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Travis Giggy: Hello, my name is Travis Giggy founder of smallbusinessvictory.com. I help entrepreneurs get a jump start in business.I often interview topic experts so I can learn from the best of the best. It's always a joy to speak with an expert with complete knowledge of their field of specialty. It's been a real eye opener for me to learn from the best and to pass that knowledge onto others.
Today is a special interview with the foremost expert in the field of search engine optimization. If you have a business, you should have a website. If you don't you're missing the boat. If you have a website, t hen you need to make it visible and findable by the masses of potential customers that have a need for your products or services.
Now when I think of SEO, I think of Jeremy Hermanns who I am honored to have with me on the phone today. Jeremy is a search engine specialist, certified Google advertising professional and Yahoo! Advertising ambassador. He's a graduate of the University of Southern California and is also a licensed private pilot and an accomplished sailor, which is a passion we both share, by the way. He's been across the equator twice while I have only been to Catalina Island a few times, which doesn't really compare.
Jeremy founded SimpleSEM in 2004 to help companies with their search engine marketing. Over the years he's worked with kinds like Dell, Sony, Edmunds, Amazon, PriceGrabber, General Motors, Expedia and a while lot more.
Now, Jeremy, you've got a bunch of other credentials but I don't want to fill the whole day with spouting your accomplishments in the search world. Right now I just want to know one thing. What was one of the coolest sailboats you've ever been on?
Jeremy Hermanns: It'd probably be a Privilege; it's one of the best luxury catamarans out there. Any boat that I can either dream of affording or can't currently afford, I try to get on it at least once or twice at boat show.
Travis: [laughs]
Jeremy: Yes, I think it was a quick 39 if I'm not wrong.
Travis: That sounds nice. I love catamarans. Anyway that's not what this interview's about. Jeremy, how did you get your start in SEO?
Jeremy: Sure, ironically it's kind of a backwards way. I worked with a company called the Overture. Everybody pretty much knows Overture. They're a pay-per-click firm.
Travis: Sure.
Jeremy: They invented it, if you will, pay-per-click. I got started in keywords. I worked there as a category analyst. Worked with tons and tons of query data and saw patterns and behaviors. Of course this was in time in the early 2000s when query volume was growing exponentially.We'd finish one set of research or reports and start doing analysis on the next set and we'd be astonished at just the growth. I knew basically from that point on my life was changed. I got the search bug. That's where I got my start and worked at the agency world, also at SEO and SEM and then moved on.
Now I'm doing what I'm doing with SimpleSEM and also with the SEM intelligence. What I really enjoy doing is SEO and SEM and it's been a passion of mine for just about eight years.
Travis: Eight years, why after eight years are you still so into this?
Jeremy: It's fun. Everyday you wake up and there's something new. We can always trust that Google, Yahoo!, MSN - it used to be a lot of tertiary other engines we were more concerned with mods and other directories but the main players that we've got, Google, Yahoo! And MSN, they're each different. They each have their own benefits and drawbacks, pros and cons. With what's out there it's a problem everyday that we can solve. It's a game that we can play. From my perspective anything that's been this academic and also economic is something that I just can't let go of.
Travis: Very, very cool. Alright before we jump into the SEO questions I just want to verify your nerd qualifications. Jeremy what is the earliest computer that you remember having as a child?
Jeremy: It was an Apple IIe.
Travis: No kidding. That is very, very old school.
Jeremy: Pretty old. I can say I did have an old PET at one point but really wasn't mine. It was one that my dad had in the office. The first computer that I had was an Apple IIe.
Travis: OK, you pass. [laughs]
Jeremy: [laughs]
Travis: Alright, the first question that I want to ask is what is the most striking example of SEO making real money that you've seen in your time as a search optimization specialist?
Jeremy: Well I mean there's a couple ways to I think slice that question but from my perspective, on all if not, let's say, 99 percent of the engagements I've worked on it's the most profitable channel.SEO for any company that makes money online -- I'm going to preface that; you can have a company online that doesn't make money (i.e. you're a social website, you're a nonprofit news source, etc.) -- but for a company that makes money online it's the number one stream of visitors. For a company that doesn't make money online, it's the number one stream of visitors.
You need to monetize that properly. What we really do is teach companies how to sculpt their website or build their website in a way that you maximize that potential.
Travis: OK, at its most basic level what is SEO? Can you just break it down in very simple terms for us?
Jeremy: I kind of look at it in two things. One is on-page factors and the other one is off-page factors. On-page with things that I like to say are really within your control 100 percent. These are things like the structure of your website, how it's hosted. Do you have a robust .txt file? Meaning do you have a document so that the search engine spiders know what pages to crawl and which ones not.In addition to that there are things called metadata, titles, descriptions, keywords. Then there's also other factors like H1's, H2's, H3's and a whole slew of things that search engine spiders are looking for. What you want to focus on is make sure you're putting your best foot forward so the search engines get the right data. They index it properly and that is categorized so that you are having or getting the recognition from the search engine that your website deserves.
