Posts tagged Interview
Google And Yelp Express “Complicated” Relationship In Conference Interview
Jul 31st
There’s nothing that jaded and weary conference goers love more than to see some “red meat” conflict between panelists during a session. And that’s what TechCrunch’s Erick Schonfeld repeatedly tried to elicit in an on-stage interview of Yelp CEO Jeremy Stoppelman and Google’s John Hanke during the Social Currency CrunchUp event yesterday in Palo [...]
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View full post on Search Engine Land: News About Search Engines & Search Marketing
SEO Auteur: My Interview With Dustin Woodard – Search Engine Journal
Jul 7th
 Search Engine Journal |
SEO Auteur: My Interview With Dustin Woodard
Search Engine Journal I'ma veteran in-house SEO who finally went out-house. By “out-house,” I mean I now work out of my house as a Seattle-based SEO consultant. … |
View full post on SEO – Google News
SEO Auteur: My Interview With Dustin Woodard
Jul 7th
I first became aware of Dustin when he dropped my name in a post (which is still a very effective way to get someone’s attention). I ended up meeting him at the first SMX Advanced networking function and we’ve been friends ever since. We’ve called upon Dustin to speak at multiple SearchFest events in Portland and his search marketing insights, offered both in person and online, mix keen intuition with real-world business awareness.
1. Please give me your background and tell us what you do for a living.
I’m a veteran in-house SEO who finally went out-house. By “out-house,” I mean I now work out of my house as a Seattle-based SEO consultant. Like many SEOs, I focus on other web topics like domaining, social media, usability and analytics. Unlike many SEOs, I also dabble in filmmaking.
2. We’ve both been in SEO for roughly a decade. How has SEO changed /evolved over the last 10 years?
In many ways it has changed tremendously, in others it hasn’t changed at all. In the early days SEO was hardly an agreed upon term and even when it gained industry-wide acceptance, most people, even web professionals, didn’t know what it was or how it worked.
SEO was considered magical and often mythical. Despite the plethora of “Dustin work your magic” requests and successes, it was often difficult to get executive buy-in on SEO. Often the power of search would fall into the shadow of the latest piece of technology or eye-candy. One time I had to put my job on the line to keep the company from switching to an all-flash website because a self-declared web visionary tried to convince our company that “no one uses search engines to find websites.”
Even after SEO became widely accepted, many “experts” have claimed that SEO is dead. With the recent social media movement a number of marketers & media personalities are preaching this once again. What I think they don’t realize is that even if search engines were to disappear (which will never happen), SEO professionals would still thrive. In truth, most SEOs are really web traffic optimizers and dominate more than just search. The most successful Digg, StumbleUpon, Twitter, and Facebook campaigns often have an “SEO” behind them.
3. Many in our industry (such as yourself) have transitioned from corporate jobs to home-based consultants. How has that transition worked for you?
The corporate atmosphere certainly comes with the benefits of stable income, social interaction, and the opportunity to be a shining star within the organization. The downside is red tape, politics, and working with people who may not get it.
Taking the plunge to self-employed, especially when you are a father of two with a large mortgage to pay, can be scary. There’s nothing steady about it and the future is always uncertain. I’ve had periods where I had little work and others, like a couple days ago, where I worked 24 straight hours. There’s a tremendous amount of flexibility working for yourself, which is both a blessing and a curse. I’m a person who likes try many things so I have to watch what I’m spending my time on closely. For example, I’m experimenting with trading some of my time for equity to help out a couple startups in the Seattle-area.
I’m getting closer to having a set number of steady clients and look forward to the time when I have to decide if I want to run an agency with other employees or if I want to stick to being a one-man show. I also make 3-6 times what I made an hour as an in-house SEO and my skills can benefit a number of companies, rather than just one.
4. How do you differentiate your services from prospective clients that might be considering you versus a full-service agency?
My first couple contracts surprised me. I was up against what I’d consider the top agencies in the industry and beat them out. I think what makes me attractive is my decade of working in-house for web companies. Audits and recommendations are one thing, but knowing how to implement and continually grow a company’s search traffic when all the basic & intermediate SEO tactics have been covered is what really sets me apart.
