I’m a pretty big fan of LinkedIn and use it often. If you haven’t heard of LinkedIn it is a social network for business and I highly recommend you join. You can use it to find answers to business questions, jobs, employees, and make connections that can help you with a lot of search engine marketing projects. And if you want to add me my profile is here. Let me know if you have any questions.

So here is my idea! Build a backend that allows advertisers to interact with video creators as well as buy sponsorships of videos tagged with certain keywords or which have certain keywords in the video. So for a broad sponsorship advertising campaign an advertiser would login, choose the category/tag they wanted such as “Tech/iPhone” or input a trigger keyword such as “iphone”. Then the advertiser could choose how they wanted the ad to show, here are some possible choices:

1 to 3 second display at the beginning of the video of a static ad image.

Ad shown as a peel ad in the right corner.

1 to 3 second display of a static image shown at end of video.

1 to 3 text ads shown at end or beginning of video for 1 to 3 seconds.

Or sick text ads above and below the post recommended videos

So that would allow someone who is offering an iPhone unlocking service to advertise on any video that has “iPhone” in its content or is categorized as such. Pricing should work as paying per click.

Now in addition to this broad keyword triggered setup you also have a place where advertisers can buy video sponsorships from video authors before they go live. So a video author might upload their video they created, choose a category, describe the content and set a time for how long before it goes live. Then an advertiser would login and view pending videos to see what is available. Then for a flat rate set by the author of the video they could buy sponsorship of the video. Plus if you have a history of the person making the videos an advertiser can see how well their past videos have done and how many times something has gone viral. So in addition to all those options you also set a big payout if the video goes viral, so if the video is shown more than X times the video’s creator gets a bonus from the advertiser. Don’t you think that would work? Here is a hypothetical real world example:

Sam is a dude in a basement. He makes a video of his cat playing with his converse shoes in his basement. The cat is cute. Sam uploads the video and decides what the hell, I’ll leave it for a few days in the pending queue and see if someone wants to sponsor it $50 bucks and pay a bonus of $5,000 if its viewed more than 100,000 times on YouTube. Matt at Zappos checks his email and has gotten an alert that a video tagged with “shoes” is pending at YouTube. He logs in and views the video, the cat is cute, he decides for $50 bucks they will sponsor the video and that if it goes viral its worth paying a bonus of $5,000. Sam gets notification and now has $50 bucks to buy stuff for his basement. The video goes live, the cat is cute, it is viewed 400,000 times. Same gets a $5,000 dollar bonus and Zappos gets excellent branding from their sponsorship with no risk.

This should also work for professional video creators as they can get paid more upfront and on the bonuses as well if they have a history of creating content that goes viral.

And for longer content, just copy Hulu and start a huge database of TV and movies that go back to the beginning of time. Google just needs to buy ABC or something and take all their long tail video content and put it online with advertising on it. For content that is twenty minutes to a few hours commercials are not a problem for most of us.

My favourite part of the conference was the site review and discussion section. If you want to make a 100% advanced-advanced SEO conference I think just having that group of guys there for three two hour sessions on broad subjects would be amazing. Just being able to ask questions, argue, and make your case is what sparks creativity IMO. All the presenters were great and my favourites were by Nick Gerner and Danny Sullivan because they were on broad subjects about how search engineers think and where they are headed. Jane, Rand, Will, Rebecca, Sarah, and everyone were just amazing!

I can’t comment on the network part of the training apart from meeting a few great guys during the presentations. I ripped the cartilage in my chest the week before and was in a lot of pain so I just went home after the conference to sleep and recover (got to visit a local Seattle hospital to make sure I was ok). I’m sure, as with most conferences, drinking after the conference is the really valuable part and from comments from others this part was were the value was.

Two days of expert-level content on search marketing & website optimization. This seminar is aimed specifically at experienced people who want to learn cutting-edge, techniques and tactics to push their knowledge and skill set to the next level.

My favourite thing about search engine optimisation and marketing is that it is constantly changing and you have to read and test constantly to stay on the cutting edge. I keep watch over a thousand SEO blogs, forums, and related marketing sites in order to catch any new techniques or ideas. I’ve stayed away from conferences because I’m not sure they are going to have any new information unless you are buying drinks for everyone at the bar afterwards. I’ll be sure to let you know what I think of this training conference SEOmoz is setting up. If you want some more info on it and who is speaking go here.

