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SEO Interview Part 1
By admin | July 29, 2008
Interviewer: So how is your website doing? Are you getting as many hits as you would like? Are you a web-master concerned about maximum web exposure for your clients? Well then maybe you need to spend some time thinking about Search Engine Optimization. Well that’s just what we’re here today to talk about with Jerry West. Jerry is a Search Engine Specialist with a website dedicated to making search engines work for you. Welcome Jerry.
Jerry West: Thank you.
Interviewer: And Jerry your website makes some pretty strong claims or even accusations about search engine gurus as you call them and you say that there is a lot of misinformation floating around in cyberspace about search engine strategies; can you explain?
Jerry West: Yeah; there’s–there’s a ton–basically I’ve been an SEO for 10 years and some of my favorite misconceptions out there is well–the–the [vaunted] guaranteed placements or guaranteed listing–many SEO firms will go through and–and state this claim and what will happen is they’ll either target keyword phrases that generate so little traffic that yes, you’ll be at the top but you’ll receive no traffic, no sales; therefore your money is wasted. Or, they’ll offer you a guarantee and this is a great guarantee; the guarantee goes like this. We guarantee that we’ll do the work, get you traffic, or we’ll keep doing the work for you for free until we–we get there. The problem with that guarantee–while it sounds good–it says nothing about getting your money back; it’s basically holding your money hostage. If an SEO can’t get it right the first time they’re not going to get it right the second, third, or fourth time, and what ends up happening you end up firing the SEO firm, they keep your money, and you try to find someone else to go to.
Another one is still even though they’ve–they’ve been dead for about six years is meta-tags. People think that Search Engine Optimization lives and dies with meta-tags. They’ve been dead since 2000. Google has never read them but people just for some reason think that meta-tags are–are the way to go through to get their website highly indexed and highly placed and that’s just not the case.
There’s a few others that–that really can–can go through and–and hit you; for example–well right now Google is really big on linking okay. It’s been said that the more links you have the better–the better you do with Google. So people will say well in order for me to trick Google I’ll do a three-way link exchange, meaning I link to you, you link to a third party, and that third party links to me. That way Google can’t detect that we’re doing a link exchange. That in itself is what–what we call a mind crime meaning that’s false information. Google can detect these; they find them and they punish the websites that go through and do them. Mind crime can be defined as well essentially I talk about on the website how certain search engine gurus are out there lying on purpose and the reason why they’re doing this is they want to protect their business. They don’t want the threat of competition; therefore they spread misinformation to lead a lot of people astray so their business stays protected–[inaudible] launching a whole site dedicated to educate people on the real power of SEO, how to do it, the right path, and to insure that you don’t get led astray–led astray by these basically misconceptions and outright lies.
Interviewer: Wow; well it seems to be important at this point Jerry to–since you started giving us some definitions, there seems to be a whole separate language for the search engine area of expertise, so maybe we can go over some of the terminology before we get into the details.
Jerry West: Sure.
Interviewer: You mentioned mind crime; can you go ahead and describe that again–mind crime?
Jerry West: Well a mind crime is–it’s a brand new term that’s been coined–it’s just been a few years old and just essentially it’s–it’s when a community secretly holds valuable information in order to further their own success and they purposely lie to outsiders by spreading this information like meta-tags and three-way linking and such so they’re able to grow their own fortunes without the threat of competition. That’s the bottom line is they don’t want competition, so they will–. You know I’ve talked to countless people who have gone to seminars or bought e-Books or took–took an SEO course. They all say the–say the same thing; I–I did exactly what they said to do but it didn’t work or I did what they said and my site got banned. Well why is that? Well they–they–that happened because they didn’t tell you the truth. They do it unfortunately on purpose.
Interviewer: Well that’s scary. How about meta-tags; you mentioned them? I’m a layperson, again what–what is meta-tags?
Jerry West: Meta-tags were first created to kind of–well catalog the internet. When search engines and I mean this is back–back in you know ’94 and ’95 over 10 years ago; they–you know it was–it was very similar to the–the card catalog when you went to the library. There was an area to put in a description so that the search engine would know what your website was about. But it had a–a keyword meta-tag where you would put your keyword phrases in there and so the search engine was better able to understand exactly all the phrases that it should rank you for. Well this was a very good idea; the problem is what unethical people did. They would go through and–and put in keyword phrases in their meta-tags that had nothing to do with their website. If they had a website selling a–you know synthetic motor–motor oil but they would go through and you know put in like Brittney Spears or they would put in some other unrelated keyword phrases in an attempt to get traffic albeit unrelated traffic but traffic none–nonetheless to their website.