Travis: OK so that's the on-site elements then you also mentioned that there's off-site elements.
Jeremy: Exactly, and those are linking. We all know about how people get there. Let's say Travis, you build a website that's got 10,000 pages. That'd be a big website but if nobody's going to link to you or the pages themselves are not linking together, which is another on-page factor, you're never going to be able to actually get the site indexed and get traffic there because the search engine's not going to know what's related to what.One of the important things about off-page factors is how people link to you and that directly correlates to how you also have your content linked together internally, or the on-page factors. All these things are basically put together so that you have a way to make a website visible.
If you're on-page factors aren't right, and people are linking to you, Google's not going to know why they're linking to you. If you have the best structure, the best website on earth that looks good to the search engine spiders, the people not linking to you, that's not going to benefit you as well.
Linking is truly the trump card when websites are really equal in structure, equal in architecture, equal in the way that the content is built and the way that it's being viewed by the spider. The person with the most links is that trump card that's going to win the top ranking. You have to make sure that you do both well.
Travis: Very interesting. In the way that you presented it to us it sounds like you would recommend that people focus on what is directly under their control first and then get the links after that.
Jeremy: I would highly recommend it. It's just like when you build a website, you can have a great idea but if you don't put that idea on the web or on a page, then nobody will be able to see it.
Travis: OK. So what technical concepts do you need to know in order to effectively SEO your site?
Jeremy: You don't need to know many. To be honest with you there are a ton of tools out there. SEO Intelligence is one that I would recommend of course. But in addition there is a lot of free tools. There's a lot of services out there.We have a thing call SEO IQ Report. And what does is that goes out and analyzes your on-page factors and your off-page factors. It gives you a ranking. But it not only looks at yours, you can put in your competitor's. So it will basically give you a ranking within a range or within a people you have already identified as your competition.
So you can go out there and know what's good or what's bad on your site. So you don't need to know a lot of code. But you do need to know the structure of a website. And it's really simple. From the top down a web page is just like any type of document. You have a header or a top portion. You have a body portion. You have a footer portion. And within that there are certain elements.
So you don't need to think this is really complicated technology. You don't need to think of it like a geek or a tech person. You can think of it just logically. It will make sense. So don't be scared off by thinking you have to have technical knowledge.
Travis: So in other words it's really not that hard to do SEO?
Jeremy: No. And a lot of people wave fancy words at you and I will use a lot of acronyms but, really, in all honesty this stuff is very straight forward. You just have to understand what a website is, basic HTML, which is the code that websites are mainly built in. That's it. You don't really have to know rocket science.And I can guarantee you there's a lot of people out there who aren't rocket scientists who haven't even graduated from high school and are making millions of dollars online using SEO and keyword targeting as their main effort of getting traffic.
It's not anything that the average American can't do, or the average person anywhere.
Travis: Yeah, I hate those guys. [laughs] I don't make anywhere near a million dollars and I did graduate high school.
Jeremy: Exactly. You and I can go on and on about war stories in a bar one day about people that we know who have made a killing doing very shady or not shady things that were just ingenious and they had the right timing.
Travis: In fact, we have done that in the past and I look forward to doing that more, Jeremy. You're a blast to talk to about that kind of stuff.
Jeremy: Absolutely.
Travis: All right, so how long does it take to drive significant free traffic to my website once I get started on this SEO thing?
Jeremy: Sure. Let's just define free traffic. You're going to have to put in a little bit of time. Nothing is "free" but when you talk about having to pay money for it, once you get SEO going it's not sit and forget it but it's a cumulative build.So all the work you put in as a cumulative effort that, as you know and probably seen, it exponentially multiplies. So you get in 20 or 30 HITS, 50 or 60 HITS. That quickly multiples to 1,000, 10 percent of 1,000 or a hundred more is a lot greater than 10 percent of 20. [laughs]
Travis: Absolutely.
Jeremy: As you grow it really ends up being exponential and that's why most people who are good SEOs they talk about the hockey stick. And that's basically your pages are getting slurped up by the search engines. Your structure is really sweet. Your linking is tight.You've got great silos and your categories. Everything is looking good and then all of a sudden, stuff starts to take off. Your keywords start moving from page three or four, which get no traffic usually, and they start moving up to two or three, then one or two. Then when you have the majority on the first page, then you really start seeing that traffic.
Travis: That's the difference with search engines these days. In the old days, like with Alta Vista, the old Yahoo!, you used to have to navigate down through three or four pages to find what you are looking for. But Google and Yahoo! These days are so good at putting the relevant content on the first page that if you're not on the first page, you're not getting much traffic, right?
