This really resonated with me, as it’s how I’ve felt about every event that I have thus far attended in the search marketing arena.

As I touched upon in a previous post, Twitter (which is my main tool for this type of engagement), is a place that real communities form around, and as part of that community, you begin to build what totally feel like real friendships from the individuals that you engage with.

In just about every example of me having met in real life those that I talk to on Twitter regularly, it hasn’t felt like “meeting” for the first time. Instead, as the title says, its meeting old friends for the first time.

I know that some people from the outside, may well perceive this, as well – a little sad? You meet your geeky internet friends in real life? Saddo!

But for me, it really doesn’t feel that way at all. The world is evolving – who would have thought hundreds of years ago that you would be able to pick up the phone and call someone on the other side of the world? Or that electronic devices would make it possible to exchange short messages to anyone and everyone?

As human communications have evolved, so too have the ways that you engage with people – you don’t have to have met someone in “real life” to get to understand some of what makes that person tick.

I, amongst probably many others, possibly share too much of myself on social networks. But the value that I get from them seems to be matched by what you put in. I really do not want to become a boring twitter account that completely lacks personality, and is just trying to be promotional. That’s just not me.

I probably bore some people when I tweet about food and cooking – if that is the case, you can just choose not to follow me – I probably won’t be offended (though I do monitor who unfollows me on there, just for reference).

When I’ve met some of those folks that I “know” best from Twitter, like Rhys Wynne, Kev Strong, Samuel Crocker and Paddy Moogan, it has after a few moments felt completely natural. There are many more that I haven’t mentioned, and I truly mean no slight to those folks, just these guys are almost as active as me on the old Twitter

Of all the folks I met for the first time at this year’s Think Visibility, the best intro has to have been with Ingo Bousa – we’ve been talking on this platform for a few years, and he is a very funny go. For the last few weeks, it’s been made clear to me that I needed to introduce myself by shouting “IS ME PETE” in a Borat style voice. I did this with amusing results (not least losing part of my voice repeating it throughout the night at loud volumes), as it caused Ingo to immediately drop his drink.

For those that may consider it sad – I would just say, try it – you don’t know what you are missing. It is likely that it is easy for me working in the online marketing industry – I don’t know if it’s the same for other groups – but don’t rule it out just because you don’t know it!

I am still around, it’s just life has been very busy of late. Whilst I’ve not been posting here much, I have been blogging still, and I thought I would share where you can catch up with some more of my recent writings.

I’ve been writing a bit about server load speeds – at least slow ones – having a negative impact on SEO and other Search/Online Marketing efforts – first back in November, where I looked at Negative SEO Issues with Website Loading Speeds (which in this case had caused home pages of a few sites I worked on to be temporarily de-indexed) and again in January with Further Implications for Search Marketing of Webpage Loading Speeds, where I reviewed an email sent to our PPC account manager for the same websites, and some of the problems that can arise when you have problems with loading speeds.

I also wrote a blog in January, moaning about the lack of update to that ever annoying, meaningless PageRank figure, only for there to be a huge update a few days later (and being informed that whilst the 100+ sites I check may not have been changing unless 301′s were involved that some others had been seeing changes in the period I hadn’t observed any movements). Whilst the title was “Please – Update or Ditch”, having had an update, I am somewhat of the opinion I would rather see it ditched, as despite our best efforts, I still hear tales of people being very heavily judged on the performance of this little green bar, when the fundamental bottom line for the website is steady or increasing. Ah well, such is life, all we can do is to continue to educate as best we can about focusing on what really matters!

I’ve also been doing some guest blogging over the last few weeks – I’ve done 2 already, have a couple more lined up and really need to get my writing hat back on for Vertical Leap again soon.

If you want to catch up with these guest blogs, go and check out Daniel Bianchini’s blog with Top Questions to Ask Your Potential SEO Agency, and Common Technical Mistakes Made When a Website Launches where Dean Cruddace has kindly let me post on SEO Begin.

I’ll be looking to be doing some more guest blogging on some sites if I can secure some slots too, so I am definitely going to have to get my writing motivation back, especially as my food blog has also been being somewhat neglected of late!

Coming up in the next few weeks/months, I’m looking forwards to being at ThinkVisibility in 2 weeks, giving me a chance to meet up with a number of my favourite Twitter friends again, and for the first time, and am hoping that I will be able to secure a ticket for the next BrightonSEO on April 1st, though that can’t be guaranteed until Monday morning when I learn if I have managed to be one of the lucky ones! I’m sure both events will be packed full of useful tips and tricks as well as great networking opportunities.

That’s it for now folks, and hopefully see many of you soon!

I spend a lot of my time in the kitchen when I get home from work, and usually am cooking up a variety of meals with all sorts of styles. As a result I thought I would start writing a food blog, and have now take the plunge and launched Quick Easy Dinners.

I guess it’s still a work in progress at the moment, as I haven’t had the time to get enough posts on there, but over the coming weeks and months, I’ll be adding a number of food ideas and recipes to the site from myself, and a number of friends and family that have agreed to contribute. I’m still unsure about the template that I am using as well, but we’ll see how things go on.

If you have a recipe idea that you would like to share, then by all means either contact Peter Handley or contact Quick Easy Dinners.

