Mike Barker

With a background in journalism and television production, Mike is a veteran in the SEO industry, starting in the web space in 1996 when it was in its infancy. At that time, Michael used the Internet to promote architectural animation services of his small company in Cebu, Philippines, obtaining a high search engine ranking in the major engines of the time including Excite, Infoseek & AltaVista.

Following the changes in Search Engines and the way they indexed websites and listed results, Mike moved with the times and became an avid blogger in 2005, moving into Web 2.0 social bookmarking and video in 2008.

Mike is  General Manager of  Philippine based web development company WebXpress Inc.  with over 90 staff involved in website development and promotion. The company has built well over 1,000 client websites and Mike actively monitors client sites and advises them on strategy.

Mike is not an advocate of mindless, bulk link building but rather of sensible, quality SEO strategies combined with a focus on making the most of the traffic that ensues. According to Mike: “The important number on any campaign is not the number of visitors to a website, but the conversion rate. It is better to have low visitor numbers with a high conversion rate because you can always duplicate what you are doing and your SEO will always be more cost effective.”

The growing  importance of video in search engine results has enabled Mike to draw on 20 years television and advertising industryexperience. This combined with 13 years working with Search Engine Optimization gives Michael a level of expertise that is shared by few people in the industry.

Michael has a deep understanding of  both the technology and business of the Internet and enjoys sharing this knowledge and helping businesses establish and maintain an effective on-line presence.