By: Tim Nash

I have been living a lie, or rather this blog has you see people assume I work in the SEO industry and to be fair the blog is to blame. For starters the word SEO appears a fair few times, quite a lot of the posts are on SEO and I even appear to offer SEO courses. The reality is very little of the work I or Venture Skills do is SEO related these days we have a few straggling clients on long term contracts and we work in a supervisory role for many clients auditing other SEO companies normally without their knowledge on behalf of concerned clients. This work will continue as will providing our link mapping and reputation management tools to clients but both this blog and the company are going to evolve with new branding and public persona to introduce what we really are...

Why is timnash.co.uk changing now?

Well to be honest I have gotten bored of people pigeon holing me as an "SEO" its not a title I have ever been comfortable with and as far as I'm concerned there are less then a handful of true SEOs in the world the rest are failed web designers who need to convince people that rather than do a real job they should be paid to fix bad code mistakes and write crap to gain links. Don't get me wrong many of these people are my friends and some are incredibly talented writers, programmers and developers but virtual none of them are "Search Engine optimisers" as an industry there is little or no understanding of what a search engine is, the mathematics or logistics behind large scale information retrieval or even the process of crawling, retrieving and indexing. This is not a problem for me and I think its on a whole a good thing certainly has been for our clients, while the industry sits in the mud throwing its own muck at each other a silent group have just been getting on with the job but I just don't want to be associated with the mud slinging. Some say change should come from the inside but lets face it a quick look at SEO cesspools such as Sphinn will quickly show that it's not going to change soon. Plus as my personal interests shift away from SEO to different aspects of information retrieval and data analysis I find it harder to be interested in the day to day politics and winging of the industry I have already stopped attending or speaking at SEO conferences with the exception of smaller ones such as Think Visibility and then I pick and choose based on what other things the conference is bringing.

Venture skills is a data analysis company

We really are and always have been! We act as a trouble shooting think tank, we collect, measure and report data sets making recommendations on how to proceed, be that on helping clients optimise their sites for search engines, improve conversion rates or predicting the spread of flu within a region. We work both online and off with a clients as diverse as the government through to high street stores to online businesses. Venture Skills will no doubt continue to brand itself as an Information Architecture firm we believe ultimately that is what we do, but we shall put a renewed emphasis of the IR and data analysis side of what we do. In part to help this we plan on introducing a new website though we will not be including a blog the current Venture Skills blog will remain live but not be updated after this week. The new site will introduce what we do and why hopefully will answer the age old question what exactly is "stuff" I'm sure we as a company will put some sort of press release like thing out as unlike certain organisations this is my personal blog and not a mouth piece for Venture Skills so until its announced officially this is just here say.

What is to become of timnash.co.uk?

It will evolve the SEO course, Q&A section will be taken down, the front page will no doubt have newer text and I am slowly introducing new ideas (such as the additional post notes which are in the side bar, you can see them being used in this article) to be honest the content probably won't change to much. Recently I have been discussing profiling, metrics and analytics more then SEO and this will continue with my goal to make these more accessible and hopefully open peoples eyes to this fascinating aspect of data analysis. I will also be introducing some more programming and examples (even if I have to fake the data to protect clients privacy) what this blog will not become is a "how to make money online" blog tried that it's boring! Occasional articles on how I have improved conversions on one of my own sites maybe but I'm not going down the internet marketing guru route.

Will you be offering SEO consulting services?

Nope timnash.co.uk will not offer dedicated SEO services, all the courses,Q&A pages will be removed though I will be introducing a "have Tim in the office for a day" option for companies that need a total boost and change of perspective. The idea comes from the original idea for Venture Skills, rather then money introducing Skills into a business and while the company never went down that route it's something I have always thought was worth exploring. I still have to think about how best to implement the idea but more to come soon.

Will the new timnash.co.uk feature the old picture what about old features oh and the mannequins?

No to the photo since I have gone through age regression I feel no shame in updating the photo with the younger, beardless, hairless person I have um become In addition I have a few new idea, including a calendar I promise to keep up to date with which events I will be at and what I'm doing maybe even before I go to them! Finally while I will be updating the look the mannequins will be staying and may even become more prominent if anyone has any 3d skills and once to help me create some more then get in touch!

Tim Nash you said SEOs are crap I hate you!

cool, bye!
I no doubt I will loose a couple of subscribers but lets face it I have never been in the cool club, I was always the person you came to when everyone else had said they had no idea best go and ask the geeky ones in the corner. So if you feel where I'm taking the blog and hopefully you is not somewhere you want to come then farewell, I hope you found the previous posts useful and will still pop by occasionally. I doubt the move will bring in new subscribers going from a niche to a tiny niche but hey if I wanted subscribers I would write top 10 lists!

I don't want this post to be overly negative or personal within the "SEO Industry" I have made some great friends and while my opinion of the industry is harsh that doesn't mean I think any less of those people nor does it mean I have had a bad time I have enjoyed debating, testing and sometimes arguing with people and for that reason I want to say:

So long SEOs and thanks for all the fish!

For those still wanting to carry on this journey then you can always subscribe to the RSS feed and you can find me on Facebook | LinkedIn | Twitter
Please note: if I don't know you I'm not likely to accept a friend invite on Facebook and if I do and your attached as a limited profile don't get to upset so are most people

This article is the opinion of Tim Nash not Venture Skills see footer for details