I will have your baby if you promise to make Live Mesh sweet. Please God don’t let the same team that handles adCenter touch this beautiful creation nor let it disappear into the black nothingness that seems to grab so many of your projects. The digital world is here and I’m tired of not having any of my files. Live Mesh solves this, it actually works, and you might be surprised to know but you make it! So whether I am on my desktop, laptop, iPhone, or internet cafe I have access to my desktop and my files. Bravo!

Sure it is in beta, sure it isn’t actually working for me right now, sure it has problems… but you need to keep this project alive. Internet people are starting to realize they are not tethered to a desk and that they can work from anywhere in the world! You need to be providing the software that allows them to do this easily. I use RoboForm to store passwords to everything yet often when I travel the newest passwords are not on my laptop as I haven’t manually added them. What I do now is I have those heavily encrypted files in my Dropbox or Live Mesh and set to sync, so the minute I start using my laptop those files are there and I don’t have to do anything. Simple solution to an old world problem.

I like to travel lite and sometimes I just work out of internet cafes (Iron Key secure). Using Live Mesh I can access to my Online Desktop and I have access to all my files to work on. There is still a lot of work needed such as letting me edit on the server using an online word app of some kind but you guys are doing great. Yea encouragement!

So Microsoft, in closing if you finish this project it will make loads of cash, women will love you, and it will open a new revenue stream while heralding you into the online web 2.0 world.

Plus I will have your baby,
Sincerely,
Ben Welch-bolen

P.S. If you are interested in learning more about Live Mesh or trying to get in on the beta I recommend the following articles… LifeHacker and ReadWriteWeb each have a great post explaining how it works and showing off all the features. Fancy an iPhone with Live Mesh? Here is how and IntoMobile has the picture and details to prove it. Shouldn’t be too hard for an iPhone app to come out as well (hint hint). Surprisingly ZDNet had a solid post on the guts of Live Mesh and the cloud storage that is powering it. Even Mac users can get in on the fun with a Mac client about to be released and view some screenshots here. And as always visit the Live Mesh Blog for the latest on what they are doing.

In the mean time if you have a site it doesn’t hurt to encourage mass links to your site using good content, useful posts, useful widgets or anything else. Rounding out your link profile is important so that these updates don’t cause problems. If you have good focused links from quality sites spend a little time focusing on the masses. That way when Google relies on pure link numbers you will be fine. Just remember to stay away from tactics that are not going to favor your site in the long term. Things like using web counters, WordPress footers, or so on to make users link to you without them knowing it is going to cause penalties from Google and not help your business in the long term.

As long as you keep creating quality content that attracts quality links you will be fine in the long run.

PageRank sculpting refers to the act of using nofollow tags on internal site links to focus page strength or link strength to the pages and anchor text that a site owner wants in a search engine. Over the last few months this has been a tricky subject with it being recommended by some and warned against by others. Comment discussions at Sphinn, SEL and SEJ has been long and lethal and a few days ago SEO Scientist posted an article reporting that it might have caused a brief penalty for a site in combination with other flags.

We emailed 10 SEO experts and asked them two questions about PageRank sculpting:

Question 1. Do you use “rel=nofollow” on internal site structure for your sites and or clients?

Question 2. Do you think the use of “rel=nofollow” tags internally is a giant red flag to Google that on its own, or in combination with other flags, might cause a penalty or problems?

Huge thanks to everyone that responded, here are the answers we got in the order received:

Joost de Valk’s answer:

1. Yes, for myself AND for clients (and large ones at that).

2. Well it might cause a look from a search quality agent, but if you’ve got nothing to hide, you’ve got nothing to loose. It is VERY hard to do right though, and in my experience, most people claiming it’s a penalty have just been doing something wrong, in the process taking too much link juice away from pages they needed to rank :).

Andy Beal of Marketing Pilgrim’s answer:

1. Yes, very occasionally and very carefully. My favourite use of nofollow is for useless anchor text. If I have a page with two links pointing to the same destination, one with the anchor text “services” and the other with “search engine optimization services,” you can guess which one will have the nofollow added.

2. No. I’ve not seen it myself and would guess that other “flags” are causing the problems.

DazzlinDonna of SEO Scoop’s answer:

1. Yes, but in a limited fashion. I think the use of NoFollow for forums or community sites is important so that all of the juice isn’t flowing to member profiles, etc. If you have 50,000 member profiles, you really don’t want to waste all of your juice on those pages, especially since most of those pages will be almost exactly alike (and may include links to bad neighborhoods as well). For many forum and community scripts, the script itself may automatically NoFollow such pages. (Note: In some community sites, the member pages ARE the main pages of the site, so of course, you DO want juice flowing to those pages, and would NOT want to NoFollow them.)