Jeremy: Exactly. I think a lot of it is browsing behavior with people as well. There's a great article out about Google doing a secret eye test with their Ajax interface that they are rolling out in a test about a month or two ago.And basically the golden triangle which people put on the page and we actually have a screen shot of it also on our blog. It's amazing because people really lose focus once they start going down the page.
That's also a complete and total product of the great relevancy that the search engines are also delivering. If you are in the top five, six, seven, eight, that top portion or above the fold of the first page, you don't really need to go much deeper because most of the information that you want is right there.
Travis: Well, that leads me perfectly into my next question. In order to be ranked high for the searches that your potential customers are typing in, you need to know what keywords that people are typing in in order what to optimize your site for. Can you explain a little bit about what is keyword research and why you would want to do it?
Jeremy: Sure. We see this all the time. It's really funny because let's say we talked to a client or talking to a person. I really want to be ranked on Austin chiropractors or a small city. They just want local targeting. But they think that the people are really typing in their city name when they are looking for a chiropractor.I live in Los Angeles and, as an example, a Los Angeles chiropractor actually has a lot of volume compared to somebody who is Poughkeepsie, Iowa, or a small city of a couple thousand people. So you can imagine that we as the person trying to guess or estimate or value what keywords we want, we should use third party tools.
I can tell you as a customer and a person in SCM I'm a horrible person at coming up with good keywords off the top of my head, because I've been in this business too long. So I know what the best practice is and what are the top category, kit categorization terms and root terms.
I'm always surprised, as I'm sure you are, when you see a great keyword list or research when you're like, oh my god, they're typing that in?
Travis: [laughs] Yeah. Typos and things that you would never expect to see.
Jeremy: Exactly. People hyphenate things. That's not even supposed to be hyphenated. And people will in addition put in plurals when they are not supposed to and they'll get more traffic than the singular term.What you've got to understand is that we as users are predictable up to a point. But we as search engine marketers need to focus on content and structures that are going to target the right keywords.
So if you write an article that is poor on keyword density or the keyword density is based on keywords that are really aren't going to help you get good traffic, it's really a waste of time.
Travis: I need you to explain briefly what keyword density is.
Jeremy: Very simply, you've got a paragraph. Nobody reads one or two words alone. So a search engine does the same thing. It actually looks at groups of keywords. So back in the day, and I'm sure everybody will remember this, you used to see a lot of websites that had the keyword "Viagra, Viagra, Viagra" or "cheap tickets, cheap tickets, cheap tickets" all over the website.And that was before search engines knew how to do proper clustering and keyword density analysis. They just said, "Oh, my gosh, he has the most usages of this term." He has used it more times than anybody else. Now that is actually counted against you.
So what Google does is... think of it this way. The top five websites for anything. You can use the keyword "sailing" or "Los Angeles sailing school." That keyword has a couple components: Los Angeles, sailing and school. Within that if you go to a website, keyword density is going to be basically how many times either each portion of that or each word you identify uniquely appears in the content of the page.
Google isn't going to rank your website for a keyword that doesn't appear in the content. That's not relevant. That's a bad experience. So, when you type in a keyword, you want to make sure that it's there.
So what we constantly analyze as SEOs is the density of both the title and the meta and the description, all the data on the website. If you put in, let's say, "Los Angeles Sailing School," I would bet that all the pages on that front page have "sailing school" on that ranked page. And I'll bet you that somewhere either on the footer or somewhere else in surrounding copy, if not the body, they also have "Los Angeles." And so, that word density, if it's there, let's say, two or three times out of 100 will be two or three percent. And that's how keyword density works.
What we do as SEOs is we actually compare your competitors' page keyword density to your keyword density, and we can get a good idea of what the search engines are comparing. And that's also one of the factors that we use to try to get a leg up on your competition or we use to analyze how you can get on that front page.
Travis: So it's not necessarily the high percentage of density, but really more of having the proper percentage of density.
Jeremy: You've got it. Every category's going to be different.
Travis: So "Los Angeles sailing school" is going to be different than "cheap tickets."
Jeremy: Exactly. And remember, you're always being compared to your peers, or to those people who rank on like pages within your query. Google's not comparing you to the sailing school. They're comparing cheap tickets to Ticketmaster and other sites, Stub Hub, etc. That's the wrong category. For travel, for cheap tickets, it would be Expedia, Excite, etc. -- those sites. So, you want to make sure that you're actually ranking and analyzing competitors that are ranking on the keywords. That was long-winded.
Travis: Does the domain name having keywords in it play any higher consideration than, say, a title tag or an H1 tag?