However, I’m new to this system, so drop me a comment if you have anything to say, for or against anything on the website, to make sure that I can improve the site in the coming days/weeks/year.

I get the reasons why they are doing this – its obviously costing them more money to run it than the share of the users dictates should be spent on it, but its very frustrating. I’ve helped a few people setup blogs using FTP to get them moving along, and much as I enjoy using WordPress and have quite enjoyed setting it up today, it was much simpler to easily create a blog with a very, very simple interface for someone that isn’t that web savvy to use.

It was also very useful for setting up an area of a website such as /blog/, in a sub-folder of the website without having to do the WordPress installation (which I did find quite easy, but fortunately my existing host was able to support).

Now to be fair, I have been talking about moving to WordPress for some time now, but I have finally got my arse in gear to start doing it

Hopefully this might mean the start of more frequent posting too!

Why should we have to pay to receive news? What with the use of Twitter for far speedier communication of the latest events around the world, trying to make people that have a wealth of information at their fingertips pay for short news stories on websites, that are already rehashing whatever is said elsewhere! It’s absolutely non-sensical!

I read news on the BBC fairly regularly, but don’t read the sun website. Reason? The sun quality is poor- the only reason I have ever bought the paper is because of their sports coverage, but it’s pretty rubbishon their website.

News corp are gonna start charging you to read their news – so, I won’t read their news!

I wonder how long they will give it after making people pay before they go back to an ad supported model? Will they take off the ads if you are paying to view this content? I suspect not, but I guess we will have to wait and see what develops

Since then I’ve been off on a stag do that I organised for my good friend Ben, been playing lots of resident evil 5 (god I hate those guys with Chainsaws) and have been working hard at the office to keep on top of everything.

This morning I managed to get my “vanity” facebook URL – I’m www.facebook.com/ismepete – a strange name “ismepete” I’ll grant you, but its been a name that I have been using for years, and its not something that anyone else seems to use – I’m ismepete on lots of sites, its my PSN id, my twitter name, used to be my MySpace name (before I got bored of it and joined the legion of people leaving the place), so at least I am consistent. Not quite sure if there is any real point in getting one, but hey ho, why not eh?

So, I’m up early this morning and I am working on my best man speech now that the stag is done and dusted. Or rather, I should be – I’m not as I am writing this blog instead. I thought I had made a really good start on this when I started thinking about it a few months ago, but having just typed up my notes I’m a bit disappointed. 3 paragraphs is all I have written, and I thought I was about 3/4 of the way there – big exageration!

I’ll get there though, and this weekend too – as it needs to be translated for the spanish folks that are attending! Wish me luck

I’ve also decided that I am going to try and get a 32GB iPhone next week – getting to work early and gonna head down to town for 9.30 when they start to go on sale. Hopefully there wont be as much demand for these, as I desperately need a new phone! I’m no iPhone fanboy – I just want a decent media phone, and there is still no release date for the n97, so enough is enough, I’m going to bite the bullet and get a new machine.

Finally, the bane of my life this week is something that I wrote a blog about over at work – Strange US search results mixed in with the normal UK Google searches.

Why Google are doing this, I do not know – for lots of search terms, this is destroying the credibility of the engine, as the results being shared with users just arent as relevant as they have been.

With Bing pushing strong to improve it’s market share (Bing is the new name for MSN’s rebranded search engine), I think that these poor results are really coming at the wrong time for Google – and I really think that they should do better than this, as Google have always said, another search engine is only ever 1 click away. All it takes is a few searches with poor results and people could switch over to another engine in an instant.

I dont really think that Google’s dominant market share is in danger at the moment, but I dont think that these are improvements to their engine – quite the opposite in fact, and something that Google should be fixing as a priority!

Over and out for now – I’ll try not to leave it so long until I blog next – maybe next week when I’ve had a chance to play with my new phone (fingers crossed I can get one).

This is my first real own blog, so I will begin will begin with an introduction, as all good stories have one of those.

My name is Peter Handley, and I am 24 years old. I work for a company called Vertical Leap, and work as whats called a Campaign Delivery Manager. Vertical Leap are a Search Engine Optimisation company based in Portsmouth, but with customers all over the country and indeed the world. I oversee a number of different websites Internet marketing, which involves me working to get them ranked better in search engines for particular words, driving more traffic to their website, and ultimately increasing the exposure and money making potential of the businesses that use our service.

It can be a challenging job, but its also something where I learn some new trick, or find some new tool with an interesting or fun feature. I don’t think its what I envisaged doing a year ago while I was finishing my dissertation at Portsmouth University, but I wouldn’t change it either.

I studied Entertainment Technology at Portsmouth University, which was a great broad introduction to many different forms of media, where I particularly concentrated on Internet Technologies and Music. I like music, but am not a producer. I did however write my dissertation on whether or not Parental Advisory stickers on CD’s constituted censorship. I went in thinking heavily that they did, but came out with a confused opinion, as certainly some people need protecting who are vulnerable and susceptible, but restricting access only makes this more desirable to certain individuals. Anyway I digress…..

I mainly studied Internet Technologies, and having a firm foundation in HTML and CSS has certainly helped in my new job. I launched http://www.peterhandley.com/ primarily as a platform for the websites that I designed whilst at university, although these have now been hidden from public view