More Blog SEO

A great show with lots of info about SEO for bloggers, the full transcript:

Good evening everyone this is Joost again with Press This. We’re having some communications issues and so I was thinking that we wouldn’t get Aaron Wall on tonight. But he’s dialing in right now and so if I keep talking for a minute, we might be lucky enough to get Aaron in.

We have him Joost.

Perfect, hi Aaron.

How’s it going Joost?

Good and it’s good to hear you. I was afraid we wouldn’t be able to hook up. It’s good to know you’re there. You were stuck on a call?

Yeah I just had a client conference call that ended about 6 minutes late.

Tight planning, so let’s get this show rolling. Everyone we’ve got a show tonight with Aaron Wall and Aaron is most well known for his site SEOBook.com, which is probably one of the first and biggest e-book businesses on the web. Aaron can you introduce yourself? What do you do for a living and where are you from, etc.?

Thanks for having me Joost. I’m from Oakland, California and I run like you said SEO Book. It is a site that offers a suite of tools and online training materials and a member only premium support community. We bundle all that together and a lot of successful SEO’s go there to keep up with SEO and then a lot of people new to SEO go there to establish their footing and start building their business.

(2:56 – overtalking)

Yeah you’re there sometimes but not as often as you were in the start.

Yeah I should be there more I think and that goes for that and 10 or 20 forums out there. I used to comment a lot on SEOMoz a lot as well and I don’t do that anymore either.

When you started SEOBook.com it was really like an SEO book. You stopped doing that a while ago, could you elaborate a bit on why you stopped doing that? I think that most people still think that you publish a PDF?

I still have it but I haven’t updated it in a while. When people join our site they get the PDF but the training materials are more up to date. The reason I moved away from an e-book and it wasn’t a single reason but a number of them. One is lots of scammy stuff comes in the form of an e-book and the perceived value of information inside of e-books kept getting lowered, so that was on piece.

A second was that if you search for SEO Book now one of the first things Google will return is like SEO Book Torrents or something. So I could see that copyright from a business perspective was going to be a bit of an issue unless I use some DRM crap and I really didn’t want to use DRM on information because I think that makes a worse product for clients.

A third thing that happened over the past few years is a lot of stuff, I think when I was newer to SEO I was more naïve and thought I had okay here is the answer and this is how this works. But a lot of it and the more experience you get and you, of course, I’m sure know this because you have lots of big publishing clients, work with some newer smaller ones as well and a lot of the answers are like well it depends. This will work great over here but then the same thing might not work so well over here.

So based on SEO becoming more subjective I thought it made sense to have more of an interactive dialogue to add further value and that’s where the idea of having the community forums came from.

Yeah the few threads I participated in are threads about international SEO and you always find the weirdest things in those threads. It is always funny to see it’s something you can’t write about anymore. It’s become yeah well a whole other predicament.

I think you can write a book and I may do that soon but the thing is, is it will probably be higher level and not necessarily try to be so specific oriented on here is a tactical tip right here. It might have some of that but it will be written from a perspective of trying to write something that will hopefully still seem pertinent a couple of years later. It might incorporate some of the big trends but a lot of it really comes down to, I mean I think as SEO gets more competitive the best SEO not only understands here is some of the general tactical stuff you can do but here is some of the strategy relevant to your marketplace. Here is some stuff that would work in your market.

I think that’s where knowing a lot about the client’s website and interacting with them really helps improve the quality of the results you can deliver.

Would you say SEO is more of school of thought then a set of tactics? What is it exactly?

Yeah I mean I think it’s as much an art form as it is a science. It’s like some of the stuff, I mean some people can study stuff and are really good at like the technique stuff and can always find loopholes and that sort of stuff. But I tend to be more the school of thought of I don’t, like especially after I’ve been doing stuff for 5 or 6 years now, I don’t like to have to start over.

So a lot of the stuff where you’re just finding a tactical loophole and trying to exploit it for full profit potential might end up requiring a restart at some point. so I like to try to use whatever concepts I can while hopefully maintaining a fairly low risk profile so I don’t have to do too many start over’s.