It may be a mistake, but I’ve decided to focus purely on SEO and social media. I’ve always been a firm believer in organic search & word-of-mouth. During my Allrecipes.com days, we never spent a penny on advertising. Paid search, affiliate marketing, and banner advertising certainly have their place, but I think that full service agencies that offer those alongside SEO may be creating an environment where there is conflict of interest.
5. User-generated content is the holy grail for generating long-term search traffic. What’s are the best ways for generating it, harnessing it for maximum utility, and policing it so that it conforms within the high standards of the brand it represents?
Strangely enough, UGC tends to get overlooked by many SEOs. I think it is partly because people have trouble fathoming how large the long-tail of search is. There are some crafty ways to attack the long-tail from a programmatic standpoint, but harnessing user-generated content is usually more powerful and more effective.
When I worked at Wetpaint, I was in charge of SEO for 1.5 million user-generated sites. Our UGC portions focused mostly on wikis, forums, news coverage, but I’ve worked with and for other companies that used reviews, Q&A, and many custom-built pages or tools that allowed site visitors to contribute to the site. You’d be surprised how many of the most trafficked sites on the web focus primarily on UGC.
Adding UGC to site that didn’t have it before can be a daunting task. Usually a key ingredient is to already have a sizable audience to work with—the more passionate the better. Building UGC components certainly comes with technologic challenges, but I think the greatest challenge is getting company-wide buy in. Once you get past that hurdle, the key is to know your audience well enough to know what would encourage them to contribute. Some people are motivated by ego, others want to promote their business, and some just want to help create authoritative information on a topic they are passionate about.
Most successful UGC launches that I’ve been a part of involved a good amount of content seeding up front as nobody knows what to do when they look at an empty slate. It’s important to inspire & interact in the beginning stages. Later on, the community can police itself. Anyone who has ever edited a Wikipedia page realizes how fast the community can police content.
From an SEO standpoint, there are many things to look out for with UGC, including duplicate content, spam prevention, overwritten or deleted content, improper categorization, plagiarism, brand attacks, and even spammy SEOs who are trying to get backlinks.
There’s actually more to UGC than I can possibly cover in this interview. I’m actually launching a UGC SEO blog next week to help shed more light on this topic.
6. How can social media be best leveraged to help a company’s search effort?
There’s no secret that social media can play a large part in a company’s search efforts. Social media is where the conversation happens and having a large social media presence can certainly draw attention, and more importantly, links to your site. I really enjoy helping companies grow their Twitter accounts to the point where they become the largest influencers for their niche.
Making the homepage for sites like Digg and Reddit is a great way to instantly attract thousands of links, but it requires the creativity and connections most companies don’t have. Even without connections, it’s not hard to make waves with smaller social sites within any industry.
Traditional linkbuilding is not usually a fun task, but creating link bait and spreading it via social media can be very fun and very productive from an SEO standpoint.
7. What are the top 3 things SEO’s should understand about Domainers and what are the top 3 things Domainers should understand about SEO’s?
Fun question. Many SEOs don’t realize how much money domainers make even if their domains aren’t indexed by Google. There’s a surprising amount of traffic directly typed into the browser and many domainers create much more sophisticated pages then the old parked pages many of us have seen in the past. In the search industry, pretty much anyone has a shot at being one of the best – it’s anybody’s game. The domain industry, however, is faced with a limited quantity of top notch domains and they are typically owned by a small number big players who often buy/sell/and trade domains amongst each other. For the domains that don’t monetize well from PPC ads, the big payday might be way down the road. It’s like owning a piece of property that sits vacant until the right company comes along willing to build upon it.
Many domainers don’t realize how much traffic search drives and how difficult it can be to rank for certain keywords. More and more domainers are starting to build out real properties, but often fail to look past one or two keywords because that is how domains work, but any SEO will tell you there’s a lot of traffic opportunity outside the top keywords and multi-word queries are much easier to win. The greatest challenge for a domainer who might be working with an SEO is to have patience. SEO results rarely happen fast, but when they do happen, they last for a very long time.
Check out the SEO Tools guide at Search Engine Journal.
