One late summer day, as I was furiously working on fragging a freaky looking head crab zombie in Half-Life 2, a site owner calls me up and nonchalantly asks me “How do I get to number 1 in the search engines for the keyword ‘processed cheese food’?”

After picking myself up off the floor, I asked the site owner “Why?”

“We sell sandwiches” he tells me; wherein I have to pick myself up off the floor again.

“Can you hold one moment please?” I ask him, and run and grab the beautiful Mrs. Rumblepup so she can get a load of this. Turns out Mr. Site Owner owns a freeze dried gourmet style sandwich business that he wants to take online. So I do a quick search on the term (you know, to make sure I’m not going crazy) and what do I get?

I got a list of sites that describe the stuff, like Velveeta, and Kraft, and Cheese Whiz, but no sandwiches, or anything that resembles sandwiches, let alone gourmet sandwiches. In fact, I don’t think anybody using that keyword phrase as a search term is interested in gourmet sandwiches.

Nachos, maybe, but not sandwiches.

Personally, I didn’t think that processed cheese food was a keyword phrase that he should be targeting, but that’s just me.

Keywords and keyword targeting in relation to online businesses are often times a thing of wide speculation. I say wide because there are educated expert opinions, and crazy-in-the-head opinions. I try to find the expert opinions myself, because the crazy-in-the-head folks often are laughed at when they go to parties. There’s the ever important “competitive keywords,” the often misunderstood “secondary keywords,” and the WTF category of “non-competitive keywords.” The whole keyword targeting thing can get on a rumblepup’s nerves.

But guess what? That’s how people search the web, using keywords. An obvious “No Duh” statement if you’ve ever heard of one, I’m sure, but you have to really understand what that means in both the technical and the marketing sense to fully understand the implications to online business. You think you know, but you’d be surprised at what you don’t.

In comes Ken Jurina and his firm Epiar, a 6 year old SEM firm in Canada that merges website marketing, design and SEO practices that drives qualified traffic through search, most notably, what keywords are actually being searched, and how to optimize business sites for those terms.

Unlike many SEM’s Epiar’s focus is on the organic or natural search rankings which is where an estimated 90% of people who use search engine click. Epiar offers their premium keyword research and strategic SEO through the use of their suite of proprietary applications that they actually developed in house. Their applications are so innovative that they have actually qualified for R&D funding through the government of CanadKen J:

Recently Epiar ranked as the 11’th fastest growing company in it’s local province of Alberta which is more known for oil and gas and not SEO, so this was quite an accomplishment. They have also won an award for “Entrepreneurial Innovation” and Ken himself has been nominated as Ernst and Young’s Entrepreneur of the year for two consecutive years.

In other words, Ken & his expert staff at Epiar know keyword research and SEO. They know what people are searching for and why. They know the search terms that web surfers use for research, and they know search terms that elicit sales. Ken is a top of his game, SEO/ SEM, marketing animal extraordinaire that gets results for his clients. No wonder. He’s co-chair on the marketing committee of SEMPO for the past 3 years, has co-founded SEMPO Canada, presents internationally, speaks and lectures at SES’s, as well as numerous Business and Corporate seminars. His articles, presentations and research appear in everything from Web Master Radio to Web Pro News and his knowledge of design and SEO has made his clients some of the happiest people online. Over 90% of Epiar’s clients boast top 10 rankings for over 75% or more of their key phrases that Epiar has optimized their website for. That’s a pretty incredible track record.

So, of course, I had to ask him rumblepup questions. To make it up to him, I’ll send him a cheese log.

rumblepup: Hello señor!

Ken J: Ola rumblepup and mucho gracias for the interview. By the way, I have yet to receive my cheese log.

rumblepup: Damn that US Postal Service. Here I am trying to improve the US/ Canadian relations and they go eat the fine cheese log that I send to a famous foreign Search Marketer. Don’t worry Ken, I’ll contact the local Canadian Embassy and get the Mounties to track that log down. Then those mounties will beat up those darn US Postal Service hooligans who ate the cheese log, make them cough up the dough for a new one, and we’ll all sit down to a cheese log and case of Coors….

..

But I see I’ve digressed again.

..

So, uhm, what’s your favorite sandwich?

Ken J: I’m a club house kind of guy. Sometimes I’ll be crazy and remove the third slice. Though a good grilled cheese sandwich is always nice.

rumblepup: How was SES Chicago?

Ken J: SES Chicago was great. It’s always fun and interesting to network and mind meld with thousands of industry peers and we’re invited that we have been invited to present at all the major North American SES’s for the last three years. The two presentations we did went very well and we have been asked to present at two new sessions at the upcoming SES NYC in April’07. My presentation was on “Business Issues for the SEM Shop” and my employee Curtis Dueck’s presentation was on “Working Keyword Research into the Traditional Marketing Mix”. Both sessions were well received and scored but we were particularly interested in the response from Curtis’s presentation where he showed off a small portion of the keyword research capabilities Epiar offers, much of which is posted on our Internet market research blog. He was “rushed” by conference patrons after his session and over the 4 day conference many inquired on whether Epiar was for sale by even Microsoft themselves.

rumblepup: Your firm has some pretty unique and interesting methodologies for researching keywords in relation to online business and services. What is it about keyword search terms that cause confusion to site owners? It seems that what most online businesses consider “obvious” competitive keywords might actually be wrong? How does your firm help?

Ken J: This is where one of our proprietary applications we fondly call “Epiar MarketView” comes in. In about 4 weeks time the MarketView data mines and analysis typically between 20,000 to 100,000 phrases and their annual search frequency as well as the number of competing websites per phrase. The online keyword research is specifically tailored around our client’s business goals, industry, products and services. Using MarketView we then isolate the specific keywords most likely to bring and convert the select target market our clients are trying to reach and position their website in front of.

The twist is that our application does most of the heavy lifting and phrase categorization with little human involvement. Whereas competitors typically analyze hundreds of phrases possibly monthly which are obtained usually from the client themselves of through brainstorming or mining of logfiles, Epiar on the other hand offers a way to eliminate the “guess work” out of key phrase research. As we have found out, there are typically tens of thousands of ways a potential visitor to your website could describe their needs, wants, product benefits and so forth. There is no way any business owner, no matter how many years in business, would know the exact way a potential client would string together words to search online or even the misspellings that regularly happen.

Anyone in the business of effective SEO knows that if you fail in isolating the proper keyphrases to optimize your website on the rest of your SEO efforts may be in vein. Who wants to rank #1 on a phrase not being searched, even is it does result in 10,000,000 competing websites? That doesn’t mean your customer is using that exact phrase to search for your company with.

It’s remarkable how often we find companies optimizing their website for the most common 2 or possibly 3 word phrases which are “best guess” and most often competed on when in fact the best converting phrases are usually long tail phrases with 3 or more terms that often have just as many annual searches but with a faction of competing websites.

I know I’d rather have my website rank where my clients are and competitors aren’t and Epiar’s clients typically agree with that logic : )

rumblepup: As a marketer, would you suggest that targeting keyword searches is a type of branding?

Ken J: Yes I would. Research has shown that clients expect “brands” to rank in the search results for phrases they are using to search for them. Often these phrase are generic and don’t mention the brand name, but the expectation is that if a company is a real player Google or other search engines will rank them high in the results. If you’re looking to increase your brand recognition and obtain a higher percent of market share ranking directly in front of your potential target market sure helps. We have clients competing with ITunes, Chapters, Walmart and so forth yet they are consistently outranking them in the search results on phrases we know are being searched. The lift on brand awareness and goodwill brought to those client’s companies is priceless.

rumblepup: PPC has of late become a rather large and agreeably important marketing tactic, but if I’m correct, you have noted that 85% percent of regular traffic comes from organic search. Is that true across the big three (Google, Yahoo! and MSN) or have you noted any difference in paid vs. organic? Is this important? Do you think that organic SERP’s are enough to be a successful online business?

Ken J: Depending on the industry it’s typically 85% to 90% click through rate on organic search results with exception to travel which is about 50% organic and 50% PPC. This trend is the same for all major search engines. Gord Hotchkiss from Enquiro has done some great eye tracking studies that back these stats up.

I certainly do believe that organic SERP’s alone are enough to run not only a successful but thriving business, be it in offering products or services for B2B or B2C and we have a long list of clients who would agree. A number of prospective clients have come to us with a large PPC budget, some as high as $80K per day, and we have dramatically reduced or eliminated the need for the PPC spend all together because their organic rankings have been so successful. That’s not to say there isn’t a fit for both PPC and organic but I do believe that a large percent of companies could severely cut back on their PPC spend if they only invested in proper search engine optimization to return long term rankings versus having to continually increase their PPC spend because of rising PPC prices.

rumblepup: Obviously, we’ve been talking about on page factors, but off page link marketing is a factor in SERP’s as well. When considering IBL’s and anchor text, what are your suggestions? Should a site owner try to mirror on-page factors like anchor text and content when obtaining links?

Ken J: It is our belief and recommendation that a site owner incorporate keywords in the anchor text links in IBLs to their site and specifically direct that IBL, when possible, to the specific page on their website optimized for those same key phrases and related content. We apply this same theory to OBLs as well and believe that search engines place value on not only who links to you but who you linked to off of your website as well. It all comes down to being transparent to a site visitor and improving the visitor experience. While we believe this helps to give further proof and verification to search engines on what a particular web page’s content is based and optimized on it also results in better visitor experience. While some search engines may not be including this IBL factor in their algorithm presently they certainly may in the future. In the end if it only results in a better visitor experience and has no effect on SERP’s then it is still serves a valuable purpose.

rumblepup: Search is ever evolving, and what was true yesterday, might not be true today. New terms such as Semantic Web, Folksonomy, Metadata and RDF are often cited as future or existing technologies that will affect search. Where are we going with this? Will tagging and social bookmarking affect search? Will semantic data models be a future consideration? What the hell is going on? What’s next?

Ken J: Yes is the simple answer. Each will play a role in validating the relevance of a site for search engines while also serve the purpose of collecting pools of potentially targeted traffic which you can drive to your website if you capitalize on the opportunities social bookmarking and similar technologies offer. As search algorithms get smarter and smarter the will continue to add or replace variables to improve on the search result. They continually are testing and defining what the best search experience may be and as a result may choose to show results be they local, news topics, maps and more which will appear above organic search results and push them lower on the page.

The reality is that search engines will continue to work towards whatever is going to result in a better search experience in order for them to hold on to and ultimately grow their percent of the search market share. As a result smart SEM’s have to be able to adapt to incorporate the benefits these new technologies offer and move with the ever-changing tide that is SEM or they will drown. The constant state of the Internet is in is exciting and fosters new opportunities for Epiar. We feed off of it and take advantage of the competitive edge it offers us as we continually focus full time man hours towards R&D to be at the bleeding edge of technology. It’s a costly but necessary investment unless you want to be a “me too” SEM which Epiar certainly is not.

rumblepup: You started your design business back in 1993. When did you first get into design for the web?

