1: How did you get started with Search Engine Optimization?
Not the average answer to this one. I got kicked out of the navy for using drugs. Wanted to express my frustration toward that organization. Made a site about it. Nobody wanted to help promote it or link to it but I wanted people to see it. It was a really bad site too. Looked like it was straight out of Geocities.
2: What is the general purpose of your website?
I have probably about a dozen websites and moderate at various SEO forums such as SearchGuild.
My SEO Book site is a news blog which aims to keep up with SEO tips and search engine news. It also sells a current ebook covering SEO and related ideas.
My Search Marketing Info was my first SEO related website I made. I wrote it moreless as tips to myself as I was learning and a person found it and wanted to hire me before I formatted it in any way. After he hired me a few more people did and suddenly I quit my middle level management job (yuck!) and was an SEO.
I no longer sell services much because:
- I am not the best at being a salesman
- I am bad at pricing services
- I work by myself and selling legitimate quality long lasting services is a hard business to scale out by yourself
- I can't see myself as a boss.
- I love having little commitment to doing anything other than doing exactly what I want to do. Right now I moreless get paid to keep learning about the web and the like. To me that is really cool.
- Longterm I think I would probably do better learning and trading in ideas instead of services.
3: What do you feel is the greatest change in SEO has been in the last 3-5 years?
I got kicked out of the Navy about 2 and a half years ago. Before then I had minimal web, seo, or marketing experience. Update Florida was fairly lousy for many SEOs. Google's litter box sucks too.
About 3-5 years ago as I understand it search was exceptionally easy to manipulate. As time passes the tools, techniques, etc all evolve with the engines.
I think the three biggest things going on right now:
- the numerous blogs and forums and other information distribution systems are cutting into the sense of community at some of them. as the cost of creating a channel drops and communities split up it makes it harder to know what channels are worth reading
- Google is starting to get beyond where the average person can quickly spam their way to the top
- Right now there are many ways to hurt competing websites (especially in Google) and I think it is going to be a rather hard balance for the engines to strike.
It seems as though Yahoo! and MSN realize that people are going to try to game their results and accept that some of that will happen as a cost of doing business. Google seems to be a bit more aggressive in trying to protect their relevancy. In doing that they flag more false positives. For a while Paypal was not ranking for Paypal. That is a bad algorithm.
You can close off search spam techniques by trying to do things like Become.com is trying, but at some point you sacrifice relevancy. If the relevancy goes so eventually will the users.
4: Where do you feel SEO is going in the next 2-4 years?
personalization localization blah blah blah. You usually see one of those two words when people talk about the future of search. Some may also use mobilization too.
I am not so sure how it will change, but I generally think that the more reliant your business model is on search the greater your chances of doing bad when relevancy algorithms change.
5: What is the biggest reason sites seem to fail on the internet?
A few that I have read over and over in various books and on various forums:
1.) I think many people do not set clear goals, apply adequate effort, listen to their market, and learn to change with the market.
2.) Some people attach themselves to commodity products. It is better to find a market and demand and create products and offerings around that.
3.) Many businesses place extracting profits ahead of building value.
6: How does your methodology standout form others?
Many people want to sell services. Generally I do not try to sell services. I try to stay up to date on what is going on and try to sell that concept as an information product.
I also stress the importance of the social aspects of the web. I think many businesses miss out by remaining faceless, forgetting that the web is a social network.
I also am not afraid to go against the grain, like when I mentioned on my blog that a friend found a blog comment spamming script for sale. I took a ton of crap for that.
7: What spam tactic do you hate the most?
People (namely White Hat SEO evangelists) who spam forums and other information systems stating that they are better than other people based on random arbitrary ethical guidelines which are detatched from both the web and reality.
8: What is the coolest website you have come across (excluding your own)?
It doesn't have to be SEO related.
http://www.themeatrix.com/
Aaron created and runs SEO Book
More Interviews:
SER/SEO Opinions Index
SER Information Hub
Search Engine Relevancy Home