What ended up happening is this became–became such a widespread problem. You know when Google stormed on the scene you know they came out in ’98 and they–they basically took off in 2000; they knew that if they were going to be a qualified search engine they could not read meta-tags and basically take–take over the market share. That’s one of the big reasons why Google did so well–is because they ignored the meta-tags and just scored on not only what the website said but what other websites said about that page. But essentially meta-tag in itself it’s a waste of time. Websites are not ranked well just by using meta-tags. Sure, Yahoo and MSN still use them but they have downgraded the use of them [and relying on them] to a–to a degree that you know just–just doesn’t make sense to rely on them.
Interviewer: All right; so Google is a search engine. Now is Yahoo a directory or a search engine?
Jerry West: Yahoo is actually both.
Interviewer: Okay.
Jerry West: Yahoo was a directory for many, many years and their–the search portal–they used for years was a search engine or a search–search database called [Ink Me]; they’re also located in the San Francisco Bay area right there with Yahoo and also Google is right there, too. Yahoo was a great directory and they charged a fee to be listed. And they decided that search was starting to be–become very, very powerful, so they actually merged–they actually had a very nice agreement with Google back in 2000–and in fact it happened on Independence Day of the US–July 4th 2000. Google started supplying Yahoo their search results and this–this–this occurred for about–about two years until Yahoo went out and buy [Ink Me] outright, so now when you do a search in Yahoo it’s Yahoo Search–no longer Google–no longer Google but also is many people have the–the misconception. Again we got back to the term mind crime; they have the–the misconception that getting a directory listing is going to give them a nice placement in–in Yahoo.
Interviewer: Sure.
Jerry West: That’s not true.
Interviewer: Not true? [Emphasis Added] Hmm; okay.
Jerry West: No; because what happens–if you go to Yahoo right now you’ll see that there is–it’s defaults to the search box. You have to actually click on directory to search the directory and very–very few people go through and do that route. In fact, our testing shows that the average site that we–we have over 300 test domains that we have, the average site that we have in the Yahoo directory gets 64 referrals from Yahoo directory. Now you’re paying $300 a year to get into Yahoo directory at 64 referrals? That’s a very expensive cost per click.
Interviewer: Well why don’t you name off a few of the other search engines that actually can compete with Google in your opinion.
Jerry West: Well there’s only two and that is Yahoo and MSN.
Interviewer: MSN, okay.
Jerry West: All the others–for example Ask Jeeves gets–has so little market share that it’s not worth doing anything with those; it’s just the three–Google, MSN, and Yahoo. And people will always point all the time that you know Ask Jeeves has a six-percent market share and that’s–that’s not actually true. What happens is these numbers are often times convoluted by the media; you know we always rely on the media to–to tell us the truth.
Interviewer: Sure. [Laughs]
Jerry West: They don’t always do a very good job. What I look for in the 300 test domains that we–we go through and use, we look at actual click-through(s). We don’t care about searches, okay; the reason why we don’t care about that is if you’re in business to get traffic from the search engine you’re more concerned over a click to your website than you are a search that’s performed. I’ll give you an example; if you look at Yahoo–when you do a search with Yahoo there’s a lot of stuff that comes up, a lot of ads, a lot of extra things that are–are on the screen that can cause distraction.
Interviewer: Right.
Jerry West: You get to use the click somewhere else besides this–a search result. That’s what we’re looking at here is–is the percentage of the–of the community that gets the actual traffic.
Interviewer: Okay; all right I can tell you have a lot to say about a lot of these. Let’s just go quickly through a few more terms, just so we know what–what you’re talking about okay.
Jerry West: Certainly.
Interviewer: The first one is ad sense.
Jerry West: Well ad sense essentially is–this is a part of Google and Google launched their advertising platform called Adwords several years ago. And just after they launched Adwords they allowed website owners to host Google’s ads on their own pages. So for example, if you had a website you could allow Google to show their ads on your–on your web page. Now Google is very, very smart; they can actually in less–less than a second they can spider your page and display ads that actually are relevant to the content on that page.