Likewise, extremely large sites can make use of NoFollow for the same reason - keeping juice from flowing to thousands of non-essential pages such as near-duplicate content from printable views, etc. Those are the exceptions in my book, however. The vast majority of sites don’t fit into those molds, and really don’t need to devote time to using NoFollow for PR sculpting purposes.

2. If the page-sculpting isn’t standard then…maybe. If a popular forum or community script automatically slaps NoFollow on certain pages, then no, it would be ridiculous for Google to even think of that as being worthy of a second look. However, any SEO footprint that is out of the norm has the potential for causing Google to stop and take a closer look. If the use of NoFollow makes sense in that it is being used in the ways Matt Cutts has described as being useful, then I wouldn’t be concerned at all. However, if you are already doing a few things that might put your site on shaky ground, then certainly adding one more SEO footprint might be the tipping point to getting noticed, and then penalized.

Keep in mind that any significant changes to a site OF ANY SORT could cause Google to stop and take a second look. So, sure, adding a ton of NoFollows one day could make rankings fluctuate as Google wonders if the site is still trustworthy. Then again, adding a ton changes of any other kind could affect rankings in the same way. So, if someone is noticing fluctuations, it may be due to large site changes in general, and not necessarily the act of applying NoFollows. In addition, you may *think* you’ve done a good thing by applying NoFollows, but you may have accidentally borked the flow of PR in a way you hadn’t anticipated. So perhaps the changes you made actually stopped the flow to some important pages, and you haven’t even realized that.

Summary: Some situations make the use of NoFollow a NoBrainer. Large sites, forums, and communities probably warrant the use of NoFollow in certain ways. Most sites don’t warrant the use of NoFollow, however, and worrying about sculpting PageRank flow on those sites is mostly a waste of time. In some limited circumstances, using NoFollow might be just enough of a tipping point to get an already-shaky site noticed, but for that matter, any SEO footprint could do the same.

Caveman SEO Consulting’s answer:

1. Almost never.

2. The question IMHO is, should people use nofollow attributes on internal links to “sculpt PageRank” and generally I think that the answer is “no.” The Google Web Spam team works to stop people from “cheating.” So, is it “cheating” to add the nofollow attribute to links pointing to photo galleries with no text and unoptimized pages? I would think not, since you’re keeping essentially duplicate, unrankable pages out of the index.

But is it “cheating” to add the nofollow attribute to a couple of sitewide nav links to refocus more link equity into critical parts of the site? The question is debatable, and to some extent depends upon degree, the intent of the site owner, and the perceptions of a search engineer. Based on the patterns of thinking I’ve seen from Google in the past six or seven years, I suspect they think that altering the nature of sitewide nav links for ranking purposes could indeed be cheating.

Matt has made some comments that lead people to believe that the use of nofollow attributes at the link level is not cheating. The problem is, people have a tendency to take individual comments out of context. Like most coding elements, it’s all down to how you do it.

Knowing that it is not hard for the search engines to identify nav links on a site: If you’ve got a site with, say, 15 sitewide nav links to core sections and pages, and suddenly a third of those are modified with the nofollow attribute at the link level…would that raise a red flag? How about two thirds? I have to believe that at some point it’s an issue.

So for me the question is, why use it? Personally I think it started as a way for the engines to get site owners to do their work for them. Now it’s evolving into a sort of link level site sculpting tool, and it’s hard not to regard it as a possible means of abuse. Using it when there are other equally effective options available makes no sense to me.

There have been a very few cases when we have recommended it to clients, when there was just no other easy alternative. But we recommend it rarely, and regard it as a last resort. Basically, with a few unusual exceptions, if your site is unable to achieve top rankings without using nofollow to sculpt PageRank, you might be better off rethinking what’s going on with the site.

Rand of SEOmoz’s answer:

1. Yes, we absolutely use nofollow to sculpt the flow of search engines link juice through a site, and have done so both on our own domain and recommended for nearly all of our clients (which includes companies like Yelp, FastCompany, Inc, Village Voice Media Group (which owns 17 national papers), NPR, Seattle Children’s Hospital, Farecast, AllBusiness, and many more.

2. No. I believe that Matt Cutts and the other search engine representatives certainly would not penalize for the use of nofollow internally after specifically noting that this was an approved SEO technique. After all, this is simply a new way to use a very old process. Webmasters since the late 90’s have used javascript links, links in Flash, links in iFrames that were blocked by robots.txt, etc. so flow link juice through a site. The concept that suddenly, nofollow would trigger negative attention is not only paranoid, but would necessarily mean that the search engine representatives are directly lying to the webmaster community.