Ken J: My print and web design/development firm, Top Draw, opened its doors in 1993 and Epiar 6 years ago in 2001 when it first began its R&D on our applications. Top Draw got heavily into website development in 1997 when the Internet was still very young and people didn’t even know if they wanted a website let along for it to be optimized. Surprisingly some of that still happens today. Now the bulk of our employees at Top Draw are website designers or programmers and our list of web solutions and services have dramatically increased over the years. As Epiar does not do website development themselves we often work with third party firms, including Top Draw, to implement Epiar SEO techniques for clients’ websites. Epiar is more like the architect and Top Draw or another 3rd party firm is the construction company that builds the online property that we have meticulously planned out.

rumblepup: Do you remember the first website you made? What was it?

Ken J: That’s over 10 years ago now, but it was probably the Top Draw website. Which funny enough we are redeveloping as we speak to improve its SEO and content. As they say “the shoe maker’s son goes without any shoes”. It’s embarrassing as the site really hasn’t been properly updated for almost 3 years now.

rumblepup: How was it that you progressed to SEM?

Ken J: Top Draw was sick and tired of their clients’ websites not ranking in the SERPs and 6+ years ago we knew we had to do something about it before our client’s started asking questions and demanding better returns on the advertising investments. We knew there had to be something more we could do to drive more qualified traffic to our clients’ websites beyond simply increasing a clients traditional marketing spend and plastering their website address everywhere. We knew we needed to capitalize on what was likely an untapped market of people already online searching for our clients. There were few solutions that we could and more theories and numerous contradictions of how to properly rank in the search results. It was at that fortuitous moment I happened to run across my now business partner in Epiar, Bob Vaasjo, who had some innovative ideas and theories about SEO. IT was then that we really pioneered in this industry breaking new ground and going through a lot of hell and heartaches in development that even resulted in employees quitting who didn’t subscribe to our new philosophy of how optimized websites needed to be built. At that time there were many web developers, and still are, who only wanted to design 100% flash websites or weren’t taught, and still aren’t today, about how to develop a website that was search engine optimized. It was a very tough time but we forged ahead against the odds and many naysayers and now are starting to really reap the rewards, but the fight and battle is far from over.

rumblepup: When you need a little help, what do you do? What forums do you visit? Whose blogs do you frequent?

Ken J: We do a lot of testing and rely upon ourselves to find a solution on many occasions but it’s always nice to call on our SEM friends who we’ve met over the years, many of which are from the relationships we have built at SES conferences. There are too many great forums and blogs to mention but I’ll list off a few. I’m often at Rand Fishkin’s blog at www.seomoz.org, Danny Sullivan’s at http://www.searchengineland.com, Brett’s popular webmaster forum http://www.webmasterworld.com/ , Barry Schwartz’s report on the most interesting threads taking place in the SEO forums at http://www.seroundtable.com/ and John Battelle’s thoughts on the intersection of search, media, technology, and more at http://battellemedia.com/. These are but a few but there are incredible resources of knowledge and I hold each of these gentlemen in the highest regard.

rumblepup: So, talking about cheese, I heard you sat on some.

(ROFL, OMG, now that’s comedy)

Ken J: Ah yes, that cheese. It was a cold day in Chicago and the SEO Fan Girl author of the popular Men of SEO Blog was treating some of us to some true Chicago deep dish pizza. Let’s just say our mode of transportation fell through and we took the subway instead. I happened to find myself sitting on a piece of processed cheese that somehow was on my seat. Well that cheese ended up joining us for the remainder of the evening and made its way around. Now I see SEO Fan Girl has made things even “cheesier” by having a contest to see whose butt the cheese is on. Feel free to take a look and vote at http://menofseo.blogspot.com/ as to which bottom you think is mine. There are a number of famous ones there.

rumblepup: SES sounds both fun and informative. What can someone like rumblepup experience there?

Ken J: Pretty much everything SEM. Great people, invaluable information and some rare insight into the future of SEM you can get only after a couple of libations with key people. The parties are a riot, talk about social networking. I can highly recommend the SES conferences as well as Danny’s new Expos at http://searchmarketingexpo.com/ of which he has three of so far this year. I know they will be a success and we plan to be at them.

rumblepup: This has been a long and challenging debate in some very serious circles. As a web and search expert, I really need your opinion on this. Who was the greatest historical figure in the 20th century?

Curly?

Shemp?

Curly or Shemp?

Ken J: No doubt about it Curly. His logic was without flaw.

rumblepup: I certainly agree. In fact, I’m writing a treatise on the cultural and philosophical influences of “Nyuck, Nyuck” and “Woo, woo, woo, woo, woo” on the national and international political arena.

See, saw, see? Soitenly! Yaadadeeee, Yaadeda.
(And for the culturally devoid of life, look it up here)

Thank you Ken.

Ken J: My pleasure rumblepup! And if you could send that cheeselog without any nuts on the outside I would appreciate it.

rumblepup: Jeez, the things I gotta do to get a guy to do an interview.

In ancient times, say 1998, when the internet was young and dumb and full of you know what, the web was somewhat limited.

Sure, you could buy books online, you could e-mail your friends, but finding really good information was somewhat of a coin flip. Usually, when you searched for, say, “html best practices,” you’d get a search result that basically told you how cute girls wearing hardly anything where dying to tell you, while they where taking off the hardly anythings and doing questionable things with tropical fruit, exactly what to do with the best html practices, and how much they loved you for it.

Fun diversion, for sure, but darn it all, at the time, I would think, “How come my friends always tell me they find these really good sites with all the information I need about html, or sneakers, or how to train a cat, or the best way to create an independent movie, or the latest news on the political climate in the Midwest, or how to make cheese? How come they find it, and I can’t? How can the web be more about real things?”

Well web technology enthusiasts, companies and pundits have been promising for years about how the web will evolve to a more user driven, or people driven, or whatever cool term they had back in the late 90’s, early 00’s (goose eggs, for the funny names group) driven.

It could be that the promise has of late to pass.

Like a brand new baby with a PhD, here comes Web 2.0 and social bookmarking. And one of the cutest babies of the bunch is also one of my favorites, Ma.gnolia.

Your first stop at ma.gnolia is usually the only stop you need. In all honesty, I was introduced to ma.gnolia from Matt Cutt’s post on Web 2.0 . I know, I know, the phrase “Web 2.0” is sooooo two months ago, but it’s an interesting meme at least, and certainly applies to a web…uhmm…thing like ma.gnolia.

Is it a service? Is it a site? Is it a search engine? Is a community? Is it a directory? I’ll tell you what I think.

Yes.

Well, what else do you want me to say? Mrs. Rumblepup always has a way to make me feel dumb when I’m trying to elucidate on the finer points of potpourri, a topic that does not mix well with my more masculine chemicals, but I’m trying. And the fact is that ma.gnolia, and sites that try to be like it are a new thing that really doesn’t include a history of mechanical know-how.

It’s kinda like a brand new, bad ass mustang that uses solar power instead of a beast 8 cylinder engine. It’s cool as hell, but hard to talk about the cool man stuff under the hood, ‘cause none of your man friends have every seen a solar powered engine before.

How can I relate it? What does it have to do with SEO and SEM? Who invented liquid soap, and why?

So what does a poor rumblepup do? How can a simple rumblepup get the answers these questions (maybe not the one about liquid soap) deserve?

Well, rumblepup goes to the man who helped start it all. I asked Larry Halff, the founder of ma.gnolia, if I can ask him my brand of dumb questions and he said yes.

I’m like, “Dude, you’re gonna love my new mustang!”

He said, “Cool, is it solar powered?”

How, much better can it get?

rumblepup –
Hello señor!

Larry Halff –
Hola!

rumblepup –
In your own words, what is ma.gnolia?

Larry Halff –
Ma.gnolia is a tool for organizing your online life. We often think about organizing our lives as a highly personal thing, and it is in some respects. But our online lives involve a lot of collaboration and personalities, and we give those aspects of online life as much emphasis as we do to the simple bookmarking and sharing. So yes, you can find bookmarks to good web sites on all sorts of subjects, but it’s as much about who is behind those finds, and putting a human face on sharing information.

rumblepup –
You had some pretty heavy hitters help develop ma.gnolia. What was it like working with them?

Larry Halff –
We were really fortunate to work with the people we did in our original design. Happy Cog , led by Jeffrey Zeldman, took on the project and delivered not only a stunning visual brand, but a superbly implemented set of HTML and CSS templates for us to build on. We found working with Jeffrey’s team very interactive while being practical and getting results quickly and regularly, right down to the last pixel.

rumblepup –
What is the underlying technology behind ma.gnolia? Why did you choose to go with that as opposed to asp.net, or php, or other, newer technologies out there?

Larry Halff –
Ma.gnolia is built in Ruby on Rails. It’s a sensible, enjoyable platform for us to develop in, and a happy developer is a productive developer. As we all know, you can find a ton of arguments about what is the best platform, so I won’t rehash that. Ruby on Rails just happens to be the best one for us.

rumblepup –
When I’m using ma.gnolia, I like to go thumbing around the tag clouds. I usually find just what I’m looking for there, or something incredibly interesting. The best part about this is that this is pretty trustworthy content; Reason being that someone has found a really good source of information, a cool “thing”, or cool “on the clock time waster” and I trust the content.

Are you watching how ma.gnolia users actually use the service? Are people using ma.gnolia as a SE?

Larry Halff –
Sometimes…

A lot of what people do in Ma.gnolia does start with using it as a resource for new or forgotten links. But because we also focus on the social aspect, we see people following the bookmarks and tags of others in the community who catch their interest. That ability to discover and share through relationships brings out the third aspect of the service and the one we’re still building, which is to do interesting things with the information you organize in Ma.gnolia and the people you know.

rumblepup –
In the search for IBL’s, web marketers have found social bookmarking. However, spammers have as well. On ma.gnolia, I have found a couple of users that post a bunch of links to the same site. But it seems to me that the community “effect” is that these bookmarks quickly gets lost in the background. They might get a little IBL, but there marks are so down the food-chain, that the SE’s might never find them. I know that your team has had some serious discussions and work-ups to handle spamming, but the real question is this; in this community setting, how do you know what spam is? Is someone who’s listing their T-shirt site, because he/she believes it to be a good source, gonna get smacked upside the head for posting it, just because it’s a personal or commerce site?

Is their anything wrong with posting a site under the pre-text of “look at this really cool thing I did?”

Larry Halff –
The line isn’t as fine as it might seem. We think it’s great that people use Ma.gnolia to make their creations known to the world and to keep others up to date on their own happenings.

