Russ Jones - The SEO Interviews - Number Six

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Welcome to the sixth installment of the The SEO Interviews. This week we interview Russ Jones of Virante.

Here are the other five interviews (listed in order):

• Joe Balestrino - Mr. SEO
• Dave Davies - Beanstalk
• Michael Grey - Greywolf
• Bill Slawski - SEO by the Sea
• Michael Martinez - Xenite.org

SEO’s Bio

I am Russ Jones, CTO of the search marketing firm Virante, Inc. in Durham, North Carolina. I have been in the web design / development industry for nearly a decade, and search marketing specifically over the last 3 years. I have a bachelors degree in Political Science and African American Studies from UNC Chapel Hill (Go Heels!) and have been married a little over 1 year to my wife Morgan. I absolutely love my job at Virante. It is incredibly exciting to come up with creative marketing strategies coupled with strong SEO tactics to make businesses profitable and organizations prosperous.

1. Doing SEO is an ever changing search engine environment can be a challenging task. What stable SEO methods do you recommend to establish a presence online?

I remember sitting in on a discussion about Latent Semantic Indexing (a terribly mind-numbing subject matter that I would not wish upon the worst of my enemies), thinking to myself: “wake me up when it is no longer about links and content.” It’s all about links and content. Thus, there are a few guidelines that have and will continue to exist ad infinitum in the SEO world:

A: Better URLs. Clean up your URL structure. Make shorter, keyword rich, dash separated (only a few) URLs.
B: Better Keywords. Do keyword analysis that compares competitiveness to traffic. A good keyword is money in your pocket.
C: Link-bait, Link-bait, Link-bait. A good link-bait campaign can be worth thousands of permanent, 1-way links. Try buying text link ads for the same price - its impossible.

2. I’m sure that you’ve heard the term “Google Sandbox” used in discussions regarding search engine optimization. Do you believe there is a such thing, and if so what would you recommend doing to get out of it?

I really love to get in arguments about the existence of a sandbox. Over and over again industry leaders claim “there is no sandbox” while, at the same time, noting that links aging, domain aging, trust building, time-to-index, SERPs updating, and some form of over optimization penalties do exist. It’s like saying you don’t own a house, you own a free standing structure with multiple rooms including a kitchen for which you pay a mortgage.

The best way to avoid the sandbox is to launch early and often. Whenever we get a client on the phone with a new site, even before we sign a contract, we inform them to go ahead and get a home page up and build a link or two to the site. It saves so much pain and frustration to have a site incubating.

For those of you less fortunate, the best way to extract yourself is link baiting. I am a firm believer in link bait and believe that it is the most valuable SEO tool, aside from keyword discovery, that any web marketing firm can offer. The natural-looking, high-quality links brought about in a good link baiting campaign can rocket you out of any aging filter and secure you long-term success on future SEO campaigns.

3. What do you believe is the biggest myth in SEO and why?

The biggest myth is that “Content is King”. Links aren’t king either. Keywords are king. I could write the world’s greatest article on mortgages and, maybe, three years later, I will rank in the top 10 for that term and get some traffic. I could write that same article, and build thousands of links to it and, maybe, two years later, I will rank in the top 10 for that term and get some traffic. I could find 100 terms with high traffic-to-competitiveness ratios, and get traffic next week with basic on-site-optimization techniques. Black hat search engine optimizers have been doing this effectively for the last decade, filling pages with terrible, useless information and laughing themselves to the bank. A little research goes a long way.

4. You created a little buzz with your rankings for the keyword phrase “5 SEO Excuses.” Did this generate more demand for your services?

Unlike most link-bait campaigns, the 5 SEO Excuses sent users directly to Google, rather than a landing page on Virante.com or theGoogleCache.com. While we did receive some extra demand, to be honest, the goal of the campaign was to debunk the growing myths about SEO’s effectiveness. The search engines are winning the battle in convincing businesses that PPC is the way to go. I also wrote a brief article recently about spinning PPC vs. SEO as “Traffic Renting” vs. “Traffic Ownership”. With a good SEO campaign, in 6 months you can acquire all the traffic you currently “rent” through PPC from the major search engines.

5. I noticed that you offer a number of unique services like Wiki Development. Could you tell me how this service benefits a client and why they need to do it?

Virante.com prides itself in being the Entrepreneurship SEO firm. While many of our clients are a far cry from being considered entrepreneurial or start-up, there is nothing more satisfactory than taking a company from Zero to a Million. (Google entrepreneurship if you like). Part of that process, however, is better business management. We do wiki, intranet, and corporate blog development for companies so that they can more efficiently and effectively run their businesses online. We find that healthy businesses make good, long-term relationships. I would recommend that every business have an internal wiki. You can set one up yourself for free, or have someone do it for you very inexpensively.

6. What techniques should webmasters and business owners concern themselves with to stay “relevant” in the future?

The best way that a company can stay ahead of the game is to be a “language leader”. There are two ways to do this. First, you need to be constantly looking for your industry’s buzz words and capitalizing on them. The day you hear a term like “LSI” is the day you build a page on it. Secondly, craft the way people search in your industry by regularly generating buzz terminology. If you can establish yourself or your company via a blog that gets regular readership, you can begin to craft the way people think about and, more importantly, write and search about your industry. There will always be value in finding keywords, writing articles, and building links, but the real successes come from being the online authority in your industry (even if you aren’t the biggest in the real world).

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