Kane Jamison
Seattle, WA
Male, 26
I've been managing and marketing websites since 2005, for wide variety of sites. I now run a content and search marketing company where I focus on creating content and getting more traffic to client's websites. We focused on SEO from 2009-2012 and have since made content development the focus of our efforts. I spend my time doing everything from editing code to coming up with content ideas to auditing websites to finding creative ways to get more links to a website we're working with.
No, there are very few situations where leaving a comment - particularly a substantive one - would hurt your site. Leave the comment, contribute to the discussion, and don't worry about doing any harm to your site. If they're valuable comments on valuable sites, you'll only help yourself. That said, leaving tons of comments on blogs all over the internet, valuable or not, is not an SEO strategy in itself. It can have some benefit, but it's not going to be the cornerstone of anyone's internet marketing.
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Yes, absolutely. I subscribe to about 10 or 15 different SEO and website marketing blogs that send daily or weekly updates, to give you an idea of how much time I have to spend keeping up to date on practices and trends.
In terms of basic understanding of SEO, however, here are the initial resources I would recommend:
SEOMoz Beginner's Guide to SEO: It's free, it's pretty to look at, and most importantly I can recommend every tip in there as quality information. Find it here: http://www.seomoz.org/beginners-guide-to-seo
Google's SEO Starter Guide: The content is basic and doesn't always go into depth, but getting the information straight from the horse's mouth is worthwhile in the beginning. Go to http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2008/11/googles-seo-starter-guide.html and download the PDF link.
Search Engine Land's Periodic Table of Ranking Factors gives a good broad overview of the factors that affect search engine rankings, and the visual layout can be very easy to digest compared to written versions: http://searchengineland.com/seotable
Search Engine Land's Video, What is SEO? is also a good one to review. http://searchengineland.com/guide/what-is-seo - Further down that page they also have links to their own "Guide to SEO," which is worth reading.
Books: There are some decent books written about SEO, although I have only perused most of them. I'd look at The Art of SEO (multiple authors including Rand Fishkin) as well as SEO Secrets by Danny Dover. The only trouble with SEO books is that it's a fast-changing industry, so certain aspects can change frequently. That said, I respect the authors of both books and I'm sure they both have plenty of timeless suggestions that won't be affected by smaller day to day changes in the industry, which is why I'd recommend them above other books if that's your preferred method of learning.
Classes: There are tons of courses, both local and online, so it's hard to single out a few. http://inboundmarketing.com/ is completely free and is focused on website marketing in general as opposed to just SEO, but I've heard decent things about their training and again, I respect the authors of those classes as well.
There are a ton of quality resources that I haven't mentioned, but these are ones that I'd recommend starting with to make sure you're on the right track and not learning from the wrong sources.
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There are two things I tell every client they need to do: 1 - add more quality content to their site 2 - build more links to their site. Content: There's a billion ways to approach this topic, but basically write quality articles that your visitors would find useful, and make it pretty with images/photos, video, whatever. Plenty of that on your website is pretty helpful. Give people a reason to care about your site, basically. Answer customer questions, whatever. Millions of ways to approach this. Please make sure your website has crawlable text. If you're using something like Wordpress you're fine. If not, type "cache:yourdomain.com" into google, click on the "text-only version" link on the top right of the page, and make sure you can read all of the text on there. Links: I'm going to keep this part short and give you 2 links. The first is an article I wrote explaining why links are important in simple terms. The second is an excellent and non-technical guide to link building if you're serious about doing it yourself: http://www.hoodwebmanagement.com/890/why-links-are-important-for-small-businesses/ http://www.clockworkpirate.com/ (you'll have to tweet to get the download link, but it's worth it) In regards to meta tags, they're not a hoax. You're referring to meta keywords specifically (there are other meta tags that are very important, like title and description). Meta keywords used to get spammed heavily and search engines stopped relying on the keywords as an indicator. I still add a few keywords to each page to future proof them, since there's the off chance that it will be used by a future search engine or other service. That said, the keywords aren't a priority so don't spend more than a couple seconds on them, but title and description absolutely are and deserve some attention on every page of your site. Read the SEOMoz Beginner's Guide to SEO if you're uncertain about how anything works: http://www.seomoz.org/beginners-guide-to-seo In regards to other people being at the top of unpaid search, it's typically because they have better content, or more links, which is why you need more of both.