When you see bookmarks with completely unrelated (but popular) tags, you’re obviously in spam country, and at that point we feel confident in taking action.

rumblepup –
You guys have a pretty standard T&C (Terms and Conditions for those playing along) but basically, as a person signs up, you pretty much tell them that they are free to post, comment, and add to ma.gnolia to their liking, just be cool and nice about it. Did I get this basic feeling right? Is the democratic nature of ma.gnolia self governing?

Larry Halff –
You have the basic feeling exactly right.

Ma.gnolia isn’t democratic in the sense that we have a voting system, but the value of Ma.gnolia is created by its members through their bookmarks, comments, additions to our support wiki , and so on.

We try to create easy paths to different ways of discovering and sharing for all kinds of reasons. Where we do that right, people come and do interesting things.

rumblepup –
Do you see ma.gnolia as an evolution of social bookmarking, or do you see the success of ma.gnolia as an evolution of the web?

Larry Halff –
I’m not a big fan of the term “social bookmarking.” I don’t think most people are passionate about bookmarks. We’re passionate about the information we bookmark and what we can learn and create from the things we bookmark. Ma.gnolia’s development is driven by the results people can achieve with the information they save, we’re not trying to build a better database application.

rumblepup –
Ok, since your site is touted as a best example of what Web 2.0 is, let me ask you. What the heck is Web 2.0 and where does ma.gnolia fit in?

Larry Halff –
I’m sure I’m starting to sound aloof, but Ma.gnolia isn’t intentionally participating in the Web 2.0 phenomenon.

We’re trying to build a great productivity tool for our members, and along the way some of our techniques intersect with what is called Web 2.0.

Or, to put it another way, Ma.gnolia is not going to be the next YouTube.

rumblepup –
So, why ma.gnolia and not just gnolia, or magnolia, or one whole word? Do you guys have del.ico.us envy?

Larry Halff –
The name mostly comes from the movie, Magnolia by PT Anderson. If you haven’t seen it, it involves a number of complex story lines that crisscross in unexpected ways, and show us different sides to characters and their stories. We look at our experience on the web like this, the way our knowledge evolves by clicking from one place to another, it grows like a flower.

If we could have grabbed magnolia.com we would have, for sure. However, that URL is owned by a big oil company and we didn’t have much hope, so we did the next best thing and dropped a dot in the middle.

rumblepup –
Do you visit, or partake, in any of the other competing social bookmarking or social network sites? Do you think there is room for healthy competition?

Larry Halff –
Ma.gnolia is the only one I use; don’t spend much time checking out other services. Ma.gnolia isn’t intentionally competing with them for market share. We’re trying to build the right tool for our members, and we figure that when people come to us, they know whether we’re right for them. Our success is not tied to being the biggest; it’s tied to providing the most value for our members.

rumblepup –
When did you first discover the web? What where your thoughts on it back then and now?

Larry Halff –
I first started using the web as a graduate student in 1992 or 1993 with a Mac version of WorldWideWeb. I have to admit, there wasn’t a whole lot out there to see back then, Usenet newsgroups where were the action was at.

What I find most interesting about the evolution of the Internet is how we’re trying to find a balance between always connected computing, the mainframe and terminal paradigm, and independent personal computing, which perhaps reached it’s peak with desktop publishing and image editing.

rumblepup –
When did you put up your first website? What was it?

Larry Halff –
I think my first web site was for my graduate school research lab, MERLin, the Multimedia Ethnographic Research Lab at the University of British Columbia. Back then I was working on a qualitative video analysis tool called Constellations. We even prototyped a web-based version, which was very much like a social bookmarking service.

rumblepup –
If I put a gun to your head, what was the dumbest user tag you’ve ever seen used? What was the smartest?

Larry Halff –
Well I don’t think we see ‘dumb’ tags. People tag the words and phrases that are on their mind when they bookmark a site, so it’s about what’s meaningful to them. You see clever, sometimes funny tags like ‘tales of interest’ but you also see inspiring ones that call for people to act on a story or event that is bookmarked. One of my favorite uses of tags is choosing a particular tag for an event; it gives us a great way to gather photo, bookmarks, and blog posts from all of the different services people choose to use.

rumblepup –
Ok, now, for the real big question. What’s your favorite Sid and Marty Krofft Show?

Larry Halff –
H.R. Puffinstuff. Who can deny that theme song?

rumblepup –
I know what you mean. Somedays, I just can’t get that song out of my head. Those are the days Mrs. Rumblepup rubs my head and checks our insurance book for psychiatric coverage. Poor girl, she still doesn’t fathom my inner genius.

Who do you think was the coolest star?

Larry Halff –
Sigmund. What’s not to love about a conical sea monster!

rumblepup –
Yeah, I loved that show. Always wondered how he talked though. His mouth just puffed in and out.

But I always had a soft spot for Joy from The Bugaloos.

Even as a six year old, I knew she was hot.

..

..

And as I’m writing this, I feel the cold stare of Mrs. Rumblepup on my back. You guessed it, bad news is coming. Gotta go.

Many thanks to Larry Halff from Ma.gnolia.

Until next time.
rumblepup.

BAMF. No, I’m not talking about the tape company. That’s BASF. Even though this little bitty blog of mine is open to all comments and all forms of expression, when I started to type out the words for one of my favorite acronyms, Mrs. Rumblepup gave me the stink-eye, and let me tell you, Mrs. Rumblepup’s stink-eye would send city devouring demons running and crying like little girls who just had their favorite Hello Kitty pocketbook ripped apart by a 7 foot crack fiend on steroids.

But I digress.

BAMF. That pretty much sums up the marketing Bad Ass (I did get the first two words in, neener, neener, neener) that is Mr. Brian Mark.

Brian Mark is a marketing animal. Well, you pretty much have to be a marketing animal when you run a show like http://www.toolbarn.com. Go ahead, check it out. I’ll wait.

Just a tool website you say?

Did you look at the PR?
Did you check out the backlinks?

That’s right. We’re talking about an Internet 500 company. What’s that, you say? Well, there’s the Fortune 500, and there’s the web equivalent of the Internet 500. Why is that impressive? Well, just imagine this; How many successful e-commerce sites do you know of? A whole bunch is an adequate statement. Heck, you might even run one. Ok, and the web consists of millions of web sites, of which, a great many are e-commerce or merchant sites. Somebody like Internet Retailer makes an exhausting search on the TOP 500 of these in terms of revenue, and the site Brian Mark runs is IN THERE with Abercrombie and Fitch, and Fossil.

Are you catching my drift here? Toolbarn.com is mentioned in the same company as Apple Computer and Target for darn sake. Just take a look at who is on the list of Top 500’s to see what I’m talking about. That takes some marketing know how, and Brian Mark is full of marketing know how.

I heard it leaks out of his ear on some occasions.

A regular speaker at SES, he’s known for great SEM and fantastic PPC marketing campaigns. PPC alone gives me hives to try to figure out, but he has figured them out.

He’s damn proud of his machines too. Whenever he gets a new box in the Computer Room, with childlike abandon, he plays with it, then runs and tells everybody the cool new toy he’s got. Sometimes he doesn’t even play with it first, just runs and tell the computer geeks amongst us about the cool new box they’re installing right now, just to make the pocket protector crowd heave a collective “whooooaaaa.”

I have a lot of respect for Brian, ‘cause we have similar backgrounds. Coming from an artistic background, he started out doing graphic design and computer graphics, and he up and decides to learn something simple, like UNIX, runs a few IT departments here and there, and then gets into web design and promotion.

See, just like me, except he’s good at it.

Word on the street is that if anybody knows the algo it’s him. I’ve even heard some rumors that he’s on a first name basis with the algo, and invites it over for cookies and beer all the time.

Running several successful blogs, several successful sites, speaking at SES, and joining the maverick team of Top SEO Consultants has made Brian Mark somewhat of a celebrity marketer amongst the “little train that could” crowd, and a respected professional amongst ALL CROWDS. I’ve had the pleasure of being called a numb-nut by him and then being taught a finer wisdom that he can drop on you like a ton of bricks.

So you know I had to ask him some rumblepup questions.

When I asked him if I could, he said yes. Then he gave me a cookie.

…

How did he know I wanted a cookie right there and then?

He’s a BAMF marketer, that’s why.

rumblepup – Hello señor!

Brian Mark – Howdy, Pup.

rumblepup – So, Mrs.Rumblepup thinks you’re a cute 18 year old and wonders how a kid your age became so important. (Check out Brian’s picture)

Brian Mark - Well, the picture is from when I was 18. I just don’t have too many that I like taken since then, and it’s sort of mocking all of the traditional media folk out there that think you need 20+ years experience to be any good at what you do. I’m actually in my 30’s now, but I used the pic anyway.

rumblepup – Hey, what’s the latest box have you guys loaded up? What got you interested in the hardware and IT aspect of the web business?

Brian Mark - The latest box is a second google mini. Before that, a pair of dual processor, dual-core Opterons with 4 gigs of RAM and SCSI mirrors for database servers. Yes, I know my hardware inside and out (other than the Google stuff, since they don’t allow you to open them without voiding any warranty. What a shame.) I got into hardware while selling computers – first at Radio Shack, then at Nebraska Furniture Mart (I remember selling computers to Warren Buffett so he could play chess online will Bill Gates, and Chip Davis so he could make his next album), and when I started working as an SCO Unix admin after taking a Unix 1 course at a local community college, well, SCO required very specific stuff at the time for hardware. So when I got into web stuff, the hardware and IT side of things just sort of tagged along.

rumblepup – How was it that Danny Sullivan asked you to speak at SES? What it like speaking at SES? Do you enjoy it?

Brian Mark - Well, yes and no. I was at the SEMPO.org booth in the exhibition hall at SES in Chicago – December 2004 if I’m not mistaken – and Matt Van Wagner talked me into approaching Danny about speaking because of our success. I talked to Danny briefly that time, and he took my card and emailed me a confirmation not too long after I got back home to speak at New York a few months later. Since then, Allan Dick from Vintage Tub and Bath has taken over the retailer track and he wants me to speak there every time, regardless of the fact that I’m not a great public speaker. I just know what I’m doing on both the technical and marketing sides enough that Allan thinks the sessions are better with me in there, especially for the Q&A portion. I’m one of the few hand-on guys in most of the sessions I speak at. Most seem to have a team back home that they’re representing.

rumblepup – When did you first discover the web?

Brian Mark - I think that would be while I was going to the University of Nebraska at Lincoln in ‘93 or ‘94. Of course, it wasn’t the same on an old VAX machine, but when you’re studying Chemical Engineering that’s all they give you to play with. When I got a PC for my room, I got onto some chatboards that had IRC and I thought that was the greatest thing ever. If you knew how, you could even get lynx up on the system and browse the web, so I did some research from my room that way.

rumblepup – How did you get into the web business?