Jane Copland of SEOmoz’s answer:

1. Previously answered by Rand.

2. It’s something I’ve been taking quite an interest in lately. I read that post over at SEO Scientist this morning, actually, and it surprised me… I hadn’t heard - and still like to think I haven’t heard - any definitive evidence that using nofollow for PageRank Sculpting acts as a red flag to Google. In fact, in this interview with Matt Cutts that Rand conducted in 2007 suggests the complete opposite. In the interview, Matt says:

The nofollow attribute is just a mechanism that gives webmasters the ability to modify PageRank flow at link-level granularity. Plenty of other mechanisms would also work (e.g. a link through a page that is robot.txt’ed out), but nofollow on individual links is simpler for some folks to use. There’s no stigma to using nofollow, even on your own internal links; for Google, nofollow’ed links are dropped out of our link graph; we don’t even use such links for discovery. By the way, the nofollow meta tag does that same thing, but at a page level.)

However, that interview took place in August, 2007, and there is no reason why Google hasn’t “changed its mind” or modified its views on the practice. If they’ve seen significant manipulation to the extent that their search results are compromised, I see no reason why they’d put an end to any tactic, no matter whether they’ve approved it in the past or not. We saw something similar happen quite recently with the badge and widget-bait debate.

As for using nofollow on our sites or those of our clients, we do it at SEOmoz (have a look at any of our pages with the nofollow display Greasemonkey plugin) and I use it on various sites of my own. I’ve also recommended clients use it and recommended it to PRO members at SEOmoz. In two instances, I noticed an increase in SERP placement after carefully nofollowing certain navigational links. The two most popular stories I hear regarding the use of internal nofollow is that search traffic either doesn’t change or gets better. I have never before heard of it getting significantly worse.

Like I said, I’m not convinced that it’s a dangerous practice, but I’m of course open to new evidence, as Google will undoubtedly change the way it views most of our optimisation tactics at one point or another.

Aaron Wall of SEO Book’s answer:

1. If a content management system (like a blog) has nofollow in it by default then yes I leave those links there. Otherwise I generally do not use nofollow much on most of my sites because I generally think Google engineers despise SEOs, and since I am well known as an SEO and have had an engineer hand edit one of my sites before I feel that using nofollow is just another way to put a kick me sign on my sites.

2. I think it is a red flag if you are…
- a small publisher with limited reach on a commercially focused site (especially if you are in a spammy or seedy niche)
- an affiliate (the thinner you are the higher the risk)
- a well known SEO (Google hates you)
- or just about any publishing/arbitrage play where you are not an obvious leader in your category, you do not have a well known brand, and/or you have not spent millions on branding, public relations, & advertising.

If you are a corporation you are OK to spam, but Google engineers get their kicks by crushing small webmasters. They keep the web safe and healthy by policing smaller players, hoping that this consolidates traffic against larger corporations which will grow dependant on Google traffic, and will end up easily swayed by Google’s business interests. Short term the corporations are not well policed so that they can become addicted to free traffic, but after many of the smaller players have been driven off the web (largely in the next 5 years) Google will start policing the profits out of corporations too.

Eric Enge of Stone Temple Consulting’s answer:

1. We do use NoFollow on selected elements of web sites, whether they be ones that we publish for ourselves, or on our client sites. We use them judiciously, to simply cut down PR flow to no value pages. For example, your “Contact Us” page, or your “About Us” pages.

We don’t completely cut these pages off by the way. We just link to them without a NoFollow from the home page only. We think they should still show up in the search engines. They just don’t need to be considered the most important pages on the site.

2. No I don’t think it’s a giant red flag. In the interview I did in September with Matt Cutts he openly recommended that NoFollow be used as a tool in this fashion. He also made similar comments in an interview he did with Rand Fishkin at SEOmoz. We have never had any problem with it on any of the sites we work on.

However, SEO is a VERY complicated science, so there could well be scenarios where this could be a flag. In particular, it could flag the publisher as being SEO savvy. This is not inherently bad, but if there are other signals that merit the attention of someone at Google, it could be used as an indicator that would increase the chance of a human review.

For example, if you had several potential signals about your site, it could be an additional signal that would increase the chance of a report. Or, if you are using a lot of NoFollows, and your competitor reports you for buying links, it could be an extra flag to look at a site more closely.

