About Hessam Lavi
Hi and welcome to my personal blog. Here, I write about Search, Search Engine Optimization, online marketing, web analytics and other less techy subjects like my favourite music.
I started my first real job at Google back in 2005 specializing in tackling webspam and black hat SEO activities in the Swedish market. I later launched a communication channel with webmasters in Sweden and attended and spoke at Search conferences to get first hand feedback about our activities in the market. Here is a short interview with me in Swedish in Internetworld (English translation here).
My time at Google taught me invaluable lessons about the company’s approach to keep its index world best, and more importantly how to build websites and create content which are best understood and evaluated by Google’s algorithms. Enforcing the webmaster guidelines and fighting shady SEO techniques also gave me first hand experience of the evolution of the SEO scene across Europe, and taught me about the nuances and peculiarities in the different markets.
My education started at Lund University, Sweden, where I studied Computer Science for 3 years. I was very lucky to spend a year at University of Waterloo in Canada as an exchange student where I got interested in Cognitive Science and the way the human mind works. After my return to Sweden I received a MSc in Cognitive Science and spent one semester working on a project at IKEA Communications about Cross Media.
I currently live in Berlin, Germany, and work at construktiv digital agency.
My name is Hessam Lavi and I live in Berlin, Germany. I'm an ex-Googler and have worked with Search and SEO for almost 5 years now. Apart from the obvious (optimization, conversion, web analytics etc) I'm also passionate about music and photography. 