Brian Mark - I started with ToolBarn.com in 1999. In between the SCO Unix job and the ToolBarn gig, I worked at a company that made video slot machines. I got to do the graphics, which was as far from SCO Unix Administratoin as I could imagine. I made some great contacts there that I still bounce ideas off of. Basically, I enjoyed the UNIX job and wanted to keep some creativity, so a web job seemed like a great blend.

rumblepup – When did you first discover SEM and SEO? How did it change your perspective on running a website?

Brian Mark - Really, I discovered it in mid 2000. I was doing it more by accident then. I had created ToolBarn so it was easy to navigate, and I followed good page design basics – title tags that were descriptive, meta tags on all the pages, description of what was on the page (same as the title) listed on the page. I didn’t know it was called SEO, but when this strange site started sending lots of referrals, I took a look at what this “Google” thing was and figured out it was a search engine pretty quick, and for whatever reason it liked us. So then I started figuring out how to make it like us more. That’s when I decided I needed to investigate this further, even though I still didn’t know what “SEO” meant. We also had an account on goto.com pretty early on, and the lack of decent analytics at the time made it too tough to tell what was working and what wasn’t, so we really limited our spend for a while and then quit that all together until we got our analytics up to speed.

rumblepup - SEO, and especially SEM, is a little mysterious. Sometimes you just don’t know if placing a particular link or a particular ad, or placement within a directory is going to work. How do you rank marketing effectiveness? What can you learn from using the right metrics?

Brian Mark - The marketing effectiveness online is pretty much impossible to figure out. If you have a number of visitors from a keyword and you gain a link to that page, then the difference between your current and your previous traffic for that phrase is from that link. But no, it’s more complicated. That link coming in on one page may lift all the pages it links to, which could affect the pages those link to, and you get this waterfall effect. There are also fluctuations in ranking without making any changes.

What I end up doing is just doing a bunch of things and not worrying about the effect of each change, but rather what was the overall effect to our website. Trying to figure out any more than that makes my head start to hurt. Adding in decent metrics allows you to see not only the traffic from a phrase, but also how many dollars that accounted for. After all, 2 million people to your site that don’t buy anything is worth less than 1 person to your site that makes a purchase.

rumblepup - Web 2.0 (Gosh I hate that term) technologies, especially the ones that promote user generated content, is quickly on the rise. What are your thoughts on it? How will it change the web? Will it change ecommerce? Is it the people powered web that pundits have been talking about for the past few years?

Brian Mark - From an ecommerce perspective, I don’t think it’ll change things too much. Some companies will try it and forget that the #1 visitors to their site are those pesky bots, so it’ll be pretty useless at that point. Some of the places it’ll make a difference for ecommerce are in form validation and the checkout process, but any content on the site will still need to be in good ol’ fashioned (x)html. Bells and whistles don’t sell, good content on good products at a fair price is what sells. This whole “people powered web” is a bit too techie for the average user. I still don’t digg or use any of the other social bookmarking sites on a regular basis. To me, it’s too much of the geek perspective and it doesn’t factor in the average web visitor. Have you tried asking your spouse or your parents what their technorati rating is? They don’t care about these things, and until a huge number of actual web users do, it won’t make a dent for me. I’ve tried some searches on the social sites, but the results are always favoring the SEO and other geek websites. They don’t, in fact, list much of the web at this time. Until they’re comprehensive, which in a social site isn’t too likely unless everyone votes for themselves, they just don’t suit most users.

rumblepup – I first discovered the real power of the web around 1998. Can’t tell you exactly what it was about the web that brought me in, but I know that within the first few months of 1998, I learned HTML and created my first website. (I still remember the first time I saw Google) Or Mercedes Benz first butt ugly website. Since then, the changes in the web have been VAST. What, in your opinion, is next? Will e-commerce change? Will search change?

Brian Mark - The only thing that will be constant is change. Our site has changed a lot over the past few years. So has search. I believe Danny Sullivan when he says we’ll do a product search and see pictures and prices come up from Google one day, and we’ll look back and wonder why we ever wanted 10 blue links. It won’t happen today, not tomorrow, and not all at once. It’ll be phased in more and more – the beginnings are the “One box”, and eventually a product will exist in a unique index from general web information and we’ll all wonder why it wasn’t always that way. That will change ecommerce quite a bit.

rumblepup – You’ve recently been working on Validation for your websites. While I think that valid markup is important for a professional developer, I’ve always been of the mind that complete, standardista, 100% (x)html compliant web development is a GUIDE to good web page development, but not the end all, be all rule that you must adhere to or face the consequences.

Let’s put it this way. As far as the CSS/ XTML crowd goes, and the debates I’ve had, they think I should be strung up to a honey soaked pole and that red army ants should be allowed to have their way with me.

An XHTML and CSS valid webpage is a beautiful thing in concept, but the SE’s, as far as I can tell, DON’T SEEM TO CARE. This goes against the standardista mantra that valid (x)html performs better than regular, old fashioned, maybe a few errors in code; HTML, as far as crawling is concerned. It’s been my contention that the SE’s are not code police, their business is RESULTS.

Matt Cutt’s has said it in an interview:

I like the W3C a lot; if they didn’t exist, someone would have to invent them. People sometimes ask whether Google should boost (or penalize) for valid (or invalid) HTML. There are plenty of clean, perfectly validating sites, but also lots of good information on sloppy, hand-coded pages that don’t validate. Google’s home page doesn’t validate and that’s mostly by design to save precious bytes. Will the world end because Google doesn’t put quotes around color attributes? No, and it makes the page load faster. Eric Brewer wrote a page while at Inktomi that claimed 40% of HTML pages had syntax errors. We can’t throw out 40% of the web on the principle that sites should validate; we have to take the web as it is and try to make it useful to searchers, so Google’s index parsing is pretty forgiving.” http://blog.outer-court.com/archive/2005-11-17-n52.html

And Jeffrey Zeldman said

“Web Standards” is not a set of immutable laws, but a path filled with options and decisions. In our view, people who insist on absolute purity in today’s browser and standards environment do as much harm to the mainstream adoption of web standards as those who have never heard of or are downright hostile toward structural markup and CSS.” http://www.zeldman.com/

And now, even Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web, has basically said that as much as they tried to promote valid markup as a “standard” the W3C is re-examining HTML because, basically, no one paid attention.

“Some things are clearer with hindsight of several years. It is necessary to evolve HTML incrementally. The attempt to get the world to switch to XML, including quotes around attribute values and slashes in empty tags and namespaces all at once didn’t work. The large HTML-generating public did not move, largely because the browsers didn’t complain. Some large communities did shift and are enjoying the fruits of well-formed systems, but not all. It is important to maintain HTML incrementally, as well as continuing a transition to well-formed world, and developing more power in that world.”
http://dig.csail.mit.edu/breadcrumbs/node/166

But, and this is a Big But, you, as a successful marketer, are making attempts to employ standards compliant websites, and I, as a student of what successful people do, am paying attention. Why am I paying attention? Why should I, and web owners, pay attention to valid markup?

Brian Mark - I got a tip late one night, long after the bars had closed and the alcohol had quit flowing, from one of my SEO idols. He told me that Slurp crawled valid HTML better. I laughed, nodded, and made note to test it out when I got home. We only had 7,000 pages in the Yahoo index at the time, and that had been bothering me. So I started validating pages, and pretty quick like we had 35,000 pages in the index. I repeated the process on our other site and I saw the same trend. So what was the effect? We now get 3 – 10x the traffic from Yahoo that we used to. This made me believe VERY MUCH in HTML validation.

rumblepup – Ok, enough debates. Jeez I’m a dumb jerk, but I love playing devil’s advocate. Here’s a hypothetical situation. You have a website with good content, good on page factors, and is SE friendly, but absolutely ZERO money for any kind of promotion, advertising, web directory placement or anything. What do you do? What’s the first thing you would do to market the site? What other things would you do that doesn’t involve paying for it?

Brian Mark - First thing I would do is get a loan.

rumblepup – Oh, you are such the wit. Did you spend all day thinking that one up? OOUUCCH, Damn first NeO, and now you hit me. I’m lodging a complaint with the union.

…

There is no blogging union, is there?

…

I’ll shut up now.

Brian Mark - Ok, now to be serious. Without money, I’d start participating in forums. You’ll come across some people with similar sites, and someone will see the value in the site and give you a link (not to mention all the signature links you’re getting). Once that starts getting you a few links and people agree that your site is a good resource, then you want to go and start getting some free directory links. Don’t concern yourself too much with PageRank or Alexa rankings on your site or on the directory. Sure, those are nice and all, but they don’t pay the bills. Just be consistent about participating in the forums and submitting to free directories and you’ll quickly gain some traffic. Once you start making a few sales, start doing some additional marketing with the proceeds and keep building things slowly over time. Nothing will defeat you quicker than lack of patience.

rumblepup – I know that you’ve created somewhat of an art form of PPC placement. How did you first get into it, and how long before you came up with a methodology for making it successful?

Brian Mark - I first got into it because we wanted more traffic. I think that’s every website owner’s dream, so if you can throw a little money at the problem and see results, great. I didn’t really get any sort of a system down until we got some decent analytics, by which I mean paid analytics. The free ones can get you started, but enterprise level analytics really pay for themselves quickly if you can understand them. I have our PPC campaigns down to enough of a highly targeted keyword list that I log in once a week to see how things are doing. I generally go by conversion rate, cost per acquisition, and spend. So long as those all seem in line, I log back out and call it good. Once every month or so I dig deeper, but most of the time it’s just a quick glance to make sure something odd isn’t going on. It took a lot of failure in PPC before I got it right.

rumblepup – What is the one piece of advice that you would give any website owner? In other words, a tried and true classic design, marketing or promotion technique which you feel not enough people take advantage of.

Brian Mark – Your users provide you with so much data every day by using your site search functions. Look closely at that and see how much you can improve those results through on-page factors, then try applying that to a broader scale. A search is a search in my eyes, regardless where it’s run. If you can’t serve relevant results to your users, then how do you expect any other search engine to do it for you? I probably learn more from looking at quality assessment on our internal search than most marketers learn from all of their metrics tools combined. After all, if you don’t check that you’ve got decent results internally, then what business do you have trying to serve customers through external search engines?

rumblepup – And what has to be the most important question of them all. Who’s hotter, Wilma or Betty?

Brian Mark - There’s just something about redheads… they scare me. But since this is an SEO blog, wouldn’t those characters be named Laura Thieme and Dana Todd? Well, Dana isn’t a natural redhead, so maybe not. In any case, I’ll have to go with Betty on this one.

rumblepup - OOOO, another Betty freak. I knew I liked you for a reason, he, he, he. Ooouuuchh! Now I’m getting titty twisters from Mrs. Rumblepup. Thanks a lot Brian. Tell us a joke to make it up to me.