In spite of the SEO Scientist report, I doubt that there is a standalone algorithmic penalty for using NoFollow like this. There must be something else going on as well. We have simply used this on too many sites with no problem at all. Bear in mind, though, that our approach to SEO is as white hat as it gets.

As a final note, I also don’t believe that Matt would publicly make the recommendations that he has, if it was fundamentally a bad thing to do.

Branko of SEO Scientist’s answer:

1. I have presently taken off all of the nofollow attributes from our clients’ sites, after the bad experience I had. Additionally, not all our client’s sites need nofollowing. I am using nofollow on some of my test sites, but that is for research purposes only, testing in which cases nofollow helps and in which cases it actually hurts the site.

2.Is it a GIANT red flag ? I don’t think so. After all, Google themselves said it is OK to use it and I don’t believe that Matt would purposly mislead anyone. Is it a signal that could be used in combination with other signals, definitely yes. I think that it is important do discern penalties from filters here: filters are more automatic and can be keyword and even country specific. Since they are automatically applied, I believe that there is some kind of negative point system that accumulates for each site that is doing things Google deems manipulative. Selling links gives you X negative points, over-optimization gives you Y negative points, etc. Of course each of those penalties could be invoked manually, but I think the majority of them are automatic. Once you reach a negative point threshold the filter gets applied and your site goes down by X places (-60, -900, whatever). In this model, I do believe nofollowing your navigational links extensively could serve as a signal.

Neil Patel of Pronet Advertising’s answer:

1. Yes, I do use them internally for my sites as well as client sites. It is a great way to control PR.

2. I don’t think it would cause any problems or raise any flags. I have been doing it for a while and have not run into any problems yet.

Thanks to all the SEO experts who contributed their time and knowledge to this question!

Matt Cutts And What Google Says About PageRank Sculpting…

So the first question we need to answer is what does Google, i.e. Matt Cutts, specifically say about PageRank sculpting?

In August 2007 Rand of SEOmoz did a fantastic interview with Matt Cutts and asked the very direct question:

“Does Google recommend the use of nofollow internally as a positive method for controlling the flow of internal link love?”

Matt Cutts responded with:

“The nofollow attribute is just a mechanism that gives webmasters the ability to modify PageRank flow at link-level granularity. Plenty of other mechanisms would also work (e.g. a link through a page that is robot.txt’ed out), but nofollow on individual links is simpler for some folks to use. There’s no stigma to using nofollow, even on your own internal links…”

This was followed in October 2007 with a posting on Google Groups and an interview with Eric Enge of Stone Temple on the subject. In the Google Groups post by Matt Cutts Aaron asked him “What are some appropriate ways to use the nofollow tag other than to protect against blog comment spam?” Matt responded with this post and here is the key part:

“What are some appropriate ways to use the nofollow tag? One good example is the home page of expedia.com. If you visit that page, you’ll see that the “Sign in” link is nofollow’ed. That’s a great use of the tag: Googlebot isn’t going to know how to sign into expedia.com, so why waste that PageRank on a page that wouldn’t benefit users or convert any new visitors? Likewise, the “My itineraries” link on expedia.com is nofollow’ed as well. That’s another page that wouldn’t really convert well or have any use except for signed in users, so the nofollow on Expedia’s home page means that Google won’t crawl those specific links.

Most webmasters don’t need to worry about sculpting the flow of PageRank on their site, but if you want to try advanced things with nofollow to send less PageRank to copyright pages, terms of service, privacy pages, etc., that’s your call. “

And the interview with Stone Temple Consulting Matt Cutts goes over the same issue. Eric Enge asks some really great questions on how it is all handled and here is what Matt has to say:

“Matt Cutts: Another good example is, maybe you have a login page, and everybody ends up linking to that login page. That provides very little content value, so you could NoIndex that page, but then the outgoing links would still have PageRank.

Now, if you want to you can also add a NoFollow metatag, and that will say don’t show this page at all in Google’s Index, and don’t follow any outgoing links, and no PageRank flows from that page. We really think of these things as trying to provide as many opportunities as possible to sculpt where you want your PageRank to flow, or where you want Googlebot to spend more time and attention.