SEO Auteur: My Interview With Dustin Woodard
View full post on Search Engine Journal
SEO Expert Interview with Craig Dawber – BigNews.biz (press release)
Jul 2nd
 Impact Media (blog) |
SEO Expert Interview with Craig Dawber
BigNews.biz (press release) The lid has been lifted on some of the most closely guarded secrets on how marketers make money online in a revealing interview with SEO expert Craig Dawber … Ways to improve your rankings with SEO copywriting Getting SEO Help From Search Engine Articles The Hidden Value in Search Engine Optimisation – SEO News |
View full post on SEO – Google News
Whiteboard Interview – Google’s Matt Cutts on Redirects, Trust + More
Jun 9th
Posted by great scott!
We’ve got a very special bonus video for you today. Our buddy-and the Googliest spam cop to ever walk the webz-Matt Cutts stopped by to do a quick interview in front of ye olde whiteboard. Watch in wonder and amazement as Rand and Matt discuss headers, status codes, how much of the web is worth indexing, porn, redirect chains, URL structures, geo targeting, leaking link juice, and amateur beekeeping!
Before you get all cynical on me and assume all you’ll hear in this interview is, "design content for users, not for engines," give it a chance. Matt only brings up his trademark catchphrase once in the whole ~20 minute interview, and he is exceedingly candid and forthcoming throughout. I promise you’re gonna walk away from this knowing some things about Google you didn’t know before. If you don’t, I’ll stand on my head. Maybe. Not really. BUT I won’t have to because you’re going to be all super-smart and educated by the end of the video. So put on your learning pants and hit play, you uppity whipper-snapper, or, if you’re like Steve Jobs and are incompatible with Flash video, read the recap below…
If you need a refresher or you’re scared of moving images and prefer the company of fluffy, harmless typing, here’s a little recap of what Matt and Rand discussed.
Should Webmasters Use the ‘If Modified Since’ Header?
The ‘If Modified Since’ header can be used to manually indicate to Google whether or not you’ve made changes to content on the page. According to Matt, they started supporting it in 2003 when bandwidth was a big issue, but nowadays, it’s not very important. That said, he still advises it as a good standard practice, but also notes that it won’t necessarily help you get crawled faster.
Should Webmasters Use 503 Status Codes for Downtime?
503s can help avoid getting a page that’s under construction or experiencing problems crawled and indexed, which can be a big problem especially for large, popular sites (watch the video for Rand’s example of Disney running into this issue). Matt advocates using 503s in this case. You can’t specify when you’d like Google to re-crawl, but they will come back and won’t index the maintenance content of the page.
Does the Number of Outbound Links from a Page Affect PageRank?
For instance, to conserve "link juice" and/or funnel it more discretely, does it matter whether I have three outbound links versus two? In the original PageRank formula, yes, juice flowed out in a simple formula of Passable PR divided by number of outbound links. But nowadays, Matt says it is a much more cyclical, iterative analysis and, "it really doesn’t make as much difference as people suspect." There’s no need to hoarde all of your link juice on your page and, in fact, there may be benefit to generously linking out (not the least of which is the link-building power of good will).
If Google’s seen a Trillion URLs, How Many Do They Pay Attention To?
Since Google crawls in PageRank order, they see the "best" stuff first and avoid a lot of the serious crap. The biggest issue is discovering duplicate or previously banned content. Matt said that about 28% of what they see is duplicate. He also made the careful distinction between "quality" content and "popular" content, further illustrating that traffic isn’t a significant ranking factor: "PR does not reflect popularity in the sense that porn is very popular, but nobody links to porn…(those sites) don’t have the PageRank you’d expect if you went by usage."
Is a Trailing / Important in URL Structure?
Seems like a minor thing right? Do you use url.com/folder of url.com/folder/ in your URL structure? Matt says he would slightly advocate for using a trailing slash simply because it clearly indicates that a URL is a folder and not a document. That said, Google is quite good at differentiating so it’s not a huge deal.
Does Google Crawl from Multiple Geopgraphic Locations?
Should I be displaying geo-specific content based on user IP? It’s a very popular question among SEOs dealing with international sites and users; but how does it affect what Google sees and what shows up in the SERPs?