Brian Mark - How did the black hat SEO get to the peak of Mount Everest? He spammed his way to the top.

rumblepup - And I’m the one that gets smacked around for telling dumb jokes.

]]> http://www.rumblepup.com/an-interview-with-brian-mark/feed/ 0 http://www.rumblepup.com/an-interview-with-mike-aka-michael-mcdonald/ http://www.rumblepup.com/an-interview-with-mike-aka-michael-mcdonald/#comments Mon, 30 Oct 2006 07:36:14 +0000 rumblepup http://www.rumblepup.com/an-interview-with-mike-aka-michael-mcdonald/

Sometimes I get so busy; I just don’t know what to do with myself. I mean this literally folks, because keeping an eye on my regular 9-5 (7 nowadays) as a Marketing Director, keeping up to date with my online businesses, and trying to fit the beautiful Mrs. Rumblepup into my waking hours, especially after she smacks me upside the head for not “paying attention to her emotionally,” made me put my underwear over my pants this morning. It’s embarrassing to say the least, but certainly a bright spot of comedic entertainment for the aforementioned Mrs. Pup.

So that’s why I find it so utterly incredible how the man known to WebProWorld as Mike can actually take the time to answer a few of the rumblepup’s questions. I mean, as if being the Admin. for WPW isn’t enough, he’s managing editor for ALL of the behemoth IEntry network publications and the Director of Operations for IEntry as well. Have you ever seen the vastness of these websites? Just WebProNews is gigantic enough, but then you start digging in and you find hundreds of sites that are just as vast, you start to pray for the guy. I mean, this isn’t just content where talking about here. It’s hundreds of writers, thousands of articles, an ocean of information that Mike has to…um…

…operate.

So before I got a headache, and my eyes started to spin in my head, I tried to find the simplest profile on him that I could.

What did I find? Just this. Just…

It seems simple until your brain starts wrapping around the concept. So I stopped when my ears started to bleed. I know busy cats, but this cat is the one of the busiest, and one of the most sought after speakers and web experts there are. He knows his caca, and when we recently crossed passed at WPW, I put my pants on over my underwear, sucked in my gut, threw out my chest, and as a man of courage and guts…begged on my knees for him to answer just a few questions.

He said yes.
…
…
…
I got him a set of rumblepup underwear as a gift. Hope he appreciates the humor.

rumblepup: So Mike, any clothing problems like mine to deal with?

Mike: Socks seem to be the bane of my existence. I can never find matching socks in the morning. If I find a pair one of them will have a hole in it or something – despite the fact that I’d already thrown it away (many times). I sometimes suspect that holey socks haunt be from beyond the trash, abducting my matching pairs and generally causing me torment and anguish.

rumblepup: When did you first discover the web? How long was before you knew you wanted to be involved in it?

Mike: I discovered what I guess we’d call the web back in about 1993-94 while in college at the University of Kentucky. Back then; the mezzanine floor of Patterson Office Tower was home to a few hundred monochrome terminals you would have to go use for your Computer Science work. I remember quite vividly wondering around there trying to find an open station amidst those I referred to as ‘the lost’. The numberless horde of ‘computer people’ bathing in the green glow of their MUDs and binging on caffeine.
It still kinda makes my skin crawl. You’d go in and see the same people in the same chairs (with the same clothes on) for days at a time. Very disturbing. At that point I really didn’t want much of anything to do with it, it would be a few more years before that would change.

I guess in the end it was probably games that kindled my interest in the web. I have always been a huge video game junky (no doubt the reason why the guys on the mezzanine creeped me out so much). The Internet became a means to frag for me more than anything long about 1996 when I started playing Quake. I was instantly and completely addicted to having a fast paced, highly competitive environment available 24/7. My subsequent interest in websites, forums and ebusiness grew from much the same interests. It doesn’t get much more fast paced and competitive than ebusiness.

rumblepup: How is it you came to join IEntry? What was if first like back in 2000?

Mike: It was actually a lot like it is today, just smaller. There weren’t as many of us, we were in a smaller office and we were working with (a lot) less content, sites and titles. It was still very much a team effort kind of thing though, and that is still very much a part of the day-to-day in 2006. A lot of us wear a lot of hats. Everybody just does what he or she is able to do. We have a lot of talented, knowledgeable folks running around.

rumblepup: In a nutshell, other than the obvious Admin responsibilities as WPW, what is it that you do? Do you have fun? What’s it like working for such a vast network? As the one of the boss men, do you get to smack people around?

Mike: Aside from the forum, I manage to keep busy with any number of things. I handle all of the hiring for non-sales staff. I field calls like inquiries, requests for interviews, press releases etc. I schedule and plan coverage of conferences. Most of the time when someone has an issue or question regarding some aspect of our network, I’ll be the one to deal with that. We have a lot of people focused on our content, but I will typically review content/subject matter on sites and newsletters. Lately, I’ve been focusing a lot on working concepts and some content for our videos. I keep tabs on subscription rates on our newsletters, rss feeds and the forum. I don’t know, I do whatever needs doing that I can do. I usually manage to stay busy. Last week for example, I helped one of our sales people teach a client how to copy and paste. The fun never ends.

As for working for such a vast network… well, it’s fun. My normal day is seldom the same as yesterday. There are so many things going on at any given time, there’s really no shortage of things to become involved in. We always have some cool little projects going on whether they are internal or for public use (like the videos). We have some pretty neat stuff in the works right now that I’m expecting a lot of people will find handy. More info soon on that one.

Slapping people around? Nah. I have a yardstick on my desk that is +10 vs. ennui, but I seldom ever have to use it. On the contrary, most of the time I’m probably the one needing slapped for doing something dumb.

rumblepup: I’m sure that from your position, you definitely get a MACRO (big, for the philistines in the audience) view of the web world. Just from WPW alone, I’m sure you’ve seen flying past your screen a plethora of information on design, search, technology and marketing, and adding to that, attending and presenting at every major convention and meeting for search and related web technologies, the BIG PICTURE must literally SPLAT on your face on a daily basis. How do keep from being overwhelmed by information? Do you ever get to take a micro view on a particular subject?

Mike: My attention span probably maxes out at 3 to 5 seconds. As such, if I get out of an information overload situation, I start to get a little antsy. One of the things I am intently interested in is the concept(s) surrounding syndication online. As far as I’m concerned we won’t even recognize the web in 5 or 6 more years (maybe less).

Information is so much more available and accessible in real time now than it ever has been before thanks, in large part, to the concepts behind things like RSS, pingbacks, live bookmarking and tagging etc. The search engines we all rely on now, like Google, do a fair job of indexing things much like a phone book or yellow pages would. They organize data they crawl and do a fairly good job of returning a result if I’m looking for a shoe store or a video game retailer. But if I want to know if that shoe store has my size in blue – right now… or if the video game store has a new Nintendo game on the shelf – right now, the search engines as we know them aren’t really so hot.

It won’t be long before you can just ask your phone or (or other net-ready mobile device) those kinds of queries and get real time responses. That’ll be when the bricks and mortar folks really get to get into the whole Internet thing they’ve all been thinking about but either can’t understand or justify for whatever reason.

rumblepup: You’ve been involved with the web since 1998. I remember feeling both exuberance and a sense of exploration for those early years of the net, always wondering, what will it do next? (Remember grey backgrounds and exposed tables and little rubber ducky animated gifs?) Now, almost a decade later, the web is vastly different. Has the web fulfilled its early promises? What do you think is NEXT?

Mike: Well, I kind of touched on that in the last question. I think the NEXT big advancement will come in terms of proliferated data access on a scale that most of us can even now scarcely imagine. I’m not talking about 20 years from now either. Internet capable mobile devices are outselling pc and laptops by leaps and bounds. When using these devices, people aren’t looking to browse, or research so much. They are looking for answers relevant not in a general vague sense as in where are the Chinese restaurants in this town – they want to know where the good Chinese restaurant is in town and does it have any seats available NOW. That’s where I see things going.

rumblepup: WPW has certainly grown over the past few years. I joined in 2003. How has it been like seeing this forum grow, and what can you tell me about the future of WPW? Any particular plans we can know? How about a convention?

Mike: It’s been great watching the forum grow. I am very stats-oriented and the pace of growth for the forum has been very healthy. I do a lot of month to month and year to date comparisons.

For example, June 2006 was up about 34% from June 2005 in terms of unique visitors per day. So that’s solid growth – I like the unique visitor number when discussing web stats. Overall page traffic is too easily skewed by a hot issue or the extremes of your audience clicking tons of pages (or none) so I like the posting stats and unique visitors as more of an indicator of growth/health.

I have recently added a bunch of rss feeds to the forum. Those seem to be doing fairly well. I also expect the forum to play a role or be a component in one of the new launches we have coming up. As for a convention, it’s something we’ve kind of mulled over at various times in the past but we haven’t ever really gone past the point of just thinking ‘you know, we might could try a conference someday’. The logistics and time something like that would require are incredibly intimidating. There’s nothing worse than a bad conference (I’ve been to some).

rumblepup: WPW has healthy competition, WebMasterWorld, which Mr. Cutts often refers to, and SearchEngineWatch, former home of the esteemed Danny Sullivan. Is there a healthy, friendly competition between the three, or are you guys putting sugar into each others gas tanks? (They don’t call me rumblepup for nothing, just tell me when and who to hit.) Do you frequent any forums or portals outside of the IEntry network?

Mike: I don’t really look at it as a competitive situation at all. I look at forums more like neighborhoods. Some people hang out here, some people hang out there… I don’t really look at it as trying to win traffic or members away from other forums. We link liberally to both of them with some frequency as a matter of fact.

I swing by lots of forums, predominantly in a lurking capacity. I like Brett’s forum quite a lot, the PubCon is actually one of my favorite conferences. Of course, it could have something to do with the fact that he typically does them in some of my favorite cities like Boston and Las Vegas, but the conference itself is actually very good too.

I think SEW does a great job too. Losing Danny is a hit, no doubt, but he wasn’t the only thing they had going for them. Barry is always on top of things, Elisabeth’s posts are always good, and I always make it a point to read Nacho’s posts when possible, he always has an interesting take on things.

rumblepup: WPW boasts one of the longest threads I’ve ever seen, Is today today or tomorrow yesterday, started over three years ago. WTF? I mean, it definitely gives any thread on “all your base are belong to us” a run for its money, but wow! Any other famous threads you like to refer too?

Mike: That’s a strange thread… I certainly appreciate it for it’s longevity, but it’s age pales in comparison to the depth of its abstraction. I figure someday it’ll inspire it’s own mini-series on HBO or something.

rumblepup: If you, Danny Sullivan, Matt Cutts, Aaron Wall, Rand Fishkin, Greg Boser, Oilman, and  Lee Odden, where stuck on a deserted island with no food or water, who would get eaten first?

