Bill Slawski - The SEO Interviews - Number Four

by Darren McLaughlin

September 13, 2006 – 5:14 am

Our latest SEO Interview is with Bill Slawski, the SEO by the Sea. If you’re interested in being interviewed, we’d love to hear from you.

SEO Bio:

Bill Slawski is the founder and president of SEO by the Sea, Inc. He started moonlighting in web promotion and design in 1996, while working for the Superior Court of the State of Delaware. Initially working for the Court as an intern for the staff attorney, his interest in technology overcame his interest in the law, and he started working to bring new technologies to the Court. The Court has been a pioneer in a number of technology initiatives over the last few years, and has been recognized by Harris Poll and the US Chamber of Commerce as the top trial court in the country for the last five years in a row. He left the Court in early 2005, to work full time with Maryland internet marketing firm webadvantage.net. In 2006, he started his own firm, SEO by the Sea, Inc., specializing in internet marketing and search engine optimization.

Bill, born 1961, has a jurisdoctor degree in law and BA in English. He is also one of the founders and administrators of Cre8asite Forums, which focuses upon Usability, Web Design, and Marketing. He is a correspondent for Search Engine Watch on Patents and Search

1. This series is about people that refer to themselves as “SEOs.” Could you explain what an SEO does, and do you consider yourself to be one of them?

When I first started out on the web, I considered myself as a guy with a web site who wanted other people to find that site. This was before Google, and even before the days of Alta Vista, so instead of relying upon traffic from search engines, I was looking for places that might link to the site, and bring actual traffic to its pages. There were directories that were helpful, like yahoo, but building some type of relationship with businesses that had sites was as important, or even more important than being linked to from those sites.

I also tried to focus upon building a strong, useful, and informative web site, and that still is a goal in these days of search engines. When Altavista came around, and then Google, the importance of being listed in those became evident quickly. But, having worked on things like using words that a targeted audience expected to see on the pages of the site already, and using them in unique title tags and headings on each page of the site made it easy to rank well in search engines for terms that people would search for to find the site. Paying attention to feedback from customers, and the language that they used was helpful as well.

When I started working on other sites, the lessons I learned from those early days translated well -

* Pay attention to the words that your audience will use to find your site and expect to see upon it,
* Build relationships with businesses that complement yours,
* Use semantically correct html and put the words that your audience will use to find your site in the right places on their pages,
* Provide useful and helpful information on the pages of your site that help visitors and site owners happy that they have found each other.

I look at Search Engine Optimization, or SEO, not as a way of ranking certain terms highly in the search engines, but rather helping people find web pages that provide goods or services or or applications or information that they are interested in. Increasing search rankings is much less important that increasing traffic to a page relevant to a site owner’s goals for their page.

2. Why are SEO techniques important in todays internet marketing environment? Is this something you would recommend for a hobby webmaster or is strictly for the pros?

SEO techniques are important because they can make it easier for a search engine to crawl and index a web page, and serve information from that page to people who want to see it. But they can also make it easier for someone to find the pages of a site inspite of search engines. I don’t think that you can perform SEO effectively without having a strong marketing plan, and understanding who the audience of a site may be.

I think that a hobby webmaster should pay attention to SEO if they are interested in reaching out to the audience that they are seeking with their site. Who is their intended audience? What do they want to say to that audience? What is the best way for them to reach out and help that audience find them?

3. What are the basic principals of a website attaining high rankings in search engines? Are there common characteristics that make certain websites rank high?

There are some things that people can do that make it more likely that they will meet the goals they set out for with their sites, which may include high rankings in search engines. Here are some:

* Make sure that your site is spiderable by search engines by using text links to pages that you want indexed, so that their crawlers can follow those links. Menus based upon java script, flash, and dropdown forms can cause problems here.

This also means that you should make sure that there are no loops or traps for spiders on the pages, and that you’ve avoided having more than one URL for the same content because of the use of things like session IDs, or data variables getting passed through the URL.

* Think carefully about the information that your site provides, and organize that information in a way that makes it easy for people to use your site, and search engines to index it. I think that it is helpful and important for someone who practices SEO to try to learn about usability, and a great example of what I’m talking about when it comes to organizing information on a site is in this article from the folks at User Interface Engineering - Strategies for Categorizing Categories.