Matt confirmed that, "Google basically crawls from one IP address range worldwide because (they) have one index worldwide. (They) don’t build different indices, one for each country."
This means it’s very important to avoid showing significantly different content to users from different countries. As Matt says, "The problem is if you’re showing different content-like French content to French IPs-Googlebot may not see that."
Thus, you want to be sure to send everyone to the same content initially and allow them to navigate to geo-specific areas of your site. While Google has gotten better at submitting dropdowns, working with JavaScript, etc., it is still strongly advised that you provide this geo-targeted navigation via static links.
Is It a Bad Idea to Chain Redirects (e.g. 301–>301–>301)?
"It is, yeah."
Matt was very clear that Google can and usually will deal with one or two redirects in a series, but three is pushing it and anything beyond that probably won’t be followed. He also reiterated that 302s should only be used for temporary redirects…but you already knew that, right?
What’s with the Bees?
It’s true, there are bees in Mountain view. A rash of amateur apiculture has sprung up on the Google campus and a few members of the Web Spam Team have caught stinger fever (though not Matt, he prefers cats). Apparently they’ve ven gone so far as to color all of the hives in the apiary in Google’s traditional primary colors…what a bunch of geeks 
Well, that was a whole pile of great stuff we were able to get out of Mr. Cutts (and we didn’t even have to ply him with booze)! Now, go venture forth and use your new nuggets of searchy goodness to clobber your competitors.
Another huge thanks to Matt for taking the time to answer our questions so thoughtfully!
View full post on SEOmoz Daily SEO Blog
SEO Automatic for the People: My Interview with Scott Hendison
Jun 9th
I’ve known Scott for over 4 years now and I’ve been trying to get him to do an e-interview for almost that long. He’s a real smart guy with a strong background in areas (WordPress, Hosting, Affiliate) that are off the radar of many folks. Finally, after the release of his SEO Automatic plugin, he agreed to answer some questions for me.
1) Please give us your background and tell us what you do for a living?
In the late 1990s I owned a new and used computer / software store. Since we took old software in on trade, I was faced with the task of getting rid of the 4000+ software titles we had accumulated. That’s how I began learning about the search engines, trying to see that stuff online.
2) What is SEO Automatic and why should webmasters / site owners be interested in it?
“SEO Automatic” as a whole is a free membership site where I share some unique tools, WordPress plug-ins, an iPhone app, and some insights into automation of some of the time-consuming and repetitive tasks that people are faced with on a day-to-day basis.
Site owners should be interested in using the instant URL review where with just one click, they can find out nearly everything they need to know about there on page ranking factors of a given URL. Not only do we define and explain exactly what’s going on, but we also give details, links, and provide most of the steps to “fix” what may be wrong.
Webmasters and SEO’s should be interested in it because everything there can save them a pretty substantial amount of time, when compared to doing things manually. Whether it’s setting up a WordPress blog the right way, or creating links to multiple URLs with varying anchor text, all of our development energy has gone into one thing, which is essentially trying to replicate human effort that would otherwise have to be outsourced or done yourself.
3) I ran the SEMpdx website through the SEO Automatic URL Review and was very impressed with the detail of information generated. But, in 2010, how important are the on-page factors mentioned in your site review?
Thanks for saying so! The URL review at SEO Automatic is sort of the flagship of the site, and yeah, it is pretty detailed. I remember wracking my brain trying to come up with more and more things the tools could check for, even though in my heart I had (and still have) some skepticism about how important all them are.
While on the one hand I’ll probably take some flak for saying that none of it means a damn thing if you have the right inbound links, on the other hand, you have to give yourself a fighting chance, because everybody and their brother seems to “know SEO” these days, so getting those fundamentals to be as good as they can be make sense.
In the old days, all you had to do with stuff phrases into your keyword meta-tag and you could be at the top of AltaVista in an hour. I don’t even know if external factors had any relevance at all in their algorithm, and all it took was to simply mention something on the site.
Google swung the pendulum far in the other direction by putting so much emphasis on inbound links, and far less for on-page factors. I think it was in part because some things were being abused so heavily, so Google completely discounted any ranking value at all for the meta-keyword tag and for the description tag, and many SEO’s were saying even ALT tags were dead too.