Mike: Trick question. Matt Cutts could never be lost on a desert island. Google can find anything. I’m waiting for the Matt-o-matic instant Cutts locator API for Google Earth.

rumblepup: Now tell me a joke and say goodbye.

Mike: I don’t really know any good jokes…

…Oh wait, I got one for you: GoodMail.

rumblepup: ROFL!!! (And for those who don’t know, read up on it.) ]

Mike: See you later.

]]> http://www.rumblepup.com/an-interview-with-mike-aka-michael-mcdonald/feed/ 0 http://www.rumblepup.com/an-interview-with-crankydave-aka-david-sacco/ http://www.rumblepup.com/an-interview-with-crankydave-aka-david-sacco/#comments Tue, 24 Oct 2006 07:41:49 +0000 rumblepup http://www.rumblepup.com/an-interview-with-crankydave-aka-david-sacco/

CrankyDave (aka David Sacco) is a freakin’ institution, bamf par excellence. That’s it, I said it and I’m not sorry I said it. You can learn more about Google and SEO in general from a forum or thread discussion with CrankyDave than you can researching for hours online. Got a question about Google, best just to ask CrankDave. Case in point; once I was researching link development on Google, and on the first page of search results was a forum post by CrankyDave. Ta Da! See, told ya it’s just better to ask him.

Why?

Well I tell you why. CrankyDave has made it his business to know search. He’s a website owner who took the fight in his own hands and made the search engines, especially Google, pay attention to him. That’s an accomplishment that many, rumblepup included, wish we can lay claim to. His website http://www.chainzonline.com is what I love to call a B3B, a Big 3 Babe, where he’s got first page listing for his chosen keyword from Google, Yahoo and MSN, in one of the most competitive industries on the net. That’s workin’ it friends and neighbors, and (as far as I can tell) he did it all himself.

I think that I first had the pleasure of getting’ wisdom from Dave at a thread from WebProWorld. As everyone knows, I’m faux famous for asking dumb questions that for some reason or another, attract answers. So, I posted my question about Google, and mister CrankyDave stepped in.

What ensued was what normally happens, CrankDave “educates you” in the finer points of Google, and has a professional and very informed wealth of knowledge he uses to do the edjumacating. He just…knows.

And, he’s one busy dude as well. Not only is he an Moderator at TIP and a VIP member at any forum worth it’s weight in…um, forum members, but he’s a very busy internet entrepreneur who’s taking care of his own little slice of heaven. It’s been my pleasure to know him, to learn from him, and to try to follow some of his examples. When he gave me a chance to ask him even more rumblepup questions, well, you know me, I just had too.

rumblepup: Como estas señor? Soooo. Uhmmm. Why are you so Cranky?

CrankyDave: LOL. Some time ago a Chicago sports radio station had a morning crew of Jim Memelo (“Spawn”), Norm Van Lier (“Stormin Norman”), and Doug Buffone (“Uncle Fuzzy”), that I really enjoyed listening to. I loved to send them a quick fax in the morning, that I always ended with some sort of little proverb, and then would get to work while I listened. There was rarely a morning that I missed sending them a fax and Norm would read the proverb I’d ended my faxes with at the end of their show. I started off by signing them “Cranky Cub Fan Dave” (as a Chicago Cub fan there’s plenty to be “cranky” about) until one morning Norm coined me “CrankyDave”. I liked it and just kept on with the shortened version. It depends upon who you ask whether or not the name fits me or I fit the name.

rumblepup: So why the blog? Why now? (thanks by the way)

CrankyDave: I’m glad you like it. I rarely have a shortage of things to say on a variety of subjects. CrankyDave.com gives me a venue to share what I want about whatever subject I want to talk about. For the most part, it’s about things that make me “cranky” for any number of reasons.

rumblepup: When where you first introduced the web?

CrankyDave: Let’s see… That would have been about 9-10 years ago. The brokerage company I used implemented online trading. If I remember correctly, they offered a discount for placing trades online instead of calling them.

rumblepup: When did you decide to take your business online?

CrankyDave: I started looking into taking my company CHANZ! online 5-6 years ago. I spent what little free time I had reading and researching most anything I could about it. The company was stable and performing very well but “online” looked like a means to work smarter not harder. In hindsight the “not harder” part is debatable but definitely smarter. In the summer of 2002, due to compliancy issues raised by the Sarbanes-Oxley, I lost a lucrative corporate account. I decided that this was as good a time as any to go online and after deciding upon hosting etc. registered the domain and started building the website in February of the following year.

rumblepup: What was it like getting your first website online? Must have been scary after all the personal upheaval.

CrankyDave: What was it like? Exhausting! I really hadn’t counted on spending so many hours glued to the computer. This is when I guess I really discovered that working smarter can indeed be working harder.

rumblepup: What was is like, trying to learn about SEO and SEM?

CrankyDave: Fascinating! To read and listen to all the various opinions and theories as to how and why things work was, and is, truly stimulating to me.

rumblepup: Did you learn it in the forums or from research?

CrankyDave: Forums, research, phone calls, emails, anywhere and everywhere I could get an opinion. I was fortunate to have a couple of really exceptionally people spend a lot of time communicating with me early on and still am. One in particular I hope is enjoying their retirement.

rumblepup: How did it change your approach to promoting your website?

CrankyDave: I can’t say that really changed my approach too terribly much since I had a pretty good grip on what it was I wanted to do and the approach I wanted to take. For me, it simply made sense to not try and reinvent the wheel, but to learn to better use the wheel I already had.

rumblepup: When did you discover your first forum? Why did you decide to join?

CrankyDave: I discovered forums early on in my researching. There was a wealth of different opinions. That was something really important to me. I wanted to know what EVERYONE thought.

rumblepup: Do you consider forums important learning or networking centers, or both?

CrankyDave: Yes, I certainly consider them important learning and networking centers. I believe the key to all of it is the bettering your ability to develop your own opinions, ideas and processes, and avoiding the mistakes someone else has already made. That’s what makes the collective stronger.

rumblepup: In a sense, your knowledge of Google and techniques for working with the search results is a very valuable asset. Why share? Why take the time to instruct other doober noobers like me on strategies, techniques and technology?

CrankyDave: Doober noobers?

rumblepup: Newb is so 90’s, don’t you think? Like to think I can start a new netspeak trend.

CrankyDave: Silence……..

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rumblepup: Yeah, I should have known better. In any case, back to the question. Why help?

CrankyDave: The core of my philosophy is that to be successful, you must help someone else to do the same. Folks who take the time to help others achieve success both personally and professionally are richer for doing so. Generally happier too.

rumblepup: Your largest search issue has been, from what I can tell, Google. Obviously, with Google nearly owning search, it’s an important topic. How much time do you take to look into the other SE’s, or dedicate search engine strategies to the other SE’s?

CrankyDave: I spend very little time strategizing for the SE’s. I know it sounds so very cliché’ but I spend my time thinking about my visitors and potential visitors and how to better serve and convert them. For the most part, everybody knows what works. It goes back to what I said earlier. Instead of trying to reinvent the wheel, do a better job of using the one’s (wheels) you have.

rumblepup: Do you do any online advertising? I’ve always been a big proponent of spending advertising dollars on getting search results instead of advertising. Do you agree with that statement, or do you think that some advertising is necessary?

CrankyDave: Absolutely. I spend money advertising online and off. Besides, the two aren’t mutually exclusive. A happy client that found you via an advertisement can do as much or more to get you better search results, not mention more pre-qualified traffic, than your dollars might have otherwise. Diversify. The “results” you get from happy clients are priceless. No need to limit yourself as to where and how you get them.

rumblepup: What SE’s do you like, apart from the big 3? Why?

CrankyDave: Which ever one is new. Actually, I like Ask.com although I do miss Jeeves. Another one that fascinates me is ChaCha.com. Novel idea of a guided search engine. I actually hope they succeed.

rumblepup: What browser do you personally use? Do you use more than one?

CrankyDave: IE. No I don’t use more than one. I prefer to look at sites the way the majority of surfers do. Last I checked, that was with IE.

rumblepup: What is the one piece of advice that you would give any website owner? In other words, a tried and true classic design, marketing or promotion technique which you feel not enough people take advantage of.

CrankyDave: Common sense. The best tool there is. I’ve said it twice now, I guess the third time’s the charm… Instead of trying to reinvent the wheel, do a better job of using the one’s you have. Title, links, structure, content. Do a better job utilizing these 4 things and don’t get caught up in the minutia of trying to disguise things. Outperform your competition.

rumblepup: Yeah, you’ve said that before. Must be the old age….OUCH! Ok, I’ll stop with the jokes. Jeez, everybody keeps hittin’ me!

rumblepup: What current trends are you most excited about? (Web 2.0, social bookmarking, etc)

CrankyDave: Let’s see… The Chicago Bears are 6-0. I like that trend. The price of gasoline is coming down. I like that trend too. As far as search is concerned, I like trend that’s developing of searchers better being able refine their own search. Google is taking that step by integrating their Froogle results into their regular results. Searchers being more empowered to better be able to define their own relevancy. Can anyone say build your website for your visitors?

rumblepup: It’s been my contention the web is at a crossroads. With the emergence of social networking, social bookmarking, blogging and user created content, the web CAN become a people powered medium. Corporations have always tried to CONTROL the web, and with the advent of NET NEUTRALITY, are making the biggest attempts to do so. Which way do you think it will go, will either side win, or will it be a mix of both?

CrankyDave: Water always finds its’ own level. Look at all the chatter right now in the blogosphere over the recent pay per click model initiated by payperpost.com. Not too unlike all the chatter from traditional media when bloggers initially hit the net. Yet, both have found a way to exist together to the benefit of both.

rumblepup: Is there a new web bubble? Everybody fears what happened in the late 90’s, early 2000, but to me, the bubble burst was simply due to wrong-headed business models and policies. During the bubble bursting thingamabobber, those years where very profitable for internet e-commerce, and I think that since then, many have learned learned their lessons. But I’ve been hearing talk down the wire that a new, weirder bubble is emerging. Any ideas?

CrankyDave: I generally leave those things to the prognosticators. It’s never a bubble until after the fact. Housing, the metals market, etc. Only time will tell. Greed is a powerful motivator.

rumblepup: Who was your favorite Banana Split?

CrankyDave: Hehehehe… You gotta love Snork. The strong silent type. Any time they can work a Harpo Marx type character into something, I’m onboard!

rumblepup: My favorite as well. Gotta love the Snork.

CrankyDave: Thanks for having me Robert! I enjoyed it!

