SEO Auteur: My Interview With Dustin Woodard
I first became aware of Dustin when he dropped my name in a post (which is still a very effective way to get someone’s attention). I ended up meeting him at the first SMX Advanced networking function and we’ve been friends ever since. We’ve called upon Dustin to speak at multiple SearchFest events in Portland and his search marketing insights, offered both in person and online, mix keen intuition with real-world business awareness.
1. Please give me your background and tell us what you do for a living.
I’m a veteran in-house SEO who finally went out-house. By “out-house,” I mean I now work out of my house as a Seattle-based SEO consultant. Like many SEOs, I focus on other web topics like domaining, social media, usability and analytics. Unlike many SEOs, I also dabble in filmmaking.
2. We’ve both been in SEO for roughly a decade. How has SEO changed /evolved over the last 10 years?
In many ways it has changed tremendously, in others it hasn’t changed at all. In the early days SEO was hardly an agreed upon term and even when it gained industry-wide acceptance, most people, even web professionals, didn’t know what it was or how it worked.
SEO was considered magical and often mythical. Despite the plethora of “Dustin work your magic” requests and successes, it was often difficult to get executive buy-in on SEO. Often the power of search would fall into the shadow of the latest piece of technology or eye-candy. One time I had to put my job on the line to keep the company from switching to an all-flash website because a self-declared web visionary tried to convince our company that “no one uses search engines to find websites.”
Even after SEO became widely accepted, many “experts” have claimed that SEO is dead. With the recent social media movement a number of marketers & media personalities are preaching this once again. What I think they don’t realize is that even if search engines were to disappear (which will never happen), SEO professionals would still thrive. In truth, most SEOs are really web traffic optimizers and dominate more than just search. The most successful Digg, StumbleUpon, Twitter, and Facebook campaigns often have an “SEO” behind them.
3. Many in our industry (such as yourself) have transitioned from corporate jobs to home-based consultants. How has that transition worked for you?
The corporate atmosphere certainly comes with the benefits of stable income, social interaction, and the opportunity to be a shining star within the organization. The downside is red tape, politics, and working with people who may not get it.
Taking the plunge to self-employed, especially when you are a father of two with a large mortgage to pay, can be scary. There’s nothing steady about it and the future is always uncertain. I’ve had periods where I had little work and others, like a couple days ago, where I worked 24 straight hours. There’s a tremendous amount of flexibility working for yourself, which is both a blessing and a curse. I’m a person who likes try many things so I have to watch what I’m spending my time on closely. For example, I’m experimenting with trading some of my time for equity to help out a couple startups in the Seattle-area.
I’m getting closer to having a set number of steady clients and look forward to the time when I have to decide if I want to run an agency with other employees or if I want to stick to being a one-man show. I also make 3-6 times what I made an hour as an in-house SEO and my skills can benefit a number of companies, rather than just one.
4. How do you differentiate your services from prospective clients that might be considering you versus a full-service agency?
My first couple contracts surprised me. I was up against what I’d consider the top agencies in the industry and beat them out. I think what makes me attractive is my decade of working in-house for web companies. Audits and recommendations are one thing, but knowing how to implement and continually grow a company’s search traffic when all the basic & intermediate SEO tactics have been covered is what really sets me apart.
It may be a mistake, but I’ve decided to focus purely on SEO and social media. I’ve always been a firm believer in organic search & word-of-mouth. During my Allrecipes.com days, we never spent a penny on advertising. Paid search, affiliate marketing, and banner advertising certainly have their place, but I think that full service agencies that offer those alongside SEO may be creating an environment where there is conflict of interest.
5. User-generated content is the holy grail for generating long-term search traffic. What’s are the best ways for generating it, harnessing it for maximum utility, and policing it so that it conforms within the high standards of the brand it represents?
Strangely enough, UGC tends to get overlooked by many SEOs. I think it is partly because people have trouble fathoming how large the long-tail of search is. There are some crafty ways to attack the long-tail from a programmatic standpoint, but harnessing user-generated content is usually more powerful and more effective.
When I worked at Wetpaint, I was in charge of SEO for 1.5 million user-generated sites. Our UGC portions focused mostly on wikis, forums, news coverage, but I’ve worked with and for other companies that used reviews, Q&A, and many custom-built pages or tools that allowed site visitors to contribute to the site. You’d be surprised how many of the most trafficked sites on the web focus primarily on UGC.
Adding UGC to site that didn’t have it before can be a daunting task. Usually a key ingredient is to already have a sizable audience to work with—the more passionate the better. Building UGC components certainly comes with technologic challenges, but I think the greatest challenge is getting company-wide buy in. Once you get past that hurdle, the key is to know your audience well enough to know what would encourage them to contribute. Some people are motivated by ego, others want to promote their business, and some just want to help create authoritative information on a topic they are passionate about.
Most successful UGC launches that I’ve been a part of involved a good amount of content seeding up front as nobody knows what to do when they look at an empty slate. It’s important to inspire & interact in the beginning stages. Later on, the community can police itself. Anyone who has ever edited a Wikipedia page realizes how fast the community can police content.
From an SEO standpoint, there are many things to look out for with UGC, including duplicate content, spam prevention, overwritten or deleted content, improper categorization, plagiarism, brand attacks, and even spammy SEOs who are trying to get backlinks.
There’s actually more to UGC than I can possibly cover in this interview. I’m actually launching a UGC SEO blog next week to help shed more light on this topic.
6. How can social media be best leveraged to help a company’s search effort?
There’s no secret that social media can play a large part in a company’s search efforts. Social media is where the conversation happens and having a large social media presence can certainly draw attention, and more importantly, links to your site. I really enjoy helping companies grow their Twitter accounts to the point where they become the largest influencers for their niche.