Conclusion and Confusion Over Google’s Stance

Google’s message seems to be pretty clear on this issue. I think the problem is this seems to contradict their previous actions as well as possibly Google’s Quality Guidelines. Google says to make “pages primarily for users, not for search engines” and asks webmasters to ask themselves “would I do this if search engines didn’t exist?” and “Does this help my users?” All those statements seem to contradict to some degree what Matt is saying about PageRank sculpting. Maybe they need to write a new guidelines section entitled “Guidelines For Advanced Webmaster Practices” which explains what is allowed when tweaking your site for what search engine’s see and how they attribute link weight.

June 2008 Update From Google

Google issued several changes along what everyone was complaining about! First they posted new guidelines on the nofollow tag and they changed their mission statement to say that you should design primarily for people but also help serach engines. Good update that helps to clear up some of the misconceptions.

References Articles On PageRank Sculpting - In rough order of mention…

SEOmoz posted an in depth article on using PageRank sculpting on their site and the results. It very clearly helped boost their traffic and the rank of the pages they wanted. A must read if you are going to follow this path.

The SEO Scientist wrote a wonderful article entitled Anatomy of a Google Filter/Penalty (or how not to do nofollow PR sculpting). In the article he believes that there is a chance that PageRank sculpting, together with other manipulations on his site, caused a filter that then caused a penalty. Great read and graph of the timeline of the problem.

SEOmoz interview with Matt Cutts where he clearly explains what you can use NoFollow to do. Stone Temple interview with Matt Cutts on exactly what you can do and a lot of other great info. I highly recommend you read both of these interviews as they are fantastic! Great questions and detailed. Also be sure to read this Google Groups post by Matt Cutts on the same subject.

GrayWolf adds another positive vote to the use of PageRank sculpting with his post “Why there is nothing wrong with sculping your pagerank”. I love his writing style and some great user comments.

The Search Engine Journal posted a key article entitled NoFollow: An SEO Red Flag? Pages and pages of comment discussion on this one and a must read. And Sphinn off that article with discussion.

Hobo posted a very well put article on NoFollow tags saying he would not be using them for internal links but rather optimising his pages through other means. He wants to save nofollows for bad neighbourhoods.

Dave Naylor’s take on PageRank sculpting is that it is good on short tail but bad on long tail and good on slightly higher traffic but bad on overall rankings. A good read with his experiences and thoughts. Recommended if you are implementing on a long tail or e-commerce site possibly.

Joost wrote an excellent article entitled PageRank sculpting - Siloing and more! He makes a great point in that this is not a new tactic but rather just a new method that appears to be ok with Google. Very well written article.

SEO Fast Start wrote on their blog that it is a tactic they are using to get more pages indexed. They see the discussion as being one of discounting pages you don’t want indexed in order to give more weight and index space to those you do.

The SEO Theory blog makes the point that you can’t sculpt PageRank until you can see it. A good article with some interesting points about why Google is approving sculpting something that is semi invisible to webmasters.

Search Engine Land posted that you’d be wise to NoFollow this dubious advice in response to the argument. This is an excellent article about the slow move of the nofollow tag from being a no vote in the link to a hacked use in explaining the site hierarchy.

Alan asks “Should You Sculpt Your Google PageRank Via Internal “No Follow” Links?” This is a great summary of the argument and some solid comments on the bottom.

If I have forgotten a link to anyone or any article please let me know. It is never my intention and I apologize ahead of time if I did.

First off, can you give us a quick background on yourself and the services you offer at eFlaunt?

I’ve been an SEO for 6 years now and offer search engine optimisation and link building services for a number of clients as well as running a few sites of my own.

I’ve spent a lot of time working for a single client over the past few years - the basic SEO consultancy has kind of moved on from “just SEO” to a more creative role that includes SEO as well - basically, I spend a lot of time thinking about new ideas for the site and how that can fit into our overall SEO strategy, which is a process I like to apply to other sites as well.

How did you first get involved in the SEO industry?

I originally studied Marketing and Information Management at Uni - I’ve always been torn between business and IT and that degree was really the only one I could find when I left school that dealt with both areas. When I left Uni I was still struggling to find work that I enjoyed - I spent a few years working in more traditional marketing roles before moving to Spain on a whim one day. A few weeks later I was in an entry level position with a Spanish SEO agency on the back of my first site I setup (which happened to be well optimised without me knowing it - I simply structured the site logically as I was going along).

I only lasted a month in the job - I wasn’t really happy with what I was doing (setting up fake directories to help promote a Spanish real estate agency!) and decided to leave for a new job with another real estate firm. But I had been introduced to Webmaster World which really started me in SEO.