Jeremy: It does. It has less weight now. I'll use an example of this: Plenty of Fish, which is probably the number one dating site. I know it is in America or within our area. It might not be nationally, but Plenty of Fish ranks great for free dating. But they don't that in their URL. So, it's one of those things where, back in the day, you could really get to the front page with a great URL alone, but now it has less weight. But it is important. If you're being compared 50/50, and nobody's teetering over the edge, and each are equal on a level playing field, that could be one of the factors that would put your site on top.
Travis: OK. So, let me quickly recap before I move laterally for a minute. So what I understand so far is that you have a website. You need to worry about your on-site factors first. You need to worry about how your intersite linking works. And you need to have the proper keyword density for the keywords that you want to rank high on the search engines for. What am I leaving out there for the basics of SEO on-site?
Jeremy: You can just kind of look at it this way. Once you build the website, you want to make sure that you have the right architecture, right? And after that you want to make sure that people can link to you properly and that linking is actually going to get passed through your website to the right categories, the right sections. If you have an About Us page, it probably wouldn't be good to have a person who's looking for a product go to your About Us page. You probably want to send him to the Product page.And likewise, if you're going through and you need to look at your competition and what content they have, you're going to use keyword density as a great way to look at how to write that content, the topic of the content, what type of copy to use.
But, in addition to that, you also want to make sure that when you get your website up and going and you've got that, that you're targeting the right keywords. So, again, you haven't missed anything, but you've got to make sure that once you do all this properly, if you're not targeting the right keywords it all could be a waste of time.
Travis: That makes sense to me and we'll go over, I imagine later on, how to find those keywords for your market and all. But right now I want to stick with some of the more basic factors, like what is a sitemap, and why do I need one?
Jeremy: Sure. So a sitemap is just like you said. It's a map for the search engine spiders, or bots, to go out and actually find what's on your website. And instead of going to your website and actually crawling through all the nooks and crannies, and having to knock on all the doors and ask what's behind the door, you're telling the search engine where to go. And that's why sitemap is so great, because it allows you to basically tell them, "Hey look, this is every room in my house. This is where all my electrical diagrams are. So don't miss anything."And the reason you want it is, again, when you're allowed to tell the search engines what you want to tell them, and you have that opportunity, take it. You don't want them to go out there and bang around your site, maybe get caught in a perpetual loop. Spiders can crash servers, believe it or not. So poor websites can make really poor crawling experiences for spiders. You could have a thousand web pages published perfectly, miss a couple links to those web pages, and you could only have ten pages indexed in Google.
Travis: That's a nightmare. [laughs]
Jeremy: So the reason why is because you could basically really shoot yourself in the foot fast just by having an improper linking structure. The spider can't get to it. Or let's say you use rich media, and there's a JavaScript piece that the spider can't decode or get around, then you could basically stop them right at the front door, and they're not going to get through all the great juicy content that's there. So shoot up a sitemap so the spider knows exactly where to go, and if he hits a wall he can back out and go back to the next one in the sitemap.
Travis: Well put. So us talking about content and linking is the perfect time to ask if Flash is appropriate for a website. Can you use flash on a website these days?
Jeremy: Sure, and I love how you say that, "Can you use Flash on a website?" Absolutely. Remember, websites are great for putting content in there. So, any time you're using Flash, my best practice and my recommendation for anyone, is to always put it in an HTML wrapper. That way it's indexable and that way the HTML piece is separate from the entire web page.Travis, you might remember about five years back people had this crazy cool idea of actually using Flash as a web page. And what they were doing is they would have great, literally incredible, user experiences and incredible sound. They'd have no visitors. And a lot of those people, if they weren't artists, would go out of business, because their sites weren't indexed. And what was indexed sometimes had no description data, so it would actually be the name of the file or a filetype or a snippet of code from the actual Flash index, which is awful to have.
Travis: [laughs] Right. Well believe it or not, I still see quite a bit of that these days. You get some local small business person that hires a local web designer who has more graphics experience than search engine experience. And they'll whip up a whole site made out of Flash and it'll have all the whizzbang coolness. And it'll still look pretty, but they'll never get any visitors to it. I see it all the time.
Jeremy: Exactly. And it's one of those things where Flash; there's a place and a time for Flash in every web experience, and it's not meant to be the entire experience. And so you can make it the whole screen if you want to but you still need to put it in an html wrapper, because then that allows us to put in the right metadata, the right structure for the spiders.
Travis: Along the same line of things that you need to be careful with, can they use a website with frames or iframes?
Jeremy: Yeah. You can. I wouldn't recommend it. The reason for that is by definition iframes have been abused. And I think the original intent of an iframe was good. And I think that they were properly used way back in the day. We're talking the '90s. We're not talking the 2000s.What people started doing is they were used a lot for malicious or malware. People were vetting a lot of tracking code, improper things and so frames don't get indexed properly as the actual content of a web page. They're third party data that is being served.