Yeah been there and done that and got the t-shirt. I know Mikel was saying not to use any stuff Google tells you to use and he was probably right.

I remember one time you made a comment on Matt’s blog when you were angry about something and like they mentioned something and then did something another way and you went Mad Hatter a bit in the blog, didn’t you?

Yeah I’ve been mad at Matt a couple of times and it’s not really Matt the person because as far as I can tell he’s just a great guy. But sometimes they go around and say one thing and then 2 days later turn around and do the other thing. It’s really annoying. Well you’ve had the same experience haven’t you?

Yeah I think SEO is from a search engineer perspective I think it’s a game of anticipating, expecting and anticipating certain results and actions and trying to adjust for them. I think it is not always easy to know how people will react. I think sometimes to get what they want they have to be a bit deceptive with their modes of promotion of certain ideas. Then when they get them out there they reveal their true intent over time.

Yeah such is life. We spoke or mostly chatted, which is what we usually do about WordPress before. Do you use it on a lot of sites? Or don’t you anymore?

We have it on; I would estimate maybe a dozen or so sites, maybe 15.

SEO Book is on Droople, why don’t you use WordPress for those sites?

The thing with Droople is it’s good and powerful but to me I’m not a programmer so it’s kind of overwhelming some of that stuff. Whereas, WordPress tends to have, I think it’s a bit, the learning curve is a bit less steep and there are tools out there like Themes Press, ThemesPress.com cost like $10 to convert an HTML theme over to a functional WordPress theme so that allows me to really just take whatever site design I have and turn it into a WordPress theme real quick.

Then there are a couple of plug ins I use like SEO Title Tag, the redirection plug in, I think I use one for the automated backup plug in. and based on those it just makes it, I mean the only risk I have with WordPress is if I don’t keep it up to date then it can get hacked. But outside of that I got daily backups being sent off, fired off to an email stored remotely. I got the SEO Title Tags pretty nice and the templates are pretty easy to create. So it’s basically the fusion of those 3 things. It cost me almost nothing and no time to get up and going. I feel more confident and comfortable doing a lot of the stuff with plug ins and making changes to it then I might with Droople.

Yeah it’s a lot easier to do for a lot of people, for me as well because Droople has always seemed kind of intimidating even to me. I’m not that good of a programmer.

You do use it on those sites? The only thing you use is SEO Title Tag and not any other plug in?

I think I might use a few other ones. Oh like sometimes if we have a poll or something I think we use the Democracy plug in but we don’t tend to use too many of the plug ins. Most of our blogs aren’t, oh another one we use is the Related Post plug ins. Those are really nice for putting relevant related links like in the content area and giving people somewhere to go next after they land on something.

But I mean we mostly view blogs as promotional vehicles to help promote the rest of the site. So we have sites that are kind of static or boring or have some interesting bits but then some bits that are kind of SEO focused and then the main goal of the blog off that site is to help promote the rest of the site.

Yeah cool. What do you use to track those blogs? Do you do anything like Google Analytics or stuff like that?

We usually use Mint just because it is simple and easy to install. A lot of our sites tend to be like an affiliate or AdSense or something like that so it doesn’t necessarily, it’s not like we keep refining conversion funnels that much and split testing when the conversion happen on another site.

I mean we’re comfortable having as a base line we usually use Mint as our analytics and sometimes Clicky and then sometimes Google Analytics on a few sites.

Are those blogs primary sources of income or tests to try stuff?

Some of the sites are sources of income but the blog generally as a role on that site is mostly a promotional vehicle for the rest of the site. For example, a lot of our blog pages may not be heavily monetized but other pages on the site might be. And then if people link into the blog that increased the link diversity and authority of the site as a whole and then other pages on the site rank better as well. So most of our monetization off blogs tends to be indirect rather than direct.

With SEO Book being the only major exception to that so far.

Yeah SEO Book of course is (13:53 – inaudible) have you ever considered doing a blog there on WordPress or is that WordPress to?