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To be honest, I personally have seen quite a few less of these over the last year or so. That said, they definitely had been out of control for a few years prior to 2011, and there is certainly plenty of "crap" left to get rid of. In February 2011 Google rolled out the first of a series of updates referred to as "Panda" updates (no special meaning, just the name for this series of updates). Since February, there have been a number of large and minor Panda updates, many of which have been aimed at content farms, sites with excessive ads, sites with lots of stolen & duplicated content, and other forms of crap. If you're interested in specifics, here's an ongoing log of Google updates: http://www.seomoz.org/google-algorithm-change So, yes, the SEO world in general is very aware of these issues, and many of us are the people running the sites with *good* content, which means we're the ones trying to outrank the crap, so we're certainly monitoring search results closely. If you're still seeing a lot in your search results, try testing other search options - can't hurt right? Blekko is one that has banned all content farms in general, even the farms like eHow that *occasionally* have useful content: http://techcrunch.com/2011/01/31/blekko-bans-content-farms/
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Chef
Is it true that the "specials" are usually the stuff that's been sitting around awhile?
Bar Mitzvah DJ
What's the craziest thing you've seen at a bar mitzvah?
Nurse Practitioner
As gender roles continue to evolve, are you seeing a rise in the % of male nurses?
I figured this would be one of the first questions asked. There is definitely plenty of snake oil and useless services being sold in the name of SEO. I think the best way to answer this question is to give you some examples of signals I use to determine the legitimacy and quality of an SEO provider: Lofty promises are the first sign. If they're making broad promises to all customers of #1 rankings or first page rankings, that's a sign that either (A) they're full of it, (B) they're using spammy links that can hurt you in the long-run, or (C) they're talking about paid advertising, which isn't SEO at all. B is the most likely scenario for a company promising great results. The second signal is what they say they will do. If they're talking any of the following I'd run away: number of web 2.0 properties they'll build for you, linkwheels, tons of article submissions, lots of squidoo lenses and hub articles, lots of social bookmarking, submission to RSS and ping aggregators, 1000s of directory submissions. These are all thinly-veiled ways to say that they're going to hire foreign writers of poor quality to create a bunch of terrible useless content, and they're going to spam the internet with that content and a link back to your site. It can be tricky to hire a quality SEO. For a typical small or local business, I'd expect to spend $500 to a few thousand a month depending on the type of company (lead-driven small businesses with high-ticket transactions like dentists, lawyers, chiropractors, etc will typically have to pay more). I personally offer a few lower priced options than that, but they're for just a few hours of work each month and they're targeted at businesses looking for a basic service, and I'm a freelancer with lower overhead than most agencies. Larger businesses and corporate level companies can expect to pay $100 to $1000+ per hour depending on the provider they choose. Here's a good idea of overall rates for the SEO profession as of late 2011: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/seo-pricing-costs-of-services Another excellent resource to read is the Google Blog Post on tips for hiring an SEO. They give some good 'best practices' advice and other signals of quality to look for, as well as questions to ask: http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=35291
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I can't give any specific businesses as an example, but I think starting with a new website, or one that has absolutely no traffic, and building it up from scratch is the most exciting and rewarding. Since I work with a lot of small business clients, that's often the case. Knowing that you've created all of that traffic and revenue for the company from thin air feels powerful, and every bit of it is attributed to your work. As far as the tipping point, it tends to happen after a couple months of work. There will always be small initial increases or bursts of traffic from links that you create, but when the site finally pops up in the rankings and all of a sudden the business is getting 50 or 100 visitors a day instead of the 3 that they were getting before, that's when you know it's real and your efforts are paying off. From there, a few more hundred visitors each day isn't far off, and at that point you're earning the business more than you're costing them, which is job security at its finest.
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That always depends on the business. Both communities will be most successful if you've got an engaged employee or social media person proactively representing your company. If you can identify any sort of community or key interests surrounding your customer base, that will also carry you a long way in building a following and actually giving value to your fans. I can give examples where I have recommended to businesses that they not focus on a social network. I have seen a vacation rental company that serves mostly older clientele - 40 to 70 is probably the average age. They do great on Facebook, but Twitter has never been a factor and I don't see it getting bigger in the near future. As far as Facebook, Business-to-Business (B2B) providers typically have a hard time gaining traction and value from being active. There are exceptions, especially if you're delivering a great service that people love, but for the most part these companies have a hard time on Facebook since people aren't really looking to get updates from examples such as a paper shredding company or a DUI attorney.
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