So a) malicious things can happen; b) your code really isn't being viewed or served from your website per se. And C it confuses the heck out of the spider because it doesn't know what element belongs to the page. So from that perspective, it's something that I would avoid.
Sure you can build a web page with it but again, it's like Flash. It's a bad idea.
Travis: Great. I want to move on to some more advanced topics here real quick before we tell people how they can do all of this very easily.We already went over the concept of keyword density and why you want to have a certain keyword density for the keywords that you want to rank on the search engines for. How do I know and how do I find which keywords that I should optimize my site for?
Jeremy: Sure. Of course, we have a tool AdWords Intelligence that we can use, but beyond that to really be neutral and unbiased, there are a lot of free keyword out there. One of the easiest ones that I would recommend people use is the Keyword Tool. And Google recently made that external so you don't need to have an AdWords account to use it.So if you go to Google, you can just type in "Google keyword tool" -- not one word; three words -- hit enter. You'll be taken to an AdWord sub-domain on Google and it'll say keyword tool external. And there's a capture verify on the page. But you can go in and literally, anybody can find 50 to 100 keywords that are going to be high traffic, high volume. They may be getting a ton of competition but remember this is public data.
At the same token, anyone can go in there and actually research keywords and find keywords and not waste their time before the actually produce the right copy and metadata for the website.
So, you want to make sure that when you build a web page or a website, your home page may talk about you and may say you may be an architect or maybe it is a family name. So you may have Giggy Architects, for instance, up there. But when you have content pages and you're talking about let's say, Renaissance architectural styles in Venice, Italy, you're not going to probably have Giggy Architects as the description there. You are going to have something that is very descriptive of the content on that page.
So when we talk about keyword density, when you build your web page and your business you can build your first About Us in your home page and what not. But when you are talking about content and real juicy stuff out there, that's what we really use keyword density and that's why keyword research is so important.
Travis: Earlier we were talking the importance of keyword density and about how important it is to also analyze your competitors who are already ranking high for those certain keywords for which you also want to rank high. So why is it important to analyze the SEO strategy of my competitors?
Jeremy: Because they are already ranking, right? [laughs]
Travis: Yeah, basically.
Jeremy: It's that simple though, Travis. You nailed it on the head. Why, because I want to be where they are. And they're my competitors because they are doing something that I want to be doing. And so the most important thing is when you go to Google and say you are looking for cheap tickets. And you see those first page people websites, companies, they are your competitors. You want to be on that page.So, in a very simple term, you want to make sure that you are with these actual people and how do you that? Well, heck they have done something right. So why don't we analyze what they have done and try to emulate it or make it better.
That's the most important thing. Nobody is every number one on Google. Even for competitors number one, remember you can be number one. So everybody is really just a theoretical number two. [laughs]
Travis: That's the great thing about the Internet. It's the great equalizer. You get the same amount of space as General Motors does.
Jeremy: Exactly. Anybody can be number one. You just have to be better than your competitors. So when you look out there it may be daunting and what now, but just know your competitors didn't rank at one point, too. And they had to get there.Travis, you and I have done this for many websites and many projects but if you haven't you'll stumble. There will be things that you will do right and you'll do wrong, but the process...
The fun thing is this process is a learning process and it's something that I think is very enjoyable. I really get a kick out of watching competition and I can tell you stuff and we can go into it in a later show about how we would fool competition back in the day and do IP spoofing and try to figure out what IPs our competitors were looking at your website. Because you could, wink, wink, teach them how to de-optimize their websites.
Travis: [laughs] That's funny. All right. So let me move on right now to some of the external factors that we talked about earlier but we haven't gotten into yet. Tell me again, very briefly, why I want to have links from other sites on the Internet that point back to my site.
Jeremy: Linking is one of those things where it's getting more and more important. When the web was a bunch of really poorly written web pages that had, what I like to say, improper content, junk content, a lot of that's been cleaned up.So a lot of people now have good on-page factors. Let's say they aren't perfect architecture but they are good. So, when you look at that first page ranking, for whatever phrase you are looking at, those people probably have done the on-page factors relatively well.
So the next thing that Google is going to start comparing is linking. Who out there and what is linking? It's popularity. It's how people view your site. And if you have good content, they are going to link to you. If you have bad content, they may want to link to you, too. But they are probably going to be saying things that aren't relevant to what you want to be said.
So, linking is important and it's not just websites. It's tons of stuff. It's articles. It's social media. It's maybe a press release. It could be a partnership that you have with another law firm or another company. It could be a newsletter that a website sends out. Maybe it's not a web page that has good links and has somebody in the coupon world picks up and puts an image up.