Interviewer: Hmm; that makes sense.
Jerry West: Now what Google will do for you–if someone clicks on an ad Google will do a web share with you. For example, if the advertiser paid $1 for that click-through, so they were willing to pay $1 for it. Of course, the actual ratios aren’t know but we’ll just go through and use an example–Google would give you 60-cents of that $1 and they would keep 40. As an incentive to keep driving more traffic to your web pages, so their revenue goes up and so does yours. And there’s been a lot of people who have made an awful lot of money with ad sense and there’s been a lot more people who have tried it and failed.
Interviewer: Okay; ad sense–. Page rank–why is page rank important?
Jerry West: Page rank–if–if you use the Google toolbar you’ll know that page rank with Google will show up as a little green bar indicator. I refer it–I refer to it as the green bar addiction. It essentially is people are so–so worried about page rank; what page rank is–it essentially is–it’s Google’s way of grading a page in its authoritativeness or its importance.
Interviewer: Okay.
Jerry West: It’s a scale from zero to ten–of course ten being the highest. The site that graded at a ten would be like Yahoo, Google, and such; eights and nines would be CNN, ESPN; you know the–the really big names that you will always hear about. But people have for some reason just realized that they have to have a high page rank in order to make it, and while that was true about–about two years ago this is another mind crime issue right here. It’s not the case anymore; in fact if you go through and do searches throughout Google you’ll notice if you click on–on each result in the top ten almost every time you’ll find one or two sites that have a zero, one, or two page rank and maybe wonder well how can that be you know–they’re so low. That’s because Google has more than 110 different pieces of criteria that go into their algorithm and page rank is just one of those.
Interviewer: Okay.
Jerry West: And what people should also realize too is this information–Google is very protective of what they have because they have the larger share of the market–of the market; they’re protective of how their algorithm works. So what they’ll show you is actually about four to six months old; it’s not current information so that–that page rank that you see is not current. It’s not accurate and that’s why a lot of people make very, very poor decisions in terms of who they partner with or who they will accept advertising from because of–well I’m not doing business with these guys; they have a low page rank. Well that’s not really a good way to do business.
Interviewer: It’s not a good indicator at that point?
Jerry West: No; no, it’s not because it’s–it’s old information and people–like I said before, they’re just you know–it’s an addiction. They’re–they’re just so fueled by this and they’re–they’re led astray in terms of their vision and why they’re in business to–to begin with.
Interviewer: Okay; well we can talk more about that later. Why don’t you tell me–well I’ve heard of the Maryland–University of Maryland Terps but I’ve never heard of SERPS.
Jerry West: [Laughs] Yeah; the–the term SERPS–S-E-R-P-S–it stands for Search Engine Results Pages–and you’ll hear SEO(s) talk about SERPS all the time and all that references to is when you do a search and you click on the search button what displays–that’s the SERPS.
Interviewer: Okay.
Jerry West: Very–very simple and straightforward answer.
Interviewer: Okay; black hat, white hat–you talk about that on your website. They sound like cowboys to me.
Jerry West: Black hat and white hat, yes; basically that is–it’s pretty much understood you know. The black hats are the bad guys; the white–the white hats are the good guys. In terms of SEO, a black hat would be one who would engage in techniques that would violate the search engine guidelines. For example, Google has various guidelines that you can’t do certain things and black hats will violate those in terms of they’re generating more traffic quickly. Without getting too technical there’s a term called cloaking that’s been out for years and years and years and essentially what it refers to is you’re able to show the search engine one page and show the visitor another. Now how it works is this; we all know that search engines love content. They don’t particularly like java script, graphics, tables and such–
Interviewer: Right.
Jerry West: So what a black hat will do is it will create a page that’s very content heavy and it will also have a page that’s very much–has flash, java script, very much intuitive, very beautiful page. What will happen is the search engine will come to index the site and the cloaking script to the text the IP Address. And it says okay; let’s see what IP Address is–this is. Oh this is MSN; so it will give the MSN-[bot] a page specifically optimized for MSN. So MSN indexes this page, it ranks well; now you or I click on this listing. The cloaking script detects that we’re not a search engine spider; we’re a real person–we’re a browser. So the search engine–the–the cloaking script will serve the very beautiful page.
Interviewer: Hmm.
Jerry West: So that’s how cloaking works; the term cloaking in my view–it’s a wrong term.