* Pay attention to web standards, and good semantic use of HTML, so that each page has:

** A unique page title element that describes that particular page succinctly, using words your audience will search for and expect to see.
** A unique meta description that also describes the page well, and may persuade people to visit the page if they see the description as a snippet in search results.
** Heading elements (i.e., h1, h2, etc.) that are organize well, and describe the text within the sections they are headings for well.
** Text that is intelligently and engagingly written, which meets visitors’ expections, and may persuade those visitor’s to fulfill the site owner’s goals.
** Text in links from other pages on the site pointing to that page, which make a visitor confident about what they will find on the page being linked to, and which use words that people may search for.

* Focus pages carefully, and pay attention to the words that intended visitors expect to see. When I talk about words that people will look for, I’m suggesting that you focus on only one or two phrases per page, and use those phrases in places like the page title, meta description, headings on the page, body text within the page, and in anchor text pointing to the page. But those pages should read naturally, and convey the information that your planned organization for the site calls for.

Finding those words means more than just throwing a bunch of keywords into a keyword suggestion tool. Before ever reaching that level, you want to explore a marketing approach for the site - what is its objectives, who is its audience, who are the competitors, what place within the niche do those competitors fill, where do the targeted audience members go to find out about the goods or services or information that will be offered on the site, and more.

And once you start putting those words on pages, consider how you can best help visitors and search engines understand their context. If I write a page about a specific type of financial service, and the name of that service is my keyword phrase, I also want to discuss benefits of using that service to the visitor, the experience and credibility of the site owner when it comes to providing that service, a history of how others may have used the service, other names for the service and related services.

* There are many different ways to attract links to a site, and I’ve focused above primarily on aspects of building a site so that it has a strong foundation when it comes to being crawled, indexed and ranked by a search engine because these are things that a site owner has the most control over. It doesn’t hurt to submit links to relevant and respectable directories, or to build strong content that people will want to link to. As I build a page, I do ask myself, what is there about this page that would make someone want to link to it? Is there anything at all about it that will make someone want to bookmark it, or share a link to it with someone else? For example, I’m happy to include a link to the SEOmoz Beginner’s Guide to Search Engine Optimization because its worth being linked to, and it keeps me from writing more here than I already have while helping me answer this question in a meaningful manner.

4. Have you seen many changes in the way search engines rank websites in the last year? Are you doing anything differently than you have in the past to optimize a website?

There are always changes to the way that search engines rank web sites. Take that as a given.

I’m not doing that much different, although I’m paying a little more attention to how information might be organized on a page. Microsoft and Google have both shown that they are interested in trying to figure out what the layout of a page can tell them about the information on that page. We see this from papers from Microsoft on VIPS: a Vision-based Page Segmentation Algorithm and Block-level Link Analysis, and from Google in Visual Segmentation.

A recent patent application from Google on local search also has me considering carefully the way that I present some information on pages more carefully, such as addresses, phone numbers, hours open, and other business information. If the search engines are going to attempt to extract information from your site that they think is meaningful, it doesn’t hurt to make it easier for them.

5. When optimizing a website do you focus on a certain search engine (like Google) or do you try to to optimize for all of them?

All of them. If you build a strong foundation for a site, and attract a variety of links to that site, you should stand a decent chance of ranking well for all of the major search engines.

6. Any tips or tricks you’d recommend for new webmasters that are thinking of becoming as SEO or doing SEO for their own websites?

Sure.

Learn about usability, marketing, design, development, information architecture as well as how search engines work. Having a well rounded background, and a holistic approach to SEO can give you insights that you wouldn’t have otherwise, and an ability to discuss a site with people working on different parts of it.

Build some hobby sites that aren’t mission critical, and that you can try different things out with that won’t harm you if they fail to attract traffic or don’t do well in search rankings. Be creative and inspired there. If you are going to recommend that someone adds a blog to their site, and use RSS feeds to get the word out about it, try building and running a blog or two yourself.

Pay attention to what the search engines say about themselves in their guidelines, blogs, press releases, white papers, and patents. If you are responsible for knowing how a search engine works, when advising clients, it doesn’t hurt to read materials that come directly from the search engines. On the other hand, use an RSS reader to visit lots of marketing, business, design, and SEO blogs, and learn from them, too.

Research.