« SEO Interview Part 1 | Home | Keyword Research »
SEO Interview Part 2
By admin | August 1, 2008
Interviewer: Right, right.
Jerry West: That’s–that’s what we’re–what we’re here for right?
Interviewer: Okay; so just to recap–before we find an SEO we need to have a good idea of what our goals are, we need to know who is our target audience, and then the SEO can help us find out what people are searching for, do some keyword research into our particular product or website, help us with design, and make sure there’s qualified traffic coming to our website?
Jerry West: Exactly; if you have a very good understanding of what you want this will help the SEO do their job better and one thing you want to make sure that you do is once you pick out a very good SEO–let them do their job. You know–you know too often we–we try to go through and you know micro-manage the people that we outsource to and–and that can lead to–to a disaster very, very quickly.
Interviewer: Now you mentioned the website designers that actually sprinkle the keywords throughout the–the website just to try to get that traffic. Can you–can you give us any examples of you know some really out there websites that may have had that happen?
Jerry West: I don’t have any off the top of my head because the ones that–that I’ve–I’ve used for years as examples, they’ve–they’ve all changed their copy but I’m sure everyone has seen them out there. They’ll read the actual text and it’s–and you can tell it’s keyword stuff because there’s just–
Interviewer: It doesn’t make a lot of sense?
Jerry West: Not only that; it–it–every other word is bolded or in a different color and it makes it very, very much–very unreadable and it just–it does not convert well.
Interviewer: All right; so how do I find someone? Do I Google them if I’m looking for an SEO? [Laughs]
Jerry West: You know it’s funny you should–you should say that. That’s probably the best place to–to start, because again if the search engine guru is not high listed then why are you bothering trying to hire them to do the same for you? That’s one place to start; the second is talk to associates, talk to–if you have a good relationship of not necessarily with your competitors but with people close to your industry ask them who they would recommend. You know sometimes it’s not always going with the biggest firm, but someone who has–I mean there’s many SEO(s) who work out of their home who are very, very good and will do as good of a job or better than you’d get from a very large SEO firm. It’s–it’s basically–it’s–there’s a few components; one would be your budget, two would be the time that you need to see results, and three is going to be your industry too. You know if–if you’re trying to crack into the casino industry it’s not really going to matter who you hire; it’s going to be very, very expensive and it will take a long time to do. But if you have a revolutionary product that you want to get out there on–on the market, almost any SEO can go through and help you get exposure and start bringing in traffic.
Interviewer: Okay.
Jerry West: I would probably ask three questions–three key questions. One, ask them what their methodology is and that’s basically what methods they use; two, you want to ask them of course how long they’ve been doing SEO; and third ask them if they’re certified.
Interviewer: Oh there’s actually a certification?
Jerry West: And most really good SEO(s) are going to be certified and what that means is they went to a–a higher up company and they learned the basics, the intermediary areas and also the advanced techniques to do proper SEO.
Interviewer: Okay; good information–well it’s no secret that internet and technology has changed the way we market you know. Everyone and every business has a website now days and they’re all vying for attention in the marketplace and obviously this has become a major portion of our advertising budget. You can target your audience so much more specifically and how–can you give us an idea of what percentage of the advertising budget this is taking up at this point?
Jerry West: It–it really depends upon the company or the–or the individual who is doing the advertising online. It’s–it’s been growing at a rate that’s just–it’s almost doubling you know every single year. For–for a Fortune 500 firm the numbers that I’ve seen range between 13 and 22-percent.
Interviewer: Wow.
Jerry West: That they’re now spending to go through and do not just online marketing but this is also taking care of their website maintenance and such so it’s–it’s–if you went back to 2000 most Fortune 500 companies were spending you know one, two-percent of their overall budget and now we’re seeing that really escalate and even–even just the paid per click numbers are–are almost doubling every year in terms of money spent.
Interviewer: So Search Engine Marketing has really become a whole new area of marketing and advertising; that’s interesting.
Jerry West: It has; it’s–it’s now being considered a very serious player and it’s no longer you know looked at as the–the black magic so to speak that it’s been known for–for years.
Interviewer: Well what’s going on out there in cyberspace that website owners and web-masters need–websites such as yours or an SEO or an SEM?
Jerry West: Well we–we talked about this before about the misinformation.
Interviewer: Okay.
Jerry West: You know the www.seomindcrime.com site we’ve–we’ve been talking about is–was put together for–for a few key reasons–one is of course to clear up misconceptions and two it’s going to give you–we talked about white hat and black hate–.
Interviewer: Right.