However, as we all know, the top-heavy weighting of external factors created a huge black market for buying links, and I think Google’s very existence was in danger if they didn’t step in and begin cracking down hard on link brokers.
I’ve always believed that on page factors were important, and to this day I still recommend adding a meta keyword tag or two for every page, and I do it myself on nearly every blog post. Even if it’s a complete waste of time today, who’s to say that it might not come back some day, especially with the importance of tagging photos, videos and all other sorts of content?
The click-through reasons for writing a good description tag are obvious, but couldn’t those also come back as a factor someday the same way that ALT tags did? If you look back in the archives, you’ll be hard-pressed to find an old-school SEO one point or other didn’t agree that ALT tags were irrelevant. Just like keyword tags, I’ve never stopped recommending them over the years, although I admit to being a lot less diligent, because like anyone, I can be pretty lazy.
4) Please talk about the other SEO features offered at SEO Automatic.
We have several original tools besides the URL review, including a keyword multiplier, a bulk server response checker, an RSS feed tool, and an anchor text variation tool, that can be used for providing link code for authors, or even for creating variations to put into article spinning software.
We even have a free macro that makes 1000’s of links “live” in an Excel spread sheet. (doesn’t that drive you crazy?).
We’ve got a few WordPress plugins now, and we’ve turned the URL review tool into an iPhone app and into an Android app too, although we’re having some technical difficulties with the Android market that make finding the app with a phone next to impossible.
5) Please talk about the SEO Automatic WordPress plugins.
Only two of the plugins are available through the WordPress codex. The first is the Core Tweaks plug-in, which essentially saves even the most jaded expert 20 minutes when setting up a WordPress blog “correctly”.
To be clear, it doesn’t “replace” the All-in-one SEO or XML sitemaps plugins, but instead does nearly everything that they don’t, so you don’t have to do it by hand.
With over 11,000 downloads so far, multiplied by a minimum of 20 minutes saved for each download used just once, I figure we’ve conservatively saved people over 3500 man-hours, and that’s something I’m pretty proud of.
The other plug-in that’s available through WordPress is one that gives you all the main SEO tools we offer at SEO Automatic, with the exception of the URL review. The Keyword List Multiplier, the Bulk URL checker, the Link Variance tool, and the RSS Feed Commander are all in this one plugin, and should work on any WordPress blog EXCEPT one hosted in a Windows environment.
We also have a couple of beta plug-ins, one called Affiliate Store Creator that allows an affiliate to take a merchant datafeed, and import it right into their WordPress, creating a unique page for every single product. It still has a couple of things I’d like to see improved, like search engine friendly URLs, having pages to add it to your XML site map, and ultimately perhaps varying the descriptions with the manufacturer provides.
Frankly though, I’m not sure we’ll come back to this one anytime soon, at least not until affiliate merchants can provide respectable data feeds in a reasonable format. The poor quality of most affiliate feeds made for a frustrating experience. If your feed is perfect, it works great, but the level of support needed when someone’s merchant gives them a feed with weird characters can be very time consuming, and that’s why we never brought it to the WP plug-in directory.
We also have a plug-in that I WAS especially proud of called the “SEO Automatic Nofollowizer” that I thought was going to set the world on fire. We released it the day before SMX Advanced 2009, and two days before Matt Cutts announced to the world that PR sculpting using no follow was dead.
Sitting in the audience that day my heart literally bounced off the floor when I realized that nearly four months of development was for nothing, and I only mention it here because we’re trying to resurrect it in some other form – maybe we’ll call it the “link juicer” 
The last WordPress plug-in is a paid one, a white label / brandable version of our Instant URL review, which allows a search marketer to run the URL review in their own environment, not only giving instant SEO reviews, but controlling all of the advice, the ranking factor choices, the definitions of those factors, and defining the high / low parameters for things like file size and the number of outbound links on a page.
For the first version of our own SEO review tool, I had to provide my programmer with all of my definitions and advice ahead of time, and when I wanted to make a change, I actually had to go in and edit the code.