When as a young and dumb rumblepup I first started hitting the web “master” forums, again and again I would come up against the handle ctabuk. What caught my attention about this forum member was his quick grasp of a situation, his willingness to help, and the length and breadth of the information he gave out. Many times, when posting a particular question, statement, or announcement, I’d secretly hope to see a response from him, because he either helped you, agreed with you, disagreed and helped you find the right path, or applaud your announcement with a certain class. I’m happy to consider him a friend and mentor, and have always been impressed by his knowledge and willingness to take a personal interest.

Mind you, dear readers, that ctabuk (aka David Castle) is one of the busiest people ON THE WEB. He is a moderator at WebProWorld, member of every trusted web business forum you can think of, owner of several successful online ventures, http://www.counciltenantsmortgages.co.uk/, that he personally handles some aspects of seo, sem and marketing, and incredibly busy as an UK mortgage “right to buy” specialist. This is one busy cat! AND STILL he finds the time to help, to share his knowledge, and to make the world better for little guys like rumblepup. If he gives you an answer to web seo, promotion, or design questions, rest assured that he’s mostly right. And if he doesn’t have the right answer, which is seldom, he finds the guy or girl who does. A web guerilla marketer of the finest kind, it’s my pleasure to ask him some questions, and have him share some insights.

rumblepup: WAZZUUUUPP!

CTABUK: Hi Robert

rumblepup: How is the web business or web driven business, in the UK these days? Are web trends different in the UK as compared to the US? –

CTABUK: The UK is way behind the US, both in terms of SEO and the use of websites to actually attract new business. Most UK businesses turn to Pay Per Click before even thinking about SEO. I get asked to review sites from all over the World and the number of UK sites that have no keyword tags is pretty terrible. I blame the site creation companies, sure they put together a classy website, but if the Search Engines cannot find them, then it is a waste of time.

rumblepup: What’s your SE of choice? Do you use Google.com (US) or Google.co.uk (UK)? Are you given a choice? What other SE’s do you like?

CTABUK: I tend to use Google .co.uk but I check all of the others on a regular basis. I tend to ignore Yahoo as the search results these days are based on advertised sites –it strikes me that if you use MIVA then Yahoo picks you up, and that is not my definition of SEO. I like ASK for Legal stuff, if I need a UK Housing Act of Parliament then Ask seems to have the right pages. In fact I like all of the Teoma Engines. I think that 7search is one to watch.

rumblepup: What’s your browser of choice and why?

CTABUK: Internet Explorer with a Coppernic connection on hand as well. Why? Good question, habit I guess. I’ve used Firefox and others but I tend to stick with what I know.

rumblepup: When did you first discover the web? Not for business, but as a media outlet? When did you first decide to do business on the web? What was it like getting your first website up?

CTABUK: Allways for Business use and my first site was set up around 8 years ago, it is still my main site.

Like everybody else, I made all the ‘wrong mistakes’ years ago knew nothing about SEO, so I used PPC and had my Amex card wiped clean by spammers. Then I paid a guy to do my PPC, that seemed to work out, but then I started searching things like ‘how to get natural search engine results’ –That led me into the forum worlds, I knew nothing about ‘user names’ I used to post as ‘Daffy Duck’ as I thought my humour – sorry –humor –would be my way of ‘breaking in’. I still remember making my first post at WPW –it was the typical classic ‘How do I submit to Search Engines’ That led me to my first on line meeting with a pretty famous Moderator CBP –I started to read, I learned about tags and directories and of course ‘usernames’.

My Company name is Council Tenants Advice Bureau UK Ltd –so I used the initials CTABUK. I then found that the more forums I used that name in that the Search Engines started to pick up on my site. Obviously I had learned to place my URL in the forum sig.

rumblepup: When did you first discover the magic words? (Search Engine Optimization, Search Engine Marketing) When did you decide that SEO and SEM where important to you and your business?

CTABUK: That came about when I realized that paying for results was not as much fun as seeing natural results come in. And in truth that was about 5 years ago and when I had joined WPW with the right user name, and being brutally honest I spent most of my time having fun in the breakroom. But then slowly I got to know the mods there. Jawn_Tech seemed to like my humor and he’s a dab hand at SEO so I followed his posts, then one of The famous mods Minstrel showed me stuff about my broken links via Xenu. I was learning my trade. But a little secret here –I don’t do website design, I believe firmly that if you are not that technical, then don’t pretend to be!

rumblepup: What was is like, trying to learn about SEO and SEM? Did you learn it in the forums or from research?

CTABUK: Now here’s where it gets interesting. The guy who had been doing my site for ages met a new Lady and buggered off with her. My site crashed, I got a forum PM from a poster named ‘faglork’ real name Alex. And he asked if he could assist. You see that is what the forums are really all about. You make friends and help out when required. He’s based in Germany and he is one of the best SEO guys that I have ever seen. Together we rebuilt my site. We would do the page layout in the UK and Alex did the tags. My job is to get it listed, I leave the technical side to Alex. To me SEO is all about the page title matching the keywords, what I am quite good as is creating niche markets and then getting the SE’s to find us.

By now I was in about 20 main forums, I was posting along side the famous guys like Aaron Wall, Minstrel and loads more. I found that posting in places like the DMOZ forum was creating good In Bound Links.

rumblepup: When did you discover your first forum? When did you first become a MOD?

CTABUK: My first forum experience was a Local village one in Lincolnshire and like I said earlier I started out posting as Daffy Duck – I’ve been a regular at WPW for about 4 years (With the right user name LOL) For years WPW had the best ‘breakroom’ on the planet. I was having fun getting IBL’s – and doing serious stuff on keywords and the use of my Initials trick on forums world wide. Then one day WPW Admin changed the name of the breakroom to ‘General Topics’ and I and loads of other regular posters got fed up with seeing posts like ‘my site has gone from Google’ appearing in the hallowed halls of the WPW Breakroom so we planned a coupe and got our own forum up. DC TIP was born. I guess a bit of a ‘trade off’ was formatted. TIP was out posting WPW and there were some hostilities, so I was by that time a Moderator at WPW then one day I posted there and saw that my rank had been put back to MVP, that just made me more determined to beat WPW at their own game and next thing I knew I had been re-modded and now the two forums happily co exist. I was flattered to make MVP, Mod was a huge privilege

rumblepup: Where did the famous ctabuk sense of community really kick in?

CTABUK: Oh heck, famous or infamous –I enjoy helping others, there is no buzz quite like getting a pm or e-mail that say’s ‘Thank You for all your help’. What does it cost to give someone a helping hand? Nothing, just a wee bit of time. So I guess people relate to me, and that’s cool.

rumblepup: Name for me a time when being a mod was most rewarding.

CTABUK: Oh everyday. A good Mod should be like dharrison (Debbie) she mods with me at WPW and TIP, she is a natural mod, we clean up the spam, we give advice and that’s what we are there for.

rumblepup: Name for me a time when being a mod was the least rewarding.

CTABUK: Flamers, I dislike people who post just to start a row, but you get to know who they and how to defuse certain situations.

rumblepup: What is the one piece of advice that you would give any website owner? In other words, a tried and true classic design, marketing or promotion technique which you feel not enough people take advantage of.

CTABUK: Content, more Content, match keywords to page titles, optimize each page, submit to Directories using your keywords as site description. Try to get .gov links wherever possible. Post in forums using the same username. Read the stickies, ask, listen then start helping others too.

rumblepup: Uhmmm, David, that was more than one. Well, that’s the famous ctabuk style, you alway get more than you pay for.

rumblepup: What current trends are you most excited about? (Web 2.0, social bookmarking, etc)

CTABUK: Everyday is exciting, if you see something that you think will make money. Do it, go for it and keep going for it.

rumblepup: It’s been my contention the web is at a crossroads. With the emergence of social networking, social bookmarking, blogging and user created content, the web CAN become a people powered medium. Corporations have always tried to CONTROL the web, and with the advent of NET NEUTRALITY, are making the biggest attempts to do so. Which way do you think it will go, will either side win, or will it be a mix of both?

CTABUK: The Google – MSN’s are here for good, as long as 75% of the world thinks Google then so will I!

rumblepup: Is there a new web bubble? Everybody fears what happened in the late 90’s, early 2000, but to me, the bubble burst was simply due to wrong-headed business models and policies. During the bubble burst, those years where some of the most profitable for internet e-commerce, and I think everybody has learned their lessons. But I’ve been hearing talk down the wire that a new, weirder bubble is emerging. Any ideas?

CTABUK: No, me not technical, 10 years ago it was VHS Video, Now it’s DVD’s and I Pods –we are evolving constantly.

rumblepup: When I visit to the UK, where’s the best place to get a pint?

CTABUK: Lincolnshire!

rumblepup: Your picking up the first round right?

CTABUK: No, maybe, whatever.

rumblepup: Uhmmm, David. In the US, it’s customary for the vistor to be treated by the visited to at least the first round.

CTABUK: (silence)..
..
..

rumblepup: I’m buying the first round ain’t I?

CTABUK: Give that man a prize! Next question.

rumblepup: Other than TIP, where or who are the resources you personally trust for the right information?

CTABUK: I post mostly in TIP, WPW, Warriors, and 2 UK Finance forums. I always trust my instincts first.

rumblepup: Ok, since I’m apparently buying the pints. Tell me a joke and say goodbye.

CTABUK: ‘Pardon Me Roy, Is that the cat that chewed your new shoes? Bye Bye rumblepup.

Serendipity is cool word. It’s got all of those neat syllables that just roll off your tongue, and it’s one of those big boy words I like to use to charm the socks off Mrs. Rumblepup. The meaning is just as cool. It’s chance, luck, digging for worms and coming up with gold. Cool Neato stuff. It’s a good word. I don’t use it often, but when the situation arises, here I come out with classy “serendipity”.

Well, serendipity certainly applies to NeO, aka David Brown, owner of Neo1Seo, a SEO firm that not only do I respect, because of its work, but also because of the contributions of NeO to the web master community. Why does serendipity apply here? Well, recently I went to the forums for a little help in understanding Yahoo, and how to capitalize on the new cool rankings I had there. NeO comes and gives me a once over, twice over, thrice over to (as we Latino’s say) ‘splain things to me. His point of view was insightful and helpful; to the point and friendly to boot. So I decide to check him out.

NeO learned SEO and SEM the hard way, because he HAD to. As the owner of an online business, he needed to get his website up there. So what did he do? He grabbed the bull by the horns and learned the things he had to, as an entrepreneur, to affect the search results necessary for success. In the process, he began the journey towards SEO awareness.

(repeat after me, ooohhhhmmmmm)

After working two plus years for someone else, he headed out on his own to start a trusted SEO firm. Hey, when you’re dealing with a firm that has a brain like Brian Mark aboard, well you know you’re in the right hands.

So, I asked NeO if I can ask him some of my dumb questions. Hey, I am the king of dumb questions, what can I say? Luckily, David said Okiedokie, and I sent him a few.

rumblepup: Hello señor! You’re a busy guy nowadays. How’s business?