Over the next year I setup another site of my own and saw some great success with it - for the first 18 months the site’s traffic doubled each month (and 6 years later it still gets 250,000 visitors a month with no marketing spend to date). When I moved back to the UK, I tinkered with my own sites for a while before getting a job with a large UK SEO agency where I spent the next year, before deciding to go it alone as a freelancer (which I’ve been doing ever since).

Do you work mostly with clients who are based in the United Kingdom or all over the world?

Mostly UK, but I’ve worked with a fair share of European clients as well.

You offer a great guide on what to check when choosing a SEO agency and a service to check the SEO work being done. In your experience have you found that when you conduct reviews that a lot of SEO companies are not delivering what they promised?

I think the main problem that occurs is not what that’s being delivered, more what is being sold to clients. People like to blame SEOs for this, but I do think there’s a level of responsibility that clients should accept as well - if you are spending a lot of money on any service then it should be carefully researched beforehand.

That said, there’s no excuse for SEOs selling services that they know carry risk for clients. Fair enough, some clients might want to pay for doorway pages, sneaky redirects and all manner of “black hat” services - but they should know what they are paying for beforehand. I hate the ethics debate when it comes to SEO - business should do whatever they want - but I do think ethics comes into play when selling SEO services - SEOs should be disclosing risks at the outset of the campaign.

On the whole though, I think the UK SEO industry is getting much better - a few years ago I spent a lot of time fixing penalties due to poor SEO work - that has changed a lot. I think clients are becoming much more SEO savvy - which is good to a certain extent, but also brings some problem - clients who think they know all about SEO can be a nightmare! Particularly if they are focusing on the wrong path slightly (for example, a preoccupation with deep links, PR sculpting, etc.) - a little knowledge can be hard to overcome, especially if it is basically correct, but taken out of context.

When a new client approaches you what are the most common misconceptions they have about search engine optimisation? Time frame? Cost?

I think most are fairly savvy these days - certainly about cost and time frame (although some might not like it!). As I said before, the main misconceptions can come from them having a little knowledge to begin with. Quite regularly I get people send in an email saying, “we need 30 PR4 links per month” or “we need 50 deep links per month”, and I just think, well if you know what you “need” then just go do it yourself - it’s not rocket science! If you want to hire me, then it’s so I can tell you what is best for your site, not just to blindly do what someone on a forum has told you to do.

I’m fairly selective when it comes to clients - I’ve passed up a lot of business that I could have done simply because it wasn’t the best approach (in my opinion anyway) for their site. I suppose a “give them whatever they want” attitude might be better for my business, but I don’t really like working like that - which can make me a bit of a headache to work with at times! If you sell any marketing service, the priority should always be what is best for the client’s business and not necessarily what is best for yours.

Is the UK market for SEO services pretty hot right now or about the same as it has been?

Pretty hot. More and more businesses are interested in SEO and there’s loads of great suppliers out there. The SEO industry still has a bit of a reputation problem with small businesses but that is improving and more small businesses are adopting SEO as core part of their marketing strategies. I think the main issue is the cost for small businesses - it’s hard to justify SEO spend when results can take time and in most cases aren’t guaranteed, particularly when web design services don’t necessarily include SEO.

We’re seeing more and more small businesses trying out SEO for themselves, which I think is a great thing. Normal marketing activities that a small business owner may be doing anyway can easily be adapted to help with SEO - participating in forums, distributing press releases, running a blog, getting listed on directories - all these things can help with SEO. The risk of course is that it is easy to go overboard with SEO and get yourself penalised or even banned from search engines - my advice to anyone trying out SEO would be to seriously research the risks first.

SEO is weird in that certain trains of thought lead you to the wrong conclusion. More keywords on a page don’t necessarily equal better rankings; more pages on a site won’t necessarily mean you can target more keywords; more links to a site might not improve your rankings. “Optimisation” is the keyword here - find the optimal point for each area of SEO and don’t go overboard.

What is the most difficult part of the search engine optimisation process?

Waiting for results! Being too impatient can lead you to trying to force change and that’s never a good idea. Finish a piece of work and when you are happy with it, leave it and move onto something else.

In general though, I think one of the hardest areas of SEO can be to accept the fact that you don’t know everything. At every stage of the learning process you can run the risk of becoming comfortable with what you know - breaking free of that mindset can be tough, but needs to be done. SEO changes all the time, and even the best SEOs in the world don’t know it all.

What is the hardest part of helping an ecommerce site rank in Google?

Unique content. Generally, ecommerce sites sell products that are available elsewhere, so you might share common information with other sites (product names, product details, etc) - it’s important to implement some mechanism to add unique content to your site. This could be reviews, or rewriting product descriptions, or various other ways of adding unique content to your product pages.

