There are many great search-experts out there. We decided we wanted to give some extra attention to some of them. Therefore we will be interviewing some of these experts. During the entire summer you will be served with short interviews with influential people in the industry. You will be seeing interviews with the likes of Joost de Valk, Marcus Tandler, Chris Sherman, Mike Grehan and Danny Sullivan, and off course our bloggers! Be aware that some interviews will be published in the newsletter!
Today: Ralph Tegtmeier aka fantomaster of fantomaster.com
1- Can you introduce yourself in one paragraph?
I’m Ralph Tegtmeier aka fantomaster of fantomaster.com GmbH, a software development and SEO company in Belgium, founded in 1999. My academic background is in literature and languages. Since the Fall of 1994 I’ve been online on the Web (it was BBS and Compuserve before then) and have worked a variety of markets ranging from offshore finance, tax minimization and privacy protection to book retail. While our company’s best known for our IP delivery (cloaking) products and services, we are currently focusing primarily on intelligent automatic content creation.
2- What are you doing this summer?
a) Pitching for investor funding to push our ongoing projects to the next level.
b) Expanding the scope and range of our content creation services to increase capacity and, hopefully, to cover more languages as well.
c) Consolidating our various services and strategies to streamline the entire process and get rid of some redundancies.
3- What is the most hottest subject in search at the moment, what should every SEO be looking into?
Local search is very big now, with mobile search soon to be a close second.
Plus, the demand for unique quality content is truly exploding – making content production scalable is one of the primary challenges we’re currently facing.
4- What do you think is the “state of search” at the moment, is the industry doing good?
It’s probably never been better in terms of global client demand, as more and more companies are finally catching on to the fact that without properly implemented SEO/SEM they’re toast in an online world.
5- What is your favorite website, apart from your own?
Only one? Oh dear. I’d be hard pressed to make up my mind, there’s really so many about. But I don’t want to blow this up beyond proportion, so let’s say I currently tend to oscillate between Fred on Everything and all the wonderful stuff you can find at MacSweeney’s Internet Tendency.
6- Can “social marketing / media” and search survive apart from each other?
They probably could but as a rule it would constitute pretty dumb marketing to adopt an “either/or” approach.
The all-purpose crawler based search engines are losing an awful lot of traffic to social sites like Facebook and Twitter these days, and there’s some pretty good reasons for that.
So better factor it in and leverage the new opportunities it entails.
Case in point: in terms of sales, we’re currently making a lot more via Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn than via Google and the other traditional engines.
7- What’s your search tip for the summer?
Privacy sanitization: to the best of your capacity, make sure there’s no stuff about or by you around you’d be embarassed for other people to find. It may be a high call to effect even today but things are only going to get worse in future so better invest in the effort now.