After three or four times making changes, I realized that I had to access it from inside the WordPress admin so I had it turned into a WordPress plugin for convenience. I never intended to make the review tool for sale until one day at a conference someone told me that he loved my tool, and in fact had sold a site critique for $1500!
He said he took my SEO automatic URL report, then copy / pasted it into his company letterhead, then removed my links, changed the content slightly, and got paid. That’s when it dawned on me to actually sell the plugin to Internet marketing firms.
This tool is far more than just a “white label” SEO report, because it’s actually using the exact results, advice, links, and information that the marketer wants to show to the end user. To my knowledge, nothing like this has ever existed, and if it had, I would have bought it years ago.
6) Why is WordPress the platform of choice for blog / site creation?
Developers love WordPress because it has a big community, and there are plug-ins for literally every function you can think of. In fact, if you can imagine it, and a plug-in doesn’t already exist, you can find a developer to build you a plug-in that will make it happen.
End-users and non-techies love WordPress because it’s so easy to use. Once you know the basics, even a monkey can add or edit content, from any Internet connected computer anywhere in the world with no special software required.
SEO’s love WordPress because – well… the SEO is automatic! Nearly all of the on page SEO can be taken care of, and there’s even a plug-in that pings Google with a new XML site map immediately for every addition. It’s not uncommon to have a new post indexed by Google in as little as 90 seconds, and that’s a lot of power.
Google doesn’t actually “love WordPress” and they don’t even necessarily “love blogs”. In reality, Google loves “properly created websites” and if WordPress is set up correctly, it’s got everything a search engine could love.
The dinosaur days of using Dreamweaver or FrontPage to manually edit .html are long gone, and any developer that tells you otherwise is simply trying to get you locked into a maintenance agreement, or they are “afraid” of learning CSS and .php.
7) What WordPress plugins do you recommend for a blog / site that wants to “cover all its bases” for both SEO & Social Media?
This month? There are 1.2 bazillion different plugins, and our “preferences” change all the time. Also, the more plugins you use, the more your performance can suffer, and the higher the risk you have for conflicts.
That said, these are a few that I can’t live without…
Setup with our own Core Tweaks
YARPP – Yet Another Related Posts Plugin
Also indispensable?
I’m sure some people will have some valid reasons for not using ANY of these plug-ins, but for the most part, I do like these the best for what they are trying to accomplish.
8) Many folks (including me) are reasonably clueless about webhosting. If you are looking for a balance of functionality and reliability at a reasonable price point for a web host, what are some tips & tricks to be able to achieve that balance?
For every person that tells you that a given web hosting service is great, you’ll find plenty more to tell you that it sucks. No matter how big the service, there’s always going to be some sort of problem at some point, because that’s the nature of computers. Does your computer work perfectly all the time?
Remember that “99.8 percent uptime” still means the site could be down more than 17 hours a year, and invariably, that timing will be at a critical moment. The key is how quickly your host reacts to those problems, and if you’re looking for a web host, I’d recommend calling their tech support line BEFORE you sign up rather than after there’s a problem.
On the other hand, if you have a mission critical site, which can NEVER afford downtime, then I think the most economical way to ensure uptime is to have a second web hosting account, then manage your DNS at a third-party service.
If one host goes down or becomes unavailable, then the service will send internet traffic to the other host instead. The cost of these DNS management services is about $50 a year per domain, and you can get a second backup host with unlimited domains pretty cheaply.
Check out the SEO Tools guide at Search Engine Journal.
SEO Automatic for the People: My Interview with Scott Hendison
View full post on Search Engine Journal
“Get a Job Interview in 30 secs” via TwitJobSearch-Skype-Twitter Mashup
May 21st
Speak of harnessing technology. TwitJobSearch has dramatically shortened the recruiting cycle thanks to its new app that links Skype to Twitter, enabling candidates to “Get a Job Interview in 30 secs”.
Click to read the rest of this post…
View full post on Search Engine Watch Blog
Jobs of the Future: Interview with Liz Gray, Faculty Member at Fanshawe College in London, Ontario
May 19th
Seo Do young – interview p1
May 16th
Seo Do young – interview p1 . Seo Do young of Springwaltz , unstoppable marriage