There's tons of things that linking can do, but it all revolves around having good content. And so, one of the things, I want to just kind of preface is that linking and link building it's frustrating. It's confusing sometimes. But it's really simple. It's just having good content and having good relationships. And if you do that well, people will link to you.
Travis: Having good content will cause other people to say, hey this looks like a valuable resource for the people who come to my website. Then they'll link to you. That is one of the best ways to build links, right?
Jeremy: Exactly. If you have poor content they are not going to want to link to you.
Travis: So what are some of the ways to build links? Let's say that we need to get somebody to look at our site in the first place so that we can get them to link to us. How do we get links?
Jeremy: absolutely. I'm going to use an analogy here. I'm a big foodie. I basically I live in the city. I live in downtown. I try restaurants once in a while because I'll be walking by and there'll be a person who will be out there saying, hey, try this. Here's a coupon. Walk on in or here's a free sample.Those people are going out there and what are they doing? They're getting on the soapbox. They are walking out in front of their business. They are talking to people and they are getting out in the community. That's what I would highly recommend is one of the first things you do is, heck, if people don't know who you are, you got to tell them who you are.
So go out in niche directories. Go out in social media. Go out and Facebook, Twitter, MySpace. There's Squidoo. There's tons of places to go out there and actually look for other people that have topics. Digg, for instance, Reddit, StumbleUpon, all of these are communities of people that if you like cookbook sites, they'll all recommend great cookbook sites.
So you can submit your content there. You could post about content there. you could critique other people's content. And that's the thing. Once you start conversations in a community, people usually like to chime in.
Travis: I hope that people are taking notes when you just said that. Because I think you just gave away about $500 worth of free consulting.
Jeremy: [laughs]
Travis: What's the difference between a one way link and a reciprocal link?
Jeremy: Let's say I met you out. I think you go out and lots of times I'll get somebody's card and I'll remember who they are but they don't remember who I am. And so, someone comes up and goes, "So do you know Tom?"And I'll go, "Oh, yeah, I know Tom." But if you ask Tom if he knows me, he may not. So that's kind of how I look at a one way link. I can point to something and say, "Oh, that's great." But reciprocally I would love for them to link back to me.
And what's basically saying is, look this is something that is coming back reciprocal. Reciprocal links are good and bad in which you don't want all of them to be reciprocal. And likewise you want the reciprocity or the reciprocal link to be...what's the right term? You want it to be relevant.
Travis: Let's see. Is there a different SEO strategy for the different major search engines? For example, do I need to do something different for Google than I do for Yahoo!, than I do for MSN?
Jeremy: Yeah. Oh, gosh how do I tackle this question? We all know what the search engine market share is right. It's basically 80 percent Google. And the other community or let's say the other piece of the pie out there is MSN and Yahoo!.And so what I recommend to clients, what I recommend anybody, is that they focus on Google. And a lot of ways that the algorithms are changing with Yahoo! And MSN is that they're becoming more like Google. So, focus on Google. Yahoo! And MSN, there are different strategies that can give you a leg up on each one. But for the most part, if you can learn and understand the fundamentals of one search engine, then let's move on to the next.
So I would highly focus on Google. It is the 800-pound gorilla. There are other things we can do to optimize certain pages for the other search engines. One of them being you can do data feeds and what not with Yahoo! And there's also ways to do page search within the organic sections. Those are really fun because those are actually, you can manipulate the results within the data feed.
But that's a whole other advanced...
Travis: I think that's outside the scope of this conversation. We touched on this topic a little bit earlier. I want to make sure that the point has been driven home, because I just saw somebody doing this last week and it's horrible.What is keyword spamming and stuffing and why should I avoid it?
Jeremy: Keyword spamming, people may think has to do with email spamming. It has nothing to do with that. In keyword stuffing it is probably the most descriptive term. What that is is you are literally taking content and you are stuffing it with keywords.It's just, when you see a bad website that has the same keyword repeated over and over again, or the copy just reads horribly because there is too much of the same thing, the same keyword, the same phrase within the actual paragraph or body.
That's keyword stuffing. And people do this all the time and they think they are being smart, when in fact they are penalizing their site and they get a penalty for that. So, I'll give you a for instance. If you were supposed to be on the first page and you are caught for keyword stuffing or spamming techniques, you could get a negative 30 or back of the third page penalty.
That's means that you are stuck back 30 positions until that penalty is removed. And there's no way you can beat your way through that. You have to basically make your site up to compliance and asked to be re-included in the index or have your penalty removed.
Travis: In other words, don't say Viagra, Viagra, Viagra, Viagra. That's not going to get you on the first page, right?