The next really hard step is interlinking your pages. It’s not enough to simply throw up 5,000 pages and hope they all get indexed and rank well - you need to think carefully about how you present your pages to users and search engines.

What do you do if the store is just bland and doesn’t stand out?

A good graphic designer is gold dust! So many businesses will happily pay thousands for SEO, PPC, marketing, PR and so on - but not bother with a few hundred quid on a graphic designer to do a good logo and site design. That’s nuts! Using graphical adverts to cross promote your content can be a great way to liven up your page.

But the look of the site is just a small part of the equation - if your content is dull or you don’t have much of it, then site owners should have a think about the purpose of each type of page on the site. What more could be added to these pages? What other features could you add to the site? What are the competition doing? What are the competition NOT doing? What kind of things do your users want?

Even the most boring sites can be jazzed up with the help of a good designer and little bit of creative thought.

On your SEO blog you mentioned that blogs are a great way to spice up a slightly boring industry and build links through quality content, are most of your client’s pretty receiptive to the idea of starting a blog?

Mostly yes, but I have to say - I’m not a fan of this “I need to have a blog to help with SEO” mentality that seems to be going around just now. Blogs don’t instantly help with SEO - in fact if they are implemented badly, then they can easily be holding back your SEO efforts.

The value of a blog is regular eyeballs on your site - that gives you real estate to cross promote your products and services. That’s the main bonus to having a blog. SEO can slot into this - through the process of cross promoting your products and services you can help your SEO activities by linking to your key pages. You also get a SEO bonus *if* people link to your blog posts. That’s a big IF. I would advise people to carefully think about the time and effort that goes into blogging and whether or not they can handle that. That might be too much for small businesses who wouldn’t see a good return on their time. However, if a business can allocate an employee or freelancer to blog regularly then it can be a great bonus for your online marketing activities.

What I wouldn’t do:

Use a blog as an easy way to publish optimised content that you relied on for your business. Most out of the box blog software packages aren’t good for this.

Think that a blog instantly equals SEO benefit - it takes a lot of work.

What would you recommend to a small business owner who is currently depending on Google for traffic yet afraid of this dependence?

Don’t worry too much about the dependence, but certainly look at other ways of expanding your business. I’d be worried if they were doing anything remotely dodgy - that’s just a recipe for disaster. But most small business websites don’t need to worry too much about losing traffic overnight if they are a legitimate business.

PPC campaigns can be a cost effective way to expand your business - low risk, measurable return and you can start off with a small budget. Forums and business networking groups can be another great way to find more business. Affiliate marketing is another, but may take some investment to setup properly. And then you also have any form of offline marketing!

At the end of the day, if you are making money from free Google traffic, then you should have money to spend on marketing. If not, then there is something wrong with your business model and not just your reliance on Google.

Can you share any success stories that make you feel all warm inside?

Well, I think the main story from the past few years is working with www.thebestof.co.uk since launch. I didn’t quite expect it to be seeing 1.3 million visitors a month 3 years ago when founder Nigel Botterill first spoke with me about his new idea for a web based franchise, but here we are! It has been a challenging project that has turned into a very successful business – I’d love to take credit for that, but it’s been down to the foresight, innovation and hard work put in by Nigel and all the staff and franchisees at N5 Ltd. This year has been particularly interesting – we’ve gone back to the drawing board with the site and concept (some of the reasons being the site has grown faster than expected and we are reassessing many of the SEO and design features). As an SEO it has been brilliant to work on a project like this, but also to be able to plan ahead and suggest new ideas.

As an SEO I can be quite competitive a times, so it’s great working with an industry leader – I have a quiet chuckle to myself when I see “competitors” crop up and failing miserably to make the grade – we’ve even seen some just lift copy or SEO elements (such as title tags) directly from our site – yet fail to perform. I don’t think most quite realise the issues involved in big site SEO!

The new site we’re working on now is going to be awesome – we really will be looking to break the mold when it comes to marketing for small businesses, with a level of integration between offline and online marketing concepts that isn’t being done anywhere else. Definitely one to watch in 2008!

Huge thanks to Scott for doing the interview with us and be sure to visit his company site eFlaunt and his SEO blog at Fused Nation!

My goal with this is to help people find a quality agency or individual who can help them improve their online search marketing efforts. This is the first revision so please let me know if you have any suggestions or feature requests. What are you waiting for? Add your SEO company now!