Jerry West: I’m in charge of the white hat side and Keith Baxter who is known as one of the–one of the biggest cloak(ers) out there right now he’s handling the black–the black hat side and what you’ll learn here is basically you’re learn both the white hat and black hat techniques and you’ll understand every methodology in terms of internet marketing–what works and what doesn’t because we’re not just a couple of guys who go around and–and talk to people and–and sell information–no. We’re in the trenches. You know if you’re an affiliate marketer and if you’re an SEO we’re in the trenches right along with you. These are–this is real information from real websites that we’ve done and essentially we’re–we’re releasing this because you know we’re both really tired of the–of the misinformation.
You need to have a really good foundation, a good foundation of not only what to do but how to do it. You know Keith and I have gone through and–and sometimes spent you know weeks–months or even years learning–learning a process and instead we’re going to go through and show you exactly what took us all this time to learn, so it’s going to you know reduce your amount of pain so to speak. But essentially if we step back for a moment and the one aspect that really causes most people to fail online is not lack of traffic, is not lack of sales, is not lack of knowledge; often times it’s the lack of the ability to get things done themselves. They–they–they lack direction–
Interviewer: And information.
Jerry West: –they lack focus.
Interviewer: Yeah, yeah, direction and information.
Jerry West: So along with what we have in terms of information we also have some key information that will help you overcome–so you know things as simple as you know understanding the key things to do and how to get motivated enough to get them done.
Interviewer: Hmm.
Jerry West: I’ve talked to you know hundreds and thousands–hundreds and sometimes thousands of–of website managers, site owners over the years and it’s always apparent the reason why they’re failing and the reason why they’re struggling–because of them. They don’t have the–the drive that they need to get over that hump.
Interviewer: It’s totally understandable because technology changes so fast; I mean how can any of us–especially small business people keep up with the changes? I mean we really need you guys. [Laughs]
Jerry West: Right; and–and you don’t just need us. What–what you really need is almost the–the release from you know the fear, the–the unknown that–that you just can’t seem to–to smash through. There’s–I’ll give you a great example; we went through and–I was–I was doing a workshop in Orlando about a year and a half ago and this gentleman, he was in a–a tremendous niche. He had a great niche market, a great product, and actually went through and found three key holes that all he needed to do was–was to fix them and invest about $20,000 in terms of advertising and the projection was he would make over $1,000,000 that year. I mean we were talking about a serious ROI.
Interviewer: Can you mention what the product was?
Jerry West: Unfortunately I can’t just because I’ve got a non-disclosure with–with everyone I talk to.
Interviewer: Okay; all right.
Jerry West: But the issue is this; six months later I call him up and check to see how he’s doing. He never did it because he was too overcome in fear to invest that $20,000. But he knew that he would make the $1,000,000. The problem was there was still some doubt in his mind, you know. We all–we all have [Laughs] those great conversations with–with ourselves right that–that we just can’t do it.
Interviewer: Right.
Jerry West: And that–that almost always is a downfall. Most SEO(s), most website owners in this business are either single person entities or two or three person operations and sometimes you have a lot going against you but you have the information, you have the technology and you have the tools–but what you lack is the confidence in yourself to actually get it done. It’s–to me it’s amazing you know–some people even have a glass ceiling where–where–where I had one gentleman who said he–he had never made more than X-amount in his career in a given year. And even though he had the tools to triple that number he was like I–I can’t do it because I can’t fathom making that much money.
Interviewer: Wow; well–
Jerry West: So they–they don’t do it and–and most people say well how–you know why would they do that? I can’t believe they would do that but then we turn around and we actually find ourselves in that same exact situation and that’s–that’s unfortunate.
Interviewer: So you’re there to get us past those stumbling blocks and try to–?
Jerry West: You know I’m–I’m not there to go through and do any kind of rah-rah motivational speaking; that’s not–that’s not who I am but what I will do and what we have available is very simplistic exercises to go through that will help you systematically get through your barriers. I’ll give you a great example; I–I carry with me all the time and of course this is going off-subject but I think it’s–it’s relevant. I carry with myself a business journal okay and I don’t keep one on my computer; I write things down and the reason why I do that is I feel there’s a certain aspect between the brain, your–your hand and a pen that–that causes creativity to really have–have a jumpstart. I take it–I take this everywhere with me; in fact I’ve had tremendous ideas with a snowboard strapped to my–to my feet up on–up on the mountain. But I know for sure if I wait until I get back home to write down the idea it’s–it’s going to be gone.
Interviewer: Right.