Making the homepage for sites like Digg and Reddit is a great way to instantly attract thousands of links, but it requires the creativity and connections most companies don’t have. Even without connections, it’s not hard to make waves with smaller social sites within any industry.
Traditional linkbuilding is not usually a fun task, but creating link bait and spreading it via social media can be very fun and very productive from an SEO standpoint.
7. What are the top 3 things SEO’s should understand about Domainers and what are the top 3 things Domainers should understand about SEO’s?
Fun question. Many SEOs don’t realize how much money domainers make even if their domains aren’t indexed by Google. There’s a surprising amount of traffic directly typed into the browser and many domainers create much more sophisticated pages then the old parked pages many of us have seen in the past. In the search industry, pretty much anyone has a shot at being one of the best – it’s anybody’s game. The domain industry, however, is faced with a limited quantity of top notch domains and they are typically owned by a small number big players who often buy/sell/and trade domains amongst each other. For the domains that don’t monetize well from PPC ads, the big payday might be way down the road. It’s like owning a piece of property that sits vacant until the right company comes along willing to build upon it.
Many domainers don’t realize how much traffic search drives and how difficult it can be to rank for certain keywords. More and more domainers are starting to build out real properties, but often fail to look past one or two keywords because that is how domains work, but any SEO will tell you there’s a lot of traffic opportunity outside the top keywords and multi-word queries are much easier to win. The greatest challenge for a domainer who might be working with an SEO is to have patience. SEO results rarely happen fast, but when they do happen, they last for a very long time.
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Where Is Your Link Army Hiding?
If “content is king”, links are the king’s supporting army, quietly helping the kingdom grow in power and authority. Unfortunately, as with a physical army, as most links get older they – or rather their influence – begins to deteriorate. Why won’t a powerful link just stay a powerful link? Why can’t you just build a huge amount of links once, and then never again? A few reasons:
1. Search engines don’t just want links; they want fresh, quality links. If a website was linked to in the past, it indicates that the site was considered an authority – once. However, if a website is continually being linked to, it not only builds past authority higher, but also indicates that the site is still considered an authority.
2. Directory links gain more competition. You have competing websites for your keyword, right? Many of these competing businesses also know about link building. As time goes by, more links will end up on the directory page with yours; by the end of a year, you may have hundreds, or even thousands, of links with which your site now shares its “link juice”. Therefore, the quality of the link deteriorates.
3. Websites close. You have 1,000 sites linking to yours – at least, you did the last time you checked. However, the Internet fluxuates rapidly; sites rise and fall on a continual basis. How many of those 1,000 sites are still live? How many have closed down, effectively killing part of your link army?
Other possible reasons exist, but these are some of the most common. Once you know that links deteriorate, what do you do? Of course, the obvious answer is to go out and find more – but where are they hiding?
15 Ways to Find Your Link Army
When you begin building a linking campaign, you first want to decide what the purpose of the links will be. For example:
* Keyword ranking
* Higher PR
* Higher traffic
If you’re targeting all three purposes, you can find links based on each goal separately, or on all three at once. Finding links that meet all three goals is more time consuming and research intensive, but provides the most effective, high quality linking.
You’re saying, “Yes, yes, high quality links, but let’s get to the nitty gritty. Where do I find them?” Here are a few places, numbered but in no particular order:
1. Sites linking to your competitors
2. Sites relevant to your own, or to a specific page you have
3. Relevant blogging sites
4. Business directories: Note that this is “business” directories, not “site” directories. For example, young entrepreneurs may find a “young entrepreneurs” directory for B2B. Another example would be your local Merchant’s Circle.
5. Product review sites
6. Any partners you may have
7. Sites whose visitors might find your information useful
8. Search for sites that linked to recently expired competitive/relevant domains.
9. Sites with your chosen keyword in the URL – i.e. www.keyword.com
10. All about “keyword” sites
11. Scan relevant sites for broken links.
12. Make relevant, thoughtful comments on “do follow” sites.
13. Relevant publication sites
14. Create microsites dedicated to specific keywords.
15. Create relationships on social media platforms: Note – don’t just come out and ask for a link. This method is slow, and is really more about the relationship than the link. Eventually, once the relationship is built, the individual will most likely link to your site because they like it and you.
3 Email Examples
Develop a listing of these types of sites based on your linking purpose. For link building that requires it, contact the webmaster (preferably with firstname@email rather than info@email) with a personal email – NOT a generic email. Be straightforward, not whiny, begging or sneaky. A few examples:
Email Example #1
Dear [name],
I noticed that [link] on your site is broken. I’d like to suggest this link on my site [your link] as a substitution. Please use [key word or phrase] as the link text, and do let me know if your visitors could use any other type of information I might be able to provide.
Sincerely,
[your name]
Email Example #2
Dear [name],
I’ve been reading your blog and find it [insert adjective]. I’d love to contribute with a guest post. I’m knowledgeable in [industry] as you can see from my site [site address]. Do you have a specific topic you think your readers may be interested in or specific keywords you’re targeting? Please let me know what your requirements are for guest posts, and when a new post would be useful.
Thank you,
[your name]
Email Example #3
Dear [name],
I came across your site recently and find it [insert adjective]. I recently wrote an article that I feel would be useful to your readers, posted here [article address]. Please use the title to link to it, and don’t hesitate to let me know if you think you could use any other information available on my site.
Does finding high quality links take time? You Betcha. Yes, it does. It takes time, dedication and research. However, the return on that time investment in terms of meeting your link purpose goals can be unbelievable. Now get out there and get to building your link army!
source from:searchenginejournal.com
