield ahead of the event. But I'd have to say, they exceeded expectations way beyond what I ever expected!

Google authorship and Google+ already influence personalized search results - which can boost the rankings for your social connections. This opens huge opportunities for individuals and means Google may reward you for being an online authority.

I should be presenting at BrightonSEO today on a 20/20 slot )20 slides, 20 seconds each( talking about 20 SEO tools. Unfortunately I can't be there - sadly my dad passed away on Wednesday morning and having battled cancer so bravely for the last year, his health deteriorated very quickly earlier this week. Obviously it puts things in perspective, as these things always do, but I know my dad would have loved me to do this.

The principles guiding search engine optimisation are sound business goals for all areas of a company, including customer service. From showing off how local you are, to putting quality of calls above quantity, here's what your customer services team can learn from SEO' Analytics A good SEO campaign is informed by feedback from your web .

In the last in our series of conference interviews )for now at least(, I'm talking to Chris Winfield ahead of the BlueGlass LA conference later this month. Personally I find it incredibly useful US conferences in order to keep up with how the industry is developing in the States - this has included SMX Advanced in Seattle and Pubcon Las Vegas in the past - and this year I'm heading over to the BlueGlass LA event.

Last week we ran a series of blog interviews for the up-and-coming search conferences and events, including SMX London , International Search Summit , BrightonSEO and ionSearch - today we look at SAScon , with answers from co-organiser Pete Young . SAScon has quickly grown into a key UK industry event - when starting out did you ever see this as the plan? And are there any further plans to expand this moving forward?

When it comes to optimization, links equal power. Some bloggers and businesses don't care how they get these links. But quality content will build long-term SEO success. Here's how to create great content without causing too much controversy.

You pay good money getting visitors to your website. So how can you make sure they buy once they arrive? Are you optimising your website? Not search engine optimisation, conversion optimisation - the art of making sure your visitors buy. Because whether you pay for clicks through advertising or attract customers through your wider marketing .

Decision makers understand the ROI of paid search, so why don't we think of measuring SEO in the same way? Once you've defined your business goals, SEO goals, and KPIs, this process will provide more measurable results - and a bigger budget.

Now is the perfect time to make changes, giving you a good few months of "normal" search traffic to analyze before major events like Christmas begin to make their presence known. Here are some tips to make your PPC campaign stand out from the crowd.

Once again, we are proud to be a blog partner for the SMX Advanced London 2012 conference. The event takes place on 15-16th May 2012 at Chelsea Football Club - Stamford Bridge. In order to receive a 15% discount, just enter the code SEOPTIMISE012 when signing up online . There are different packages available and the prices go up after 30th March so it's best to book early! For coverage of previous events,

Yesterday Google announced a new page layout algorithm update - this is a landing page quality update, which looks at "the layout of a webpage and the amount of content you see on the page once you click on a result". As opposed to having the need for scrolling beneath ads to get to this. Doesn't this sound very similar to Panda though? At Pubcon in November last year, Matt Cutts mentioned that: "If you have ads obscuring your content,

If you have a corporate Facebook page, here are some tips for making it extra effective' Treat it Like a Website Your Facebook profile is a microsite in its own right, so be sure it contains all of the information visitors need in order to understand your brand message, or to purchase your product or service. .

We've been quietly working away on a few things here at SEOptimise during the last couple of months, so it's probably about time we made a couple of announcements! Firstly, you may have noticed that in December we opened a new London office in Paddington. Alongside this, we recruited two new SEO execs - Gillian Cook and Pak Hou Cheung - both of whom have written some great posts on the SEOptimise blog already.

It's that time of year again, where everyone is starting to think about which UK search conferences and events to attend. So for 2012, I've put together a conference calendar of search events - let me know if there's any I've missed! February: SES London - London, 21-23 February 2012 March: Think Visibility - Leeds, 3rd March 2012 UK Search Awards Conference - London, 9th March 2012 Distilled - Link Love - London,

Everybody's been talking about search in 2011, but what were the events that helped to shape the search landscape of the year? We ran a poll on SEOptimise in order to find out. While the biggest search impact of 2011 might not come as much .

Last week I setup a Facebook poll to ask people what they considered to be the most significant change in search during 2011. This has received a great response, so here are the results so far )you can still take part on the SEOptimise fan page (: To recap on what these changes were: Google Panda )37 votes( - if you haven't heard of Google Panda, I'm not sure where you've been.

Last week I spoke on the SSL search panel at the SAScon mini conference in Manchester. This is a great conference, with the main SAScon event taking place in May - and to cover main tips and takeaways from this I've listed the top 28 tweets: Testing products not enough - spend time talking to your customers #sascon November 24,

Having been out at Pubcon in Las Vegas this week, I've been going a bit tweet-crazy with my coverage of this. There's been so many great tips and takeaways, that I thought it would be good to share this with our readers. Image credit: Guy Levine So for now here's my twitter coverage of Pubcon 2011: General SEO Trends 1( #7 ranking for a long-tail term can get as much traffic as #2 for head-of-tail!