I haven’t created; well what happened is it’s kind of a lot of stuff. A programmer decided Droople is the way to go for me and not necessarily me. Once it was installed it’s got a tie in with our affiliate program, a PayPal API, permission levels on the blog, the training section, the forums so it becomes a bit harder to change at this point. So kind of going to leave SEO Book as it is as far as the CMS front goes. But we have other sites that are using WordPress and a site can look fairly similar just have a totally different CMS and you might not know it just by looking at it.

Like SEO Book when it was brand new was powered by Movable Type, then it got converted over to Droople and then if you to like PPCBlog.com it’s a WordPress site but it looks kind of just like SEO Book.

It does look the same yeah. So you’re not thinking too much about the tactical aspect of SEO on those sites then?

Like if you get the on page optimization down pretty well and have decent key word diversity then that is about as far as a lot of that stuff goes. Then from there it’s really just a game of public relations and link building and you figure out what markets you want to be in, how you can differentiate yourself and how you can promote the site.

The way I view a lot of the promotional stuff is you don’t need every promotion to be profitable. If you can have 1 in 5 or 1 in 10 be a homerun, half the others kind of pay for themselves and 1 or 2 of them tanks, then hopefully you’re still doing okay on the average across the whole front.

Yeah.

Also there’s a lot of the stuff that just cumulatively adds, you know, if you keep doing promotions over and over again it eventually starts building momentum.

True. We need to go pay some bills and then after that we’ll get back on this.

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We’re back and we’re here with Aaron Wall of SEOBook.com. I was just looking at SEO Book for the first time this week to be honest Aaron and saw you were looking at credit card stuff. You seem to do a lot of analysis of what’s happening in search. How do you do all these analysis? Are you using your own sites or are you constantly looking around in forums?

It is a variety of things. We track the rankings of a lot of our sites to look for anomalies like…I mean we check the traffic to our sites and we also track the rankings. We check the rankings of a few dozen sites across about 100 key words or something. Then if we see certain ones jump up or down we get some ideas from there. Also we get stuff from NR User Forms people also share like well maybe it’s this.

Then I also read a lot of the top SEO blogs as well. It becomes like a combination of those 3 and then also sometimes Webmaster World has some interesting stuff spread across 40 pages of a thread and you breeze through it. the thing is once you know people like you, people like Dave Nailer and a few other people like that, you really know some of the people who know what is going on and based on your own experiences plus you chat with people and say hey do you think this is this. You add up all the forums, plus knowing some other people plus reading a lot of blogs on other sites plus your own experiences and all that allows you to come to some pretty good conclusions.

Yeah you’ve been in this space for quite a while now. How long have you been doing SEO Book?

It launched in December 2003.

Okay so that’s 6 years almost. Do you feel that you’re becoming better at SEO or is it becoming harder to do anything?

I think it might be both. SEO in and of itself is becoming a harder, more expensive, more holistic process. But then I might be getting better at it too.

You’re making more money at it now I hope.

Yeah we do pretty well. It is just a matter of trying to keep up with stuff and trying to establish a few strong sites. I mean there are a lot of different ways to do well with it. Some people are really good at scaling it and sending out lots of emails and other people just try to come up with the strong promotional ideas and yet other people are out there trying to buy up old sites. There is lots of different ways to win. So you really don’t have to be the number one guy in any one aspect.

There is that duchebag designer called Derek (last name – 22:42) recently and he recently blogged SEO is either obvious and not worth paying for or a scam that didn’t work. Then a lot of SEO’s were spotted by linking to him. So determining a link community call them all scumbags and get their link equity and use it to promote the same business model that you were allegedly against.

If it works it works.

Right.

I even stopped thinking about stuff like that. I’ve been called a scumbag so many times for being an SEO it’s a good thing that people introduce me as a WordPress developer first and an SEO second, probably a good thing to brand yourself with something else first.

Yeah I think that was a really smart move for you to do that because everyone who is a true SEO still knows hey Joost knows his stuff and he knows all this stuff. But at the same time, the people who are like SEO’s are scumbags well they can still link to you because you’re something else first. It was a smart move.