Interviewer: Okay.
Jerry West: It should be called IP Delivery.
Interviewer: Okay.
Jerry West: Now let me give you a better idea why cloaking or IP Delivery was–was–was first introduced back. I helped–helped write a script back in ’96 for Ford Motor Company. What they wanted to do is if someone let’s say in–in Japan went to www.ford.com–
Interviewer: Okay.
Jerry West: Well Ford didn’t want them to go to www.ford.com and have it click on the flag for the Japanese version of the site. Instead they wanted an automatic detection of where this person was logging in from and giving them the site closest to them. So the IP Delivery or the IP Detection would say okay, this is not–this is an IP address from Japan. We serve them automatically the Japanese version of the website. That’s how IP Delivery or cloaking started and that was the main reason for it. It became popular because it was very easy to go through and manipulate the search engines and show one page, display another and so forth. The–the whole concept behind it is fine; it’s the use of it that’s wrong. And the–the biggest problem is the content won’t match. They’ll have a page that’s highly ranked for an off-topic and they’ll–they’ll switch them to another–very much a–a bait and switch type of situation, you know. You search for–we used the–the example before–you–you search for a motor oil substitute and you’re rerouted to a pornography site. This happened–was it ’00–was it ’01, there was some hijacking done to the Smithsonian page so people would think they–they were going to the Smithsonian website; instead they got routed to a pornography site.
Interviewer: So if the–
Jerry West: That was a huge problem. In fact it actually led to legislation that President Clinton put in that you could not use trademark terms in your meta-tags. You–you had–you had grade school children in class doing searches and the teacher would–what they thought was the Smithsonian page–
Interviewer: Right, right.
Jerry West: –they’d be redirected to a porn site.
Interviewer: And those were the black hats behind all of that?
Jerry West: Exactly, exactly.
Interviewer: Okay; so the white hats–the white hats ride on their horses and save the day or–?
Jerry West: Well what white hats basically–they–they built websites the–the old-fashioned way. They’re all static; some–and they obey all the rules. It may take them months or years to go through and generate you know good quality traffic but they–they do so that they follow every step; they don’t violate any rules or any terms. And that’s the biggest difference between–between the white hat and the black hat; the black hat will use very, very shady techniques to generate traffic while the white hats will go through and do everything that’s clean and pure to insure that–that you know if–if for example Matt Cutts from Google would walk in and you know look at your site and he would go through and give it his blessing. Whereas the black hats would make sure that Matt Cutts couldn’t find it for–for you know–for any reason. Just you know Matt Cutts leads the–the Spam Fighting Team at Google. That’s his job.
Interviewer: Oh okay; good to know, okay. Density–density?
Jerry West: Density–what density refers to is often times called keyword density–is it’s the percentage of the use of the keyword phrase on the page. Example would be you have a 500 page–I’m sorry, a 500 word document and the keyword phrase that you use–is used–on the page five times. You would have a one-percent keyword density for that page.
Interviewer: Okay.
Jerry West: This is also where a lot of people go through and get confused and they go I need a 10–12-percent keyword density; you know that’s–you don’t want to do that. Your keyword density should be–well in fact, I’m one to always state you want to be very careful of who you listen to and where you get your information because I’m a big proponent of you build a quality site first and the traffic will come naturally just because of how–how you built it, as long as you have a very good SEO foundation.
I’ll give you some quick numbers here that in fact we got through and we pull and we–we research and target the–all the major engines very, very closely. For example, the–the density in the content itself in Google has been about one to two-percent over the last eight months. Go over to MSN and MSN ranges from two to four-percent and over at Yahoo it ranges from two to five-percent. So the–with those numbers you can basically state–is well if you’re within two to three-percent you’re going to be okay. You start getting above that and the search engine will think that you’re what’s called spamming. You’re trying to go through and keyword stuff that pays to make the page increase. I’ve got–I’ve got data that shows that if you go through and–and make those numbers too high you’ll start to fall in Google because Google looks at those numbers very, very closely and–and they want to make sure that the page is relevant. They don’t want you know someone going to the search results pages and finding–finding garbage.
Interviewer: That’s interesting; okay last but certainly not least–because I’m sure many more of these terms will come up during our conversation, but Search Engine Marketing.