Jeremy: Nope. It doesn't even have to be Viagra. You could think you are being clever, Travis, and -- let's not use Viagra but let's use something like tickets -- let's say you did "cheap tickets, cheaper tickets, tickets for cheap, tickets that are cheap." You may think you are being really smart, but their advance heuristic and semantic and matching technology in clustering, you're going to get off a red flag right away. So do not do it.Even if you think you are being smart, use natural language. It's the most, the best indexed and the most understood by the actual spiders and search engine indexing algorithms.
Travis: So in Google's webmaster help pages, they actually say, "Hey, don't make your web page for us. Make it for the people that are reading your web page." And do you think that's in general good advice coming from Google?
Jeremy: Absolutely. I think it hinges right on that last statement which is use natural language. Speak to your audience. You may use a computer to interface with the web but ultimately humans and people are consuming it. So if you are not speaking to the user, the consumer, the actual person on the other end, remember the web is just a tool.Google is just a tool for us to digest that information and consume it. Make sure it's as personable as possible.
Travis: Jeremy, I can't even start to say how much value you have given away today. I think that we should probably be selling this call instead of giving it away because there is so much valuable information that's been in here.So I want people to able to get the most out of this and to be able to move their websites from page three to page one or from oblivion all the way up to page 1. So I know that you run a website called SEO Intelligence and there should be a link to your website right on the page where somebody downloaded this interview.
Can you tell me and overview of what SEO Intelligence is for and why you started this business?
Jeremy: Again, I have been in the search engine marketing world, SEO and pay-per-click for about eight years. And you and I have probably experienced this. I get this asked at least five or six times a week. People say, "Hey, can you look at my website? Hey, check this out. How can I improve my rankings?"And I'm always obliged and I will always give as good advice as I can if I have time or with the time that I have. But getting a lot of those questions I can't put together a full fledged proposal for them. I couldn't do a lot of the work.
So I got a lot more requests from people that were curious and people who were just starting than people who were established and had money to pay for full consulting services. So I started SEO Intelligence basically because we were using a lot of these tools in a proprietary sense running simple SCMs as an SEO shop.
And it only made sense to, lack of a better word, dumb them down and make them usable with fancy graphics and interfaces so that people could interact with them and use them for their own benefit.
It took me a while to do that. I'm a tech guy like you. For me I had to basically work with a really good friend and designer to create SEO Intelligence and now it's one of the best and the most cost effective way to search SEO campaign going. Also track your results and really truly know what's going on with your website and what's going on with your competition.
Travis: So what's the bottom line? How does SEO Intelligence help me to get more traffic to my website?
Jeremy: Very simply. It gives you insight and it gives you tools. If you don't know where you're currently ranking, if you don't know what your competition's doing, it immediately benchmarks that. If you don't know what your website looks like, what your on-page factors are, immediately you take an SEO diagnostic test, and you know, oh my gosh, I'm missing a title, I'm missing a description. Oh my gosh, my robot subtext is not there. We give you the tools to create robot subtext in two minutes. We give you the tools to scan your website in five minutes. Literally, you can go from knowing nothing to being smarter than 90 percent of people out there, within a ten-minute span.
Travis: So, you're telling me that this one website's going to help me to do all this keyword research and competitor analyzation and all these other tools that we've been talking about today?
Jeremy: Absolutely. I also urge anybody to go out if you don't know what your on-page factors are, if you don't know what websites you're linking to, if you don't know if you're indexed in Google, Yahoo!, MSN, go to the home page, you'll see a button in the lower right-hand corner, and it will say, "What's Your SEO IQ?" You can click on that, you can take that test, and you can actually get an idea right there of how you actually compare to your competition, how you rank for the keywords you put in, and immediately you get an idea. You don't even need to pay for that.
Travis: You know what? I'm going to put a link directly to that SEO IQ Test up on my website, so that anybody listening to this won't even need to try to find it. They can just click right to the blog and they'll get right to it, because I think that's important.
Jeremy: It's very easy, and it's free.
Travis: Now, I'm not nearly as tied into the SEO community as you are, but the SEOs that I know who are worth their salt, who can provide you any kind of results, are going to charge a minimum of $2,000 a month. Is that your experience also in this market?
Jeremy: Absolutely. I mean, if I'm approached personally, to actually go out and do SEO consulting -- again, it's not cheap -- I'm using these same tools; we're using an expanded form of all these tool sets for our own clients that, again, we're charging upwards of two, three, four, five, six, seven thousand dollars a month to do their SEO. You can get those exact same tool sets and, again, you don't need the power that we have. You don't need to track 50,000 keywords. We've got clients that track 100,000 keywords. Just to run a report on that, you don't even understand the bandwidth and query volume that we need.Literally, the tools that we have and the packages that we have should satisfy about 95 percent of the people out there. We're coming out with new versions that are actually going to be Professional, Executive, and Enterprise. So, you can actually do one domain, ten keywords, get all your reporting monthly, and it's basically $8.95.