It does a lot better on sites like Digg and the other sites that they get it. I talk about SEO a lot and I don’t mind talking about SEO but it’s also people put SEO into a corner where it doesn’t belong and shouldn’t be and it should be just a part of the entire marketing process and that’s something you keep explaining to people.

We probably shouldn’t be calling it SEO ourselves all the time because a lot of the time it’s just normal marketing and SEO is just a small part of it.

I think Joost if you read Jacob Nielsen he makes a lens for the web where he wrote a piece called the Power Defaults and explained why people click the number one listing most frequently and even when you change the results the number one still gets the most clicks. Well I think what it is if you’re in any profession for a long time and you actually care to do a good job what ends up happening is the borders between your profession and/or in related professional blur and you keep calling everything through the lens of what you know and do.

So to Jacob Neilsen something might be usable, a usability, that to a designer is part of web design and to who SEO is part of the marketing. So I think they all end up overlapping and it is just whatever label you ascribe to yourself is the label that you’ll apply to a lot of the neighboring topics you end up exploring.

True. So for the listeners out there who run blogs, what would you think are the first things people should be worrying about when they start worrying about their SEO?

I think the first thing is I think Copy Blogger had some good, Brian Clark, had some good info on this. It’s basically before you worry too much about SEO with a brand new blog, you probably want to spend some time thinking about the hierarchy of the topic that you want to get involved with and how you can create a brand that doesn’t necessarily compete head on with the strongest brands but may compliments them.

Then when you first start writing, write first more for ideas to spread and try to social network with people like interview them on your blog and do that sort of stuff. Then once you have that link equity then all the other SEO stuff can kind of matter a lot. But if you don’t have much link equity, then there is a bit of a ceiling to how well you can do with SEO.

The other thing I would say is if you can get an exact match domain that is aligned with the commercial key work you know you really want to target then it might make sense to build off one of those with your blog. When first launching a blog, I like to make the blog like the home page of the site. Then after you let it age for a bit and develop some featured content and you got some good stuff here and there, what you can do is change the home page of your site to like a welcome page and move the blog to /blog and inside WordPress there is a way to do this without actually having to move any files. You just create a post page called blog and you set the home page to some static page and then you make the blog at /blog. So the benefit of that is after you get a few posts you’re immediately able to start promoting it and it looks like you have a site and everything.

Then over time as you develop more of a site and have more of a useful featured content and stuff you can help highlight it. Then rather than have people come to the home page that is a blog entry and dump them into the middle of the stream somewhere, you can welcome people to the site and say hey welcome to my site, this does this and this, here is who we are, go here to do this. And basically you can set up the home page as a welcome screen for new people rather than just dropping people off and here is our 3 most recent posts or whatever.

Yeah.

Another SEO thing I like with blogs is if you use something like SEO Title Tag is creating page titles that are really kind of SEO oriented but creating on page headings that tend to be targeted at people reading your RSS feed. So you can make one more targeted towards SEO and the other targeted towards trying to pull a click in from RSS.

There is a lot of different plug ins for this. I use SEO Title Tag, All in One SEO, which ones do you suggest? Which ones do you use?

I used Head Space from John (last name – 29:24) because it has a lot more features. For me, it’s by far the best and has import functions for all the other plug ins which thought was a very good way of getting people to convert. A good quality thing about it is John actually got hired by Automatic a couple of weeks back. Although I must say the SEO Title Tag one you’re referring to is the one made by (name) and so he knows what he’s doing as well although he should really update his plug in page with some screen shots from the current versions of WordPress. He added compatibility with WordPress 2.7 and we are a bit out of that now.

So I always use Head Space and I would dive into that. I know that John’s working on a major update to that because it has a lot more functionality and lets you index and follow specific pages on your site and stuff like that. It is a lot more then SEO Title Tag.

Do you think some of that stuff is getting worked into the WordPress core?

I hope so but don’t get your hopes up just yet. I’m working with some clients who are on WordPress.com and we really, really need that stuff in WordPress but we’re waiting for it. I hope it’s going to happen but I don’t know if it ever will be. It would make sense to build it in at least from my point of view. But I always doubt about that because I dabble in SEO all the time and I’m always curious to how many people would actually use those things if they were built into WordPress. Yeah I don’t know but I hope they do at some point.

