Interview with Robert Charlton about SEO/SER Trends - 12/03/2005 |
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1: How did you get started in SEO and web marketing?
I had an eclectic background that combined math-physics, art, photography, and writing. The blend led me to become a film and video producer-director, and many of my bread and butter marketing/commercial clients (including Lucasfilm, Bank of America, Saatchi and Saatchi, Hewlett-Packard, etc) were based here in San Francisco.
The Bay Area turned out to be the epicenter of the dot-com boom. When the media market here changed, I was fortunate that some of my ad agency clients, who were moving away from "outmoded" technologies like video (insert smiley), encouraged me to move to the web.
SEO was the niche that caught my imagination. It was the most poorly described area in the web literature of the time, and it drew on my previous background, everything from my marketing communication experience to my aptitudes for pattern recognition.
2: What is your definition of Search Engine Optimization?
It's a coordination of all of the elements involved in the design, building, and accessibility of a website, including: marketing or communication goals, searcher and buyer behavior, site structure, page design, content creation, server issues, context on the web, and the vicissitudes of search engine algos.
3: How has SEO changed over the past few years?
It's gotten more challenging. The web's a lot bigger and more competitive; spam has gotten more massive in scale and more sophisticated; and the algos the engines are using to combat link spam, domain spam, and scraped content are resulting in more collateral damage to sometimes innocent sites. You have to be aware of spam techniques to avoid even the appearance of gaming the engines. On existing sites, I find I'm doing much more cleaning up of what prior SEOs have done.
The "sandbox" or time lag in ranking new domains, as well as the advantage that established sites have, is making handling client expectations ever more difficult
Coming down the road, considerations involving vertical search, local search, and personalization are also keeping the mix interesting.
4: Do you feel site development is more important than simply SEOing sites and if so why?
The answer of course depends on the nature of the site, the client's budget and flexibility, and where I enter in the development process.
I push ongoing content building where it's appropriate... to create fresh material to attract repeat visitors and new links, and to expand the breadth of targeting and the variety of page types if we need more.
5: What is the best approach a site can do if they are trying to grow and improve their organic search presence?
Create rich and varied content worth linking to... I mean, really, really worth linking to. Then, publicize the site enough, by all means possible, that people will visit and link to it.
The more breadth you have in your material, the more potential searches you will target, and the more likely you are to get those nice longtail searches that don't show up on the keyword tools, but which do show up in your logs.
The more variety in your pages, the more resilient your site will be as algos change and evolve.
6: Why is fresh relevant content so important to organic search?
I don't in fact know how really fresh it has to be. In terms of, say, the Google algo, I can look at some pages that seem to have an initial freshness boost that fades, and other similar pages that seem to stay put or to rise on their own.
If yours is the type of site that depends on return visits, then you want fresh content to keep your visitors returning.
If your content additions are significant enough (say, a topical blog), adding more of it also generates publicity; and this increases visitors and inbound links. Not all sites, though, depend on this kind of currency.
7: What is more relevant and why: blogs, original articles, gradual relevant backlink growth or something else?
Organic backlink growth requires content. The content that attracts links may not be great prose or entertainment. It may just be a unique product, or cheap prices, or a gimmick like expensive pixels for sale. I will publicize a site and solicit links in order to get potential linkers to a site, but I don't build the links artificially. To get good quality, relevant, one-way inbounds, the site needs content of some kind to motivate those links. The kind of content depends on the site and its business model.
- Blogs tend to be more like news. They're temporal in structure, and attract repeat visitors. If you don't keep them fresh, you're liable to lose those visitors. - In some cases, customer forums might bring in extra traffic. Or, special interest forums might be the entire destination. These also need to be fresh and active. - Original articles are generally more carefully structured than blogs and probably fit better into a highly optimized, "themed," hierarchical linking structure. You can spend a lot of time writing good articles, so you don't want to revise them very often.
Backlink growth... good, relevant, inbounds, from independent sources... is important no matter what you do. Apart from this, there is no one best approach that works for all sites.
8: Besides your own site, what are some sites you love visiting? It doesn't have to be SEO related at all.
I'm like one of the fabled shoemaker's barefoot children. I've been involved building hundreds of sites, but currently don't have one of my own. I'll update you when that changes.
SEO-related sites that I spend time on are WebmasterWorld, SearchEngineWatch, Threadwatch.org, a bunch of good blogs, and of course, Google itself.
Non-SEO... the Cassini Imaging site for the Cassini space probe has been one of the most amazing visual and imaginative journeys I've ever taken ( http://ciclops.org/ ). I'm an international news junky, so, apart from individual news sites, Google News has been a marvelous gateway to the world. Wikipedia ( http://en.wikipedia.org/ ) is increasingly becoming a resource I'm turning to for a surprising range of topics. And again, Google.
Robert Charlton is a search engine optimizing consultant who strategizes about web presence, advises companies and organizations, and optimizes sites. He has provided SEO services to clients ranging from small niche companies to Fortune 500s, in market areas that have included technology, publishing, entertainment, travel, software, and consumer products. Bob can be reached at robert.charlton@gmail.com.
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