About Valentin Yeo

I don’t have a typical career path. I dropped out of my apprenticeship (IT Sales) in 1999 because i had an idea for building a website based around consumer reviews. I got a few friends together and we started building that company. Eventually we got bought by another company called ciao.com (which is now owned by Microsoft). We basically merged into Ciao.com who were at the time looking to build a website based on the same idea.

I was working at Ciao as a product developer and took care of SEO and Usability. Ciao was a brilliant playground because the website was HUGE. At some point they were one of europes 50 biggest websites. So i learned a lot about SEO and Usability there as everything i did had massive effect (good and bad). Another good thing that came out of ciao was i had access to a lot of people that had guru level in their area of work. Be it SEO, usability or just common business knowledge.

I left ciao in end of 2002 and moved on to build another company. This time it was a e-commerce business. After 2 years it was one of Germanies top 10 consumer electronics online shops. The massive growth that this company experienced in its first 2 years of existence is based on SEO techniques that i had learned. In the 3rd year i left this company too due to differences i had with one of my partners.

In 2006 i then started to work as a freelance consultant feeling that i should take my learnings from my past experiences and help other people. After all i had learned a lot about the technical and product development side of building online businesses in the last 6 years.

At the same time (2006) i started working on my 3rd business venture. With 2 good friends i built a new company that should make good use of our knowledge around SEO. We built a yellow page directory website that is now one of Germanies biggest yellow page directories.

In 2009 i started to increasingly spend time on social media marketing. This quickly evolved into another area that i do consulting work for.

Since beginning of 2010 I am working as a long term consultant for trivago.com – hotel price comparison. I am helping there with SEO, Usability and Product Development. Great company… love working for them :)

Consulting

I usually work as a long term consultant as most businesses need long term tuning instead of one quick fix.

My skills, to me, are interlocking. Meaning it doesn’t make much sense to apply one without the other. Like i wouldn’t just make a a website usable without at the same time making sure that its also seo optimizied. As an example: when i optimize URLs for instance i think of the user AND the search engine. The same goes for social media marketing. Websites that are looking to grow a lot need to connect to existing social media websites.

SEO:

Link building active and passive (link bait, widgets, etc.), keyword research, content optimization, internal page rank optimization (page rank sculpting), content optimization. In short every aspect of SEO on-site and off-site.

Usability:

Heuristic evaluation, user tests, a/b split, creating wire frames, overseeing implementation, analyzing existing features

Product Development:

Development of new features, overseeing implementation of features, analyzing of existing features

Social Media Marketing:

Generate traffic and leads via twitter, facebook and co.

Project Management:

I like working with people. I like motivating people help them communicate effectively and helping them reach their goals.

Contact

If you feel i can help you, get in touch with me via email, twitter.com/valentinyeo, LinkedIn or facebook.com/valentinyeo.


No Comments »