I think I need to take one more break before we do the final section of the show. Here we go with another little break.

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We’re back and Aaron was just mentioning that he forgot one tactic we should really be talking about and that is guest hosting. Aaron you had some info about that?

Yeah I mean when you have a new site it can be hard to build momentum if you’re eon an island. So I mentioned dong interviews with people as a good way to get a bit of exposure out there. Another thing you can do which is certainly a bit of a harder sell would be if you could try to write articles for other sites that accept them as well.

The cool thing is if you put something great on someone else’s site that already has a lot of readers and it’s related to your topic then it’s pretty easy to pull and gives you awareness; whereas, if you just tried advertising your way or put all the great content on your own site it might take a lot longer to get that same level of awareness.

Absolutely. We had a great question in the chat room from Justin; I think you might know him as well. His question was what is the best way to create a mobile friendly, yet SEO friendly site? How do you go about that if you ever do that?

I think a style sheet is a good way to go. I think that the people that are accessing the phones mobile are accessing the web on the little phones are generally going to be people who have pretty decent smart phones with decent technology for the screen stuff. I think that really I think in time it’s just going to get better and better at being able to access the web just like a normal device.

One thing I would say is it’s important to make sure you have RSS feeds and that sort of stuff in case people want to have access to information without necessarily all the presentation. But otherwise I just don’t see mobile phones as even though they’re huge I don’t see them replacing the desktop or anything like that. I just see them as being an additional channel but one that’s more branding and exposure and top of mind stuff rather than necessarily directly related to creating lots of conversions.

If you have a local pizza shop then maybe having a really nicely done local site is important. But if you’re like a traditional blog or a forum or something like that or you’re mostly a thick content site then I don’t think there is as much of a need to try to make that as mobile friendly as possible.

I would agree although I would have to say I see an awful lot of I-Phones on my own blog. But then again you probably don’t need to always do something for I-Phone users because they’ve got a really proper browser in there. I would agree with you for the other part.

So we’ve got a couple of minutes left but not too much and there are some questions in the chat room. One from a friend of mine and I don’t know if you guys ever met, Ossie webmaster is well known in the SEO sphere for being well…he’s asking if you’re using a dual site at all?

If I ever used what?

Google Sites?

Oh I never used Google Sites. I’ve looked at it and kind of the idea of what it was but I’ve never really used it. I haven’t used it that much. I put one thing on it, an old page, and then I looked at how the sites allow you to set up that are kind of like I-Google and how they allow you to set up other pages but I really haven’t used them that much.

It seems to me that Google (inaudible – 39:56) is a bit dead as well. I don’t see it turning up in the search as much as it did in the beginning it seems.

I think us SEO’s kind of flamed them for some of the early public relations on it was talking about how it was going to be better then everything else and get promoted and all that. So then some of us SEO’s kind of flamed them for that and as a result I think it sort of killed the product, like the bad public relations on the launch.

Yeah Google should stay out of the content business I think. Well that might be just me.

A lot of these media companies are going to go bankrupt and when they do look for Google to start hosting the content on Google for free to make it accessible to people.

That would work and get them a lot of good PR I guess. You do a lot of videos as well on SEO Book; you seem to always do those on YouTube. Do you do that for a reason or is it just…

I originally did a bunch on YouTube just for practice and get exposure and feedback. We have some other ones on our site that are just on the site only and aren’t accessible elsewhere. But I haven’t made as much video content recently. I need to get into doing that more. I kind of go in waves with it. The thing is like when I speak, sometimes I talk and I get like high at the end of sentence sort of like Valley Girl syndrome and it annoys me and some people notice it. It takes a while to get used to speaking and being really good at it and cutting them.

Sometimes I’m like a perfectionist in trying to make it good. A single 5 minute video can take 1 ½ hours to make because I have to try to record it 8, 10 or 50 times. That is why I love writing because if you screw up a word or screw up a sentence or something it’s so easy to change it.

Yeah.