Jerry West: It’s not–it’s not going to be there in its entirety so if I start to write it down immediately the idea will start to grow. And because you write it down the idea may not–may not work today; this happened to me last October. Last October I grabbed a–going on a flight back East and I grabbed the wrong business journal on accident or grabbed one from two year’s previous, so I decided on the plane to go through some of my old ideas. And I always go back through about six months later and make comments and this one idea I had written in the margin in red ink–stupidest idea ever. [Laughs] And I underlined it right; well technology had changed. The market had shifted and as I read this idea I’m like wait a minute. This can work now. When I got off the plane I called my staff back at the office and told them the idea and the spin that I wanted to do on it, caught a cab to go to my hotel; by the time I got to the hotel my staff had done all the keyword research, gotten the basic foundation of the website down and by the end of the day we had a website up, the campaign was going to be launched in about two or three days and this single idea has been the biggest money-maker of our company.
Interviewer: Wow; I love that story.
Jerry West: The only reason why that happened is because I kept a business journal and I wrote it down and I was able to go back through and remember an old idea, dust it off, give it a spin–bam–there’s success.
Interviewer: Well that’s inspiring. Okay; Jerry so–so I’m your client and I hire you to help me out with my website. What are some of the strategies you might recommend? Let’s just get down to brass tacks for maximizing my search engine present for my website?
Jerry West: Okay; so basically you’ve got a website and you want to go through and just maximize your presence–a few key–a few key issues you want to look at–one, the first thing that I would do would be to look at your–at your web logs. I want to know what’s happened. If you’re failing I want to know why. If you have some success I also want to know the reasons behind that too. I want to look at conversion ratios and what conversion ratios are is the number of fails divided by the number of unique visitors and currently on the web you’re looking about .7 to .9-percent–less than one-percent, not too good. If–if you’re suffering from there a great book for you to get is a book called Call to Action and you can get that at Amazon–about $15-bucks, hardcover. What this will show you is ways to go through and increase your conversion ratios from the one to two-percent to seven to eight-percent or even more.
I want to look at where your traffic is coming from. I want to see what keywords you’re targeting. Also I want to see if the actual search engines are able to index your site, you know. I had–I had a Fortune 500 company call me about three years ago wanting help and they said we–we have no–we have no traffic from Google whatsoever. Well the problem was they actually had a line in their robot–robot [inaudible] file that was excluding Google from indexing their site. It’s amazing some of the–the small and unknowingly bad mistakes a lot of web-masters of the large companies make.
Interviewer: And simply? [Laughs]
Jerry West: So I look at–look at–to make sure that your site is currently being indexed. That’s always a big issue. I will look to make sure that you have a site map through Google and I don’t mean the site map where you click on the link and it gives all the pages on your website. I’m talking about this–there’s a new program Google has called site maps which will–it’s an actual feed; it’s an XML feed that will give every page of your website to Google so it can index it and then it will tell you all the areas where you have problems. It’s–it’s almost like going to the doctor and getting a prescription; you understand what’s wrong with your website and why Google can’t index certain portions of your website.
So we’ll look at–at your keywords very, very closely. We’ll–we want to make sure that you’re targeting the right ones. We’ll look at your code; we want to make sure that your code is proper. There’s a few things we want to look at. At the very, very top of every web page should be what’s called a–the D-2-D Statement, Document Type Definition. This tells the robots and search–search engines and also the browser that’s loading your website what version of HTML your web page is created and some other–other key information. This allows your website to be loaded faster in most browsers and the search engines can actually index your site faster. But make sure you use the right one; if you use the wrong one it will have the adverse effect and you will start to get slower load times and slower or even non-indexing by the engines.
Interviewer: Okay.
Jerry West: Anyway so that’s–those are some of the key components I would go through and start looking at–to your website at the very beginning, very, very foundational–just insuring that you have–you’re–you’re compliant and you’re doing things the right way and things that you’re not doing correctly we want to get those corrected first.
Interviewer: So you would actually make the corrections or would I–would I do that myself?
Jerry West: If–if I was your SEO and you had–you know you were a one or two-person operation I’d probably do them myself just to insure they were done properly. If you’re a large company you would never give me access to–to do that, so it would be the company that would go ahead and do that.
Interviewer: Okay; now you talked about the guy who was reluctant to invest the $20,000 which could have resulted in huge sale–sales increases. Do you have any success stories you can share with us?
Jerry West: Sure; one of my favorites was just–just recently–if–you know for those people who know Google–Google well, Google has what’s called a supplemental index. It’s an index that holds pages that have been devalued; they–on the process of basically being removed from the index. Google feels they just–they just aren’t worth anything. I had a gentleman who subscribes to our service, our–our information and we went to him and wrote a step-by-step guide on How to Get out of the Google Supplemental Index Hell is what we called it. Well he had a very large client and they had I believe about 50,000 pages indexed by Google and all of them were in the supplemental–supplemental index; all the pages were. He went through and polled the guide step-by-step and in less than 30 days all 50,000 pages were removed from the supplemental index in the real Google index and traffic just went through the roof.