Travis: You're kidding me. That's ridiculous.
Jeremy: We're actually coming out with an Executive Package, that can do five domains, 50 keywords, get weekly reports, not monthly, and that's the same price we have now for $39.95. And then we're coming out with an Enterprise Package, so if you really want to go crazy, you can basically do 15 websites, 150 keywords per website, get weekly reports, and that's only $99.95.
Travis: That's a no-brainer, man, for the kind of tools that are provided on this website.
Jeremy: Yeah, I know. It's one of those things that when we came up with it, I'll be honest with you: I have a business partner that I work with, and he wanted to charge triple what we're charging now, and I just couldn't see it. I want to bring this to more people, not less. I would say the nucleus of SEO people, as a percentage of web masters and web developers, really hasn't changed much, as a percentage. I want to make that bigger, and I want to empower the actual small business, the person who, hey, he can go there and change his WordPress blog, or he can go in there and change his Yahoo! Store, but when it comes to running query reports, and ranking reports, and seeing the variance between his MSN keywords, his Yahoo! And his Google, he shouldn't have to set that up. It should be all automated, and it should be delivered to his inbox. So, that's what we're really trying to do.
Travis: How does SEO intelligence compare with the other SEO tools that are out there on the Internet?
Jeremy: It's funny you ask. There are so few web-based tools. That's why I built this. We have a team of SEO people that work at our company, and a lot of them have a preference for what tool sets they use. I'm a tool-set agnostic. If you can get the same data and populate the same reports, I'm not going to bug you where you're getting the data as long as it's accurate.But what happens is, downloadable programs that do this are the majority out there. I'd say 85 to 90 percent of all the SEO tools are downloadable, meaning they either live within your browser, not as an ASP page, but actually as an extension or a plug in and they work then locally. We actually download it and run it as an application. Those are the majority of the programs out there. So, let's say an employee is sick. Let's say an SEO optimizer changes accounts. Well, in that scene you literally have to take all the data from that hard drive that's installed as an application, and move it over or export it to another application, and the person on the other local machine has to have that. So was is no normalization of data sources and there still isn't.
There are tons of tools out there. Web CEO is a big one, and Web Position Gold. There are a bunch that have been real mainstays. Other downloadable ones are SEO Ease, Brad Callen and those guys. I mean, they're great tools, but they're downloadable. And I wanted something where, hey, if I go traveling I can go log in, I can key the rankings on my websites, and see the rankings on my clients' websites, I can look at a graph and a chart and know exactly what's going on, and I didn't need to do anything. And you know what? If I got hit by a bus, somebody could get my login and do the exact same thing.
Travis: Well, there are a lot of people out there that hope that you don't get hit by a bus, Jerry. How does SEO Intelligence help me to save my time?
Jeremy: Again, it's really automation, and right when you start up and you go and you actually set up an account, you have to take an SEO IQ score. Why? Well, we get your top competitors, we get your keywords, and then we can start actually figuring who you are and what you need to do to make your website better. So, we give you a score. We populate the dashboard and you can immediately go from there and actually start doing keyword research, actually finding those keywords, assigning them the pages, and actually optimizing. Within an hour or two, you can have a fully optimized web page, and, literally, have logged in with your credit card less than 60 minutes before. So, it's one of those things where it's very seamless.The best part is our Reports Manager. This was literally a godsend for me because if you have Web CEO, or one of those programs, it has to be local, on a machine. It has to be scheduled to run. You don't do anything. You just sign up for your SEO IQ report, you tell them the frequency you want it sent, and it will be sent to your inbox, fully done, with graphics and everything. The other part is let's say you do a keyword competition report. Let's say you do a linking report. Any of these, you can schedule, and they're in your Reports Manager. You can refresh them, you can review them, you can make them recurring. So, saving time, our Reports Manager is one of the best things for SEOs out there.
Travis: Well, I highly recommend that anybody that's listening to this checks out SEO Intelligence. I am going to be a member myself. I'm completely sold.
Jeremy: Can we do this discount for SEO Intelligence, as well?
Travis: If you're giving it away, man, I'm sure that none of us are going to turn it down.
Jeremy: Sure. So, let's do anybody on checkout can put in the discount code "Victory" and they'll get 20 percent off.
Travis: That's really great of you, man. So that's V-I-C-T-O-R-Y, Victory?
Jeremy: You got it.
Travis: Thanks, Jeremy. Jeremy, I can't thank you enough for being on the call with me today. It has been enlightening, and I've sure had a good time.
Jeremy: Absolute pleasure. Again, thank you for having me on.
Travis: Thanks, Jeremy. I'll talk to you soon.
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