Yeah the audio stuff is a lot harder for me. It is not something I’m, like if I’m on an FAQ panel, like if we’re speaking at an SEO conference when like the questions come in I can answer almost any question. But when I’m speaking, giving the long speech I don’t think I shine quite as well as if I’m just directly answering a question or if I’m writing out a blog post.

its different things for different people I guess. Yeah I do when I make videos these days I usually make the video first and then I record the sound later. It usually works a lot better for me then just to try and do both at the same time and do them correctly. It is usually just a pain in the ass.

Yeah that’s what I usually do, I try to do them both at the same time and that’s probably why I keep kicking myself in the head.

Yeah that’s what I used to do as well. The chat room is asking how closely we think that Google checks blogs and alters rankings. I don’t know exactly what it means but do you think that Google does a lot of hand tweaking of search results for blogs?

I don’t think they look to hand tweak to promote blogs. If anything they probably try weighting them less because blogs were ranking so well. I don’t think they naturally try to tweak blogs in general that much. I think a lot of the stuff with blogs, blogs seem to be conversational, links are a part of conversation so I think a lot of stuff, blogs tend to be regularly updated, the good ones build a loyal following of people who often also run blogs. So I think a lot of stuff related to blogs, how they’re structured, how they’re frequently updated, how they’re conversational and how they build a relevant audience that can also link, I think a lot of that also tends to give them strong SEO juice, just how it’s structured.

I don’t think Google necessarily does a lot of tweaking to say okay to say okay let’s (44:39 – inaudible) blogs or anything like that.

They seem to well push them down sometimes because it’s too easy to rank with blogs sometimes in some areas.

Yeah I think it might be more along those lines like if and I think part of that might also be looking at like how the links come in. if they come in, in a burst and they don’t come in for a while maybe they lop a bit off the top there and only count those so much.

Yeah he’s added more info, he was ranking for personal development and then he did a blog post on how he was ranking first page for personal development and within a week or two after doing the blog post about how he obtained those rankings with the other page he was ranking with that page dropped to like page 2.

Yeah if you’re dropping from page 1 to page 2 that’s where the ranking change can happen. Like an interesting thing that happens, by the way, with new blog posts is when an authoritative site posts something about SEO, when an authoritative blog like Our Blog, Your Blog, Search Engine Land, Search Engine Watch, SEOMoz, any of those sites promote a blog posts that is about SEO and its new, well off the start Google on some of those new posts on authoritative sites they end up giving it a better ranking then it would deserve just based on the web graph. Then a few days later the ranking ends up coming back down.

I’ve seen that happen a lot where you can basically and Dave Nailer is playing with that an awful lot it seems like lately, where he just knows he’ll rank number 1 or 2 for a couple of days with his blog and then he’ll go down with that. It’s very good if you’re trying to rank for some competitive reasons.

Right and so if you know when there is an event coming that might have some publicity around it, if you can write a day ahead of other people, get that ranking there early and then if your content is good enough that when people search and find you some of them link at you and it can become more reinforcing. But if those follow on links don’t show up then the new posts ends up fading away back into obscurity again, at least for the core key words that it was ranking for because it was new.

Yeah. So Aaron we’re going to have to break this up because it’s actually been almost an hour already. It’s been an absolute pleasure talking to you and we should do this more often. But yeah thanks for being here. Anything you want to plug?

Thank you for having me and glad to be on and would love to come back.

Okay so everyone who wants more Press This advice from Aaron in his preferred way of communication as he just told us in written text should joint SEOBook.com and read the blog and register and get some good advice.

Next week we’ll have another Press This, of course. I’m trying to see who will be on with us next week. Next week is actually Scott Kingsley Clark who offers a plug in I’ve come to love over the past few weeks. It is called Parts CMS and basically injects a new CMS on top of WordPress and makes it possible to do a lot of cool things I wasn’t able to do easily otherwise.

For those of you listening to the podcast, we broadcast live on Tuesdays from 5:00 p.m. Eastern, 2:00 p.m. Pacific and for those in Europe, 11:00 p.m. CET. We’d love to have you live in the chat room and ask questions of our guests. That’s it for now and so until next week thanks and good bye.