Hi, my name is Alistair Lattimore.

Convergent Media was started in January 2013 and is a place for me to write about internet marketing, search engine optimisation, web analytics, social media and anything else that perks my interest that is in someway internet related.

I have a somewhat unusual background which lead me to where I am today. It involves three older bothers who are engineers, a youthful 17 year old who didn’t know what he wanted to do later in life, a mostly complete Mechanical Engineering degree, a nearly complete Information Technology degree, software development, internet marketing and a thirst for knowledge.

Why

I work for the second largest hotel chain in Australia, who operate over 100 properties spanning three different brands throughout Australia, New Zealand, Indonesia and in the not so distant future Fiji.

Ecommerce Analyst is my title, which provides me flexibility to work across lots of different facets of the hotel chains vast online business. I focus the majority of my time on product development for Mantra Group websites, looking for opportunities to improve the user experience, addressing technical search engine optimisation issues and generally trying to make the world of our users that little bit easier.

I became very interested in search engines in 2004 when I first started with the group and was intrigued by the fact that Google was highlighting search terms in file names that used hyphens as a word separator and ranking those pages better than similar pages that used underscores. Since then I’ve been fascinated by Google, their insatiable thirst for data and the incredible advancements they’ve made in the last 10 years.

I’m an active part of the internet marketing community, providing assistance in official Google support forums and discussing issues on lots of different internet marketing websites. Over the years I’ve unintentionally built a reputation for myself as being highly knowledgeable in search, helpful to a fault and able to distill otherwise complex ideas into terms non-internet marketers can understand.

Got a tough nut to crack, get in contact with me.