NeO: Great! Don’t worry about me though… business will get better.

rumblepup: I only found out recently that Brian Mark works with you. Brian is an awesome marketer, and I’ve only briefly spoken with him on some threads, and once on the phone, but I’ve always been a fan of his work as well as impressed by his abilities. How did you guys…uhmm…hook up?

NeO: Well late one night, up near brokeback Mt…someone else asked this question… (you thought it was going to be a juicy break on some brokeback story, sorry to disappoint!)

Brian and I have been in cahoots for quite some time now… One day he asked if I wanted to collaborate on some projects, and I jumped at the chance to add his resume to the firm’s repertoire! We’ve been having fun since, and plan to continue well into the future!

rumblepup: Do you have any plans, or any aspirations, to do speaking engagements, or broader presentations?

NeO: I used to speak to large groups at my old job… but have yet to be asked to do any speaking engagements for anything SEO related. Not to say I wouldn’t, time permitting, I’m busy as a one legged man in an ass kicking contest!

rumblepup: It’s a real interesting time in for the web right now. Since the emergence of new technologies (web 2.0, AJAX) and social networking and social bookmarking has become somewhat of hit, it looks like the web has a real chance of becoming “user driven.” Of course, most people still do SEARCHES on Google, Yahoo and MSN, but more and more web enthusiasts use places like digg, Technorati, Furl, and the new sites like ma.gnolia, for searching. The concept being that the content is trusted, because someone found it, found it to be a good source, and bookmarked it. What are your opinions on this trend? Will it continue? Will the SE’s adopt more of this type of user driven content? Are they already using it? (Google Co-op, Google Notebook, MyYahoo, MSN’s Live Space, even Ask has mystuff.ask.)

NeO: Web 2.0 technologies are definitely the future. I’ve seen trends come and go on the net, throughout the years… and I believe that these user driven (word of mouth) social book marking sites will be around for years to come. RSS to .html feeds are something to keep an eye on IMO. This just goes to show that being a spammer doesn’t make much sense, some of my most hit pages are How-To videos that I put up (for the simple fact that I was tired of explaining it to all my friends) and now several authorative sites have linked to them… because they help people. The Golden rule still applies to the net today, now more than ever, good content will keep people coming back to your site!

rumblepup: When did you first discover the web for business?

NeO: I started to learn VB in 1993 enjoyed it but then walked away from it all to have a career in real estate… I came back in late 98 early 99 to start hacking (original term = someone that can quickly decipher a program and teach it to others.)

Well that and I did get into a bit of trouble hacking… and was politely told that I was a smart kid and should I choose to continue down the road I was on… I’d end up in prision , so I decided to make a living on the net… I would like to point out that I was not an overnight success! This isn’t as easy as downloading an eBay success kit and making 10k per week! There’s sooooo many scammers online it’s really sad!

rumblepup: When did you first decide to put a website up? What was it like, putting up your first website?

NeO: Aug 6th 2003 was the first site launch… A timeshare resale company, I wanted a way to carry over onto the web and still be able to make some cash… I enjoyed the process more than the outcome!

rumblepup: When did you first discover the magic acronyms, SEM, SEO? Any other acronyms you like?

NeO: Shortly after the launch of the site… I thought if I built a site I’d have a ton of visitors that would turn into sales! That didn’t happen, however it was back in the glory days of keyword stuffing – all you had to do was stuff your meta tags with a ton of keywords to get noticed in the SE’s… Then the Florida update happened and sites that were ranking were no where to be found! That’s when I really started putting effort into learning as much as I could about SEO & SEM.

I also like the acronym SERP (it sounds sexy)

rumblepup: With so much attention given to optimizing for Google, you, amongst a whole “nation” of SEO providers, actually take some time to address dealing with MSN and Yahoo. Is the term “Optimized for Google, and Yahoo and MSN will be just fine” still true, or should website owners be concerned with different issues concerning the other members of the Big 3? What other SE’s do you think can become more important in the future?

NeO: I think that if you only optimize for Google your cutting your own throat! Yahoo! And MSN make up the other two big chunks of the proverbial pie… Brian knows that one of my favorite tee shirts says “I’m not that smart… but I can rank well in MSN” Since the MSN live update has come through, it’s not as easy to get overnight rankings in MSN (they’ve learned from past mistakes) as it was before. I think that sites like digg, Furl, delicious, & technorati will become a viable source for searches in the very near future!

rumblepup: “Nearly Every Successful Marketer is a Spammer” is an article I found on Aaron Wall’s SEOBook, and it has some interesting points, in that some seemingly spam type linking and marketing techniques can actually be used in that grey area between black and white hat marketing. I’ve often employed “creative” link building in my marketing endeavors, but never overtly spammed, if spamming means flooding open pages with link after link of the same content. What are your thoughts? Should SEM’s be creative in finding IBL’s, or will it eventually NOT pay off. How “creative” as a professional, do you have to be to service your customer, if at all?

NeO: Don’t SPAM… that’s my first thought! Spammers suck… plain and simple, I get approximately 90 comments daily to my blog 90% of them are ads for Viagra or some other drug… It’s annoying and they never get a link. I personally believe that the Spammers of the world are the trailer trash of the web! Now while I agree w/ what Aaron says in the article to some extent… I also believe that Buzz Marketing can achieve the same results. Sure getting a front page article on digg will help bolster traffic… but in the end, if you’ve wasted someone’s time, are they going to bookmark your site, or come back again, or better yet… are they going to buy anything from you? Probably not…

In my humble opinion the best way to bring about awareness for you or your site is to establish yourself as someone who knows a little something about your area of expertise. Make a video tutorial, Share a simple hack, and offer a free program that will help out newb’s! Some of my most trafficked pages are simple tutorials I’ve put together (RSS to .html & Add an alias to Gmail) People actively search for these, and when they find that I’ve taken the time to build a how-to video they link to it!

rumblepup: Google has finally made peace with the term PSEM. At one time, you could see that Google clearly did think hiring an PSEM was a good thing, ’cause they do not want anybody manipulating their search results. I believe that if a person, on their own, is not getting the results they need, they SHOULD hire a PSEM, if not but for the very simple reason that SEM is a job in and of itself. How can anybody manage a business AND manage SEM at the same time? What other reasons should a website owner take into consideration when thinking about whether to hire a PSEM, like yourself, or not?

NeO: SEM & SEO is a full time job, you’d be hard pressed to run your company and tackle all of the duties of a full time SEO / SEM! I do know that Google has said not to hire a company that Guarantee’s first page placement! Which makes sense… no one can “Guarantee” that, do they have a copy of the Google algorithm? Or are they going to use black hat techniques to get you there only to have a short lived victory… and then your site gets black listed!~

My other personal favorite is these companies that Guarantee 1st place SERP’s for terms that NO ONE SEARCHES FOR! I can pretty much rank for supercalifragilisticexpedalicious in a few days… because no one else is trying to rank for that term! So my best advice is be careful out there… ask for references, past clients, campaigns they’ve run, what success have they had… And then watch your traffic… did it increase? Are you improving sales? Does the overall ROI pencil out?

rumblepup: Damn but ROI gets around. Who is the guy?

NeO: It’s not a guy. It means Return On Investment.

rumblepup: COUGH!!!! Ahem. (clearing throat) Of course it does. Jeez, no wonder Mrs. rumblepup won’t let me use the toaster. Shall we go on to the next question?

rumblepup: I’ve always had the belief that if you achieve a certain PR (Page Rank for the bubble heads) you can use it to take advantage by targeting certain keywords. In my thinking, if Google “trusts” your site enough to give it a PR of 6, then targeting a keyword like “shoestrings” will give you a better SERP, over a page with a PR of 3, who target the same keyword. However, since BigDaddy, that thinking has amongst marketers has changed. Now it seems that Google will trust the links that you send out from your website, but not really take your PR into consideration when serving up results. In other words, PR means nothing as it pertains to search results, just on page factors. Can you expand on this a little, or, do you agree that PR still has something to do with SERP?

NeO: I’d say first off that PR has more to do with off-site factors (like who links to you and what’s their reputation) than on page factors. What webmasters / SEO’s and the likes need to keep in mind is that the little green bar doesn’t pay the bills… sales pays the bills… A good PageRank is what we all strive for, but don’t put so much emphasis into the little green bar… instead focus on building quality pages that HELP internet users and through natural attrition your IBL’s will grow! And along the way you’ll gain some Google juice A.K.A. PageRank

rumblepup: What is the one piece of advice that you would give any website owner? In other words, a tried and true classic design, marketing or promotion technique which you feel not enough people take advantage of.

NeO: KISS (Keep It Simple Stupid) instead of wasting your time trying to figure out the cheat code to get to the top… build a quality website! Tell everyone you know about your website, be proud of your creation! And keep plugging away at it! One other thing that I would mention to webmasters…

rumblepup: I only said one. Ouch! No hitting.

NeO: ..you don’t have to be an author to publish content… do a Google search for the niche your in and include RSS in the search… You’d be amazed at all of the FREE content you could have on your site to help your viewers… If your not sure how to do it, swing by my RSS to .html how to video, watch it, learn and prosper

rumblepup: The browser wars are getting interesting. FF is VERY strong amongst the web enthusiast group, and gaining ground in the casual user group. IE7 boasts an impressive bunch of features. What’s your favorite browser and why? Will you be using IE7?

NeO: I do have Internet Exploder 7 but only use it to check pages… FireFox RULES!!! With the plugin’s and add an engine functions on FF you can’t go wrong!

rumblepup: How come you’re all matrixy? Do you have the sunglasses?

NeO: Because NeO is the OnE! I started using that handle yrs ago and it’s just kinda stuck… I do have the sunglasses and even got the Halloween costume for a class reunion Halloween party we’ll be attending this yr!

rumblepup: Now, tell me a joke and say goodbye.

NeO: A skinny little white guy goes into an elevator, looks up and sees this HUGE black guy standing next to him. The big guy sees the little guy staring at him; looks down and says: “7 feet tall, 350 pounds, 20 inch private, 3 pound left testicle, 3 pound right testicle, Turner Brown.”

The skinny white guy faints and falls to the floor. The big guy kneels down and brings him to, shaking him and says, “What’s wrong with you?” In a weak voice the little guy says, “What EXACTLY did you say to me?” The big dude says, “I saw your curious look and figured I’d just give you the answers to the questions everyone always asks me. I’m 7 feet tall, I weigh 350 pounds, I have a 20 inch private, my left testicle weighs 3 pounds, my right testicle weighs 3 pounds, and my name is Turner Brown.”

The small guy says, “Turner Brown?!…Sweet Jesus, I thought you said, “Turn around”!

rumblepup: LOL. Happens to me all the time. You see, I’m 7 foot 8 inches tall, and my private is….OOUCH. Ok, I’ll stop, I’ll stop.