Me in Malta
That’s me in Malta a couple of years ago.
My name is Craig Bradford I’m 24 years old and I’m currently living in London.
A little about me…
I was born on May 7th 1987just outside of Glasgow. Fast-forward 18 years and off I went to University. I’ve always loved sports and been quite technically minded so I jumped at the chance to study what seemed like the perfect mix between the two in Sports Engineering at Strathclyde University.
I don’t know what I was expecting but I remember being quite disappointed when on the first day, instead of being shown where the lathe’s were, we got directed to the art store to spend a fortune on some fancy pens. I was never the ‘Arty Farty’ type, but I managed to stick it out for 4 years and finish up with a BEng (Hons) 2:1.
First World Title Against Rene Teuber of Germany
Like I said I’ve always loved sports and while I dabbled in football, basketball and the occasional game of pool, my real love has always been in martial arts and in particular Tae Kwon Do and eventually full contact kickboxing. I started Tae Kwon Do when I was 5 years old and have been some form of contact sport ever since. I was fortunate to win a few titles over the years winning Scottish, British, Commonwealth and finally becoming Super Middle Weight World Champion in 2010 after a 12 round epic battle. Although I still love martial arts, training for 12 rounds is a full time job which I just don’t have time for. Needless to say it’s unlikely I’ll be back in a ring any time in the near future.
In between all that sport I was also fortunate enough to find time for a girlfriend. As it happens, we actually met quite some time ago at school and have been together ever since. Having first got together at 16, Lyndsay and I got engaged just before her 21st birthday in Paris. I thought I had a picture somewhere but can’t seem to find one. This one in the pub will have to do for now.
Lyndsay & I Messing Around In The Pub (Don't Know What I'm Doing!)
Since then, life has changed quite a bit. I’ve moved to London and currently work as an SEO Analyst at Distilled.I also help out in the SEOmoz Q+A whenever I can.
Which brings me nicely on to why I started this blog. Those of you who know anything about SEO will know that it takes a lot of testing and guess work to figure out just why Google and other search engines rank websites where they do. I’ve started this blog to use as a testing ground to figure that out and share my findings as I go. I don’t promise to update regularly but I’ll do my best to post as often as I can. Most posts will be SEO related but I’ll likely throw in the odd curve ball about business, technology and anything else I find interesting.
Last but not least I love all things to do with business and money. I’ve always enjoyed learning from successful businesses and the people behind them through reading biographies and any other type of book I can learn from. I’m not as interested in reading fiction; my mind tends to wander too much so it’s usually a waste of time.
Like most people in SEO I’m not quite sure how I got here.
I think that about covers everything…
Craig, saw your article on schema. What creative ways do you think a financial advisory site like http://www.rossasset.com might take advantage of schema markup to get a fatter listing on google. Right now I’m ranking first page (in the US) for phrases like Find A Financial Adviser (and some others). I’m going to implement rel=author on a new version of my site, but I thought if I got a little creative I might be able to get 5 stars in my listing, or even other text to make the whole thing bigger and more noticeable. -Brendan
Hi Brendan, Nice to see that you’re being pro active in implementing Schema.org. For your situation I would use the local business markup for financial services. See it here: http://schema.org/FinancialService. Thanks for reading my post and good luck with the Schema.org implementation.
Hi Craig, I own an architectural practise in Birmingham. Every two to three weeks for the last two years I have been receiving phone calls about seo! After doing basic reading and speaking to various so called experts I decided to take plunge and manage my firms rankings myself. So far so good! I first read about schema on a seo companies site and it contained a link to your seomoz article. Thanks for sharing you helped simplify it’s applicability I am going to try and incorporate into my own site will let you no what the results are…
Hi Craig,
Great article on Schema but I’m confused . . . after inspecting the source code behind this page I was not able to find an schema data. Is it hidden to “view source”.
Pardon me if I just don’t know what I’m talking about but I thought the data would be visible just like metadata