Jerry West: Search Engine Marketing–also called SEM–we have Search Engine Optimization, SEO–Search Engine Marketing will encompass pay per click and that acronym is PPC and you know all the major engines have a way to go through and–and show advertisements on the SERPS, the Search Engine Results Pages. Search Engine Marketing also includes affiliate marketing and I’ll briefly touch on that. Essentially what–what affiliate marketing is–is you sell other people’s products for commission. An example would be Sony–Sony has an affiliate program and the average payout is about eight-percent, so if you through your marketing efforts send a visitor to Sony and that person buys Sony would give you eight-percent of that sale. It’s very similar to what we do every day; you know people ask us all the time, you know where do you get your hair cut? Who is your doctor, and so on and so forth? And we give out our recommendations but very rarely do we get a check for 20-percent of the surgery that your doctor does right? But affiliate marketing–
Interviewer: Wouldn’t that be nice?
Jerry West: –allows you to get a commission based upon your recommendation and that’s why affiliate marketing has really been a powerful source in SEM or Search Engine Marketing.
Interviewer: Okay; well now that that’s–we’re through with some of this terminology you’re free to toss around those words at will. So it’s all about getting traffic and getting to the top of the list, so Jerry what do we need to know before we find someone to help us with SEO?
Jerry West: Good question; like I said earlier, I’ve been doing–doing this for 10 years and a lot of people have–well let me back up. The first thing that you want to do is actually sit down and make a plan on what you want to accomplish. I know that may sound kind of hokey but most people don’t have a vision or a plan of action, so they get into a web business without any type of direction and they wonder why in six months they haven’t made–made any money or they may be in the hole–because they don’t know where they want to go. So get down on paper what it is that you want to accomplish. And therefore you can then start to understand who your target audience is, understand who your public is; if you have to do surveys, do surveys.
Once we have that understanding you can begin to do keyword research, starting to understand what people are searching for–you know www.wordtracker.com has a very nice database where you can go through and find out what people are searching for. You want to insure that the traffic that comes to your website is traffic that will buy. Don’t get suckered into the thought of I have to get a ton of traffic; I have to throw stuff up on the wall and just see what sticks. No; I don’t–I’m against that philosophy. I’m of the philosophy of you drill down and you find out exactly what people who are deep into the buying cycle–back up here to the buying cycle for–for a moment. The buying cycle can be anywhere from someone doing initial research to doing extensive research to the point where they’re ready to buy. If you bring someone to your website who is just doing the initial research the chances of them buying are very, very slim. If you bring someone in who is at the very end of the buying cycle–for example a–you know the actual Sony component, the actual part number–that’s someone who is looking to buy right?
Interviewer: Right.
Jerry West: But someone who just types in DVD player–that probably is not someone who is looking to buy right now, so you wanted to insure that your time, effort, and advertising go into bringing people in who are at the very end of that buying cycle. Sure, you’ll get people who are at the beginning but the ones that you’re targeting–that you’re spending the most amount of your time are those ones who are ready to buy.
There’s other areas you want to go through and look at too. And those are website design to insure that it’s user-friendly, the copy or the words on the page make sense; this is where SEO(s) really have a hard time. They go through and they–they sprinkle keyword phrases all through their text. [Laughs] Then you go back and read the text and it doesn’t make any sense. People read it and they go ah, this doesn’t make any sense. Yes; they have a number one ranking but if the user is not going to convert into a buy it’s not worth it is it? And that’s where people get confused.
So if I can give any advice that–that’s really taken today and that is you want to insure that your traffic is qualified traffic.
Interviewer: Okay.
Jerry West: Now you’ll start to understand or look at web logs and that is it’s detailed information about the people who come to your website, how they got there, how long they stayed, what pages they saw, what page they left on; this is key information so you can understand–wait a minute; 68-percent of my visitors are leaving off this page and they’re not buying. I need to go and do something with that page to–to insure that my conversion ratios will be–will be better. Sometimes it’s not about getting more traffic; it’s actually doing something with the traffic you already have coming to your website.
Interviewer: And this is the job of the SEO?
Jerry West: This–this can be–you–this is more of an SEO/SEM, someone who has good experience marketing, copyrighting–there are some fantastic SEO(s) out there that have great experience in all aspects of marketing. This is not just about driving traffic. This is actually taking that traffic and getting them to buy because seriously that’s all that matters at the end right; how often does the cash register ring?
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