Interviewer: Wow.
Jerry West: And of course the client you know just treated this guy like–like a God. Well of course–of course he would because of what he was able to do. But what was amazing is–is his comment to me was it was very simple; it didn’t take all that much time; but I was able to go through and follow things step-by-step-by-step and get them done.
Interviewer: Uh-hm, okay; well can you project to say five or ten years into the future–maybe you’ve already written this in your business journal–and share what your predictions are for where we’ll be with this technology?
Jerry West: [Laughs] I–well five to ten years there’s–there’s no way. I know if you look–if you look back you know ten years ago; ten years ago the biggest search engines were Alta Vista, Magellan, Info Seek was–was a big player, Yahoo was just–was just starting out to get a lot of traffic now; you look at all those but one have–have gone away. You know even five years ago Google didn’t have the–the share they have now; they were also just really starting to get a stranglehold on the industry. It wasn’t until ’02 where they really came on.
You know five–five years from now there’s–there has to be a–a new player in the search community. There’s going to be you know–you know even one year from now you’ll see a–a drastic change probably. I’m–I’m still one that believes that Microsoft some day is going to get it right. My–my opinion is they–they hired the wrong people; they–they hired people who don’t know how to test or write an algorithm in my opinion. I think they’ll get it right and they’ll start to go through and–and they’ll use their huge influence especially what they have with the Windows platform to start taking market share away. They’ve–they’ve already started doing that already; we’ve–we’ve seen a nice spike just this month with MSN. MSN right this month is currently at about 22-percent market share which is up from the previous quarter of–they were about around between six and eight-percent on average.
Anyway my–my personal prediction is SEO and SEM will continue to climb and it will continue to be a–a huge part of the economy. We’ll start seeing you know more and more advertising being done online, more and more interactive sites, interactivity; you know five–five years I know they’ve got what Web-TV right now?
Interviewer: Right, right.
Jerry West: You know five years you–you know Direct TV and Dish Network will have–and Comcast Cable and AT&T Network will have the web fully integrated with their cable and satellite subscription. It’s just going to happen. You’ll–
Interviewer: Sure; it may not take that long, yeah.
Jerry West: [Laughs] Probably not; you may even see that in about 18 months.
Interviewer: Well I think we need–we need a new television series featuring you and your partners and you guys are the cyberspace CSI team.
Jerry West: That’s right yeah, yeah; Keith Baxter and I–that would–that would be pretty good.
Interviewer: So let’s talk about your website because you are out there to fight these atrocities that are happening out in cyberspace. If I were to plug in some key words what would be the keywords that would take me to your website?
Jerry West: Well the website that we’re launching with–with Keith Baxter is brand new. It’s not launching until July 1st. So in–in fact my main website www.webmarketingnow.com, we don’t take clients. So in–in terms of the key words that will bring up that site, we don’t market that site at all. We do 100-percent affiliate marketing, so we market other people’s products and unfortunately I can’t release any keyword phrases; thus I don’t want anyone to know what my affiliate sites are–thus they would go through and duplicate those.
Interviewer: Ah.
Jerry West: But you know for the term web-marketing, we’ve been in the top ten for years in the big three. You go–you can go to Yahoo, MSN, and Google, so essentially in fact we did–did some recent testing to it may not be in the top ten in Google but it is there and MSN and–and Yahoo. And–
Interviewer: Okay; that is your web address?
Jerry West: You’d can sign up right now to be on the waiting list so when the launch does happen July 1st you can–you can jump on it; it’s going to essentially just–it’s going to take the industry and turn it upside down. It’s–[Laughs]–it’s–it’s not going to be too bad. Keith–Keith Baxter is actually posting his–in video-form, his personal step-by-step basis to go through and give yourself a $50,000 raise.
Interviewer: Sounds good.
Jerry West: And basically you’ll be–you’ll be working your–your tail of for it but he’ll give you a step-by-step basis to do it.
Interviewer: Okay; we will definitely be going to your website and I’m sure many of our listeners will also and we–we’ll be prepared to work a lot harder afterwards. So thank you Jerry West for joining us.
Jerry West: You’re so welcome.
Interviewer: And I wish you great luck with your website and we will hopefully be seeing you in cyberspace.
Jerry West: Sounds good.
Interviewer: Well thanks for joining us today to learn everything we never knew–we never knew about Search Engine Optimization. For more information about this topic you can contact Jerry West. Happy online searching everyone….
del.icio.us Digg it Earthlink Furl iFeedReaders ma.gnolia Maple.nu Netvouz Netscape RawSugar reddit Scuttle Shadows Simpy Spurl StumbleUpon Wink Yahoo MyWebTopics: SEO |