An Interview of Casey Yandle (@cyandle) Written By Jim Spencer (@fairminder)
A friend of mine on Twitter @fairminder sent me these questions to answer as part of an interview so I am posting the interview on our blog and he will also post the interview on his blog as well. So here is our interview from this morning. Hope you like!
Jim: Morning Casey! Thank you for taking this time to do answer some questions for me.
Casey: Morning! It’s not a problem at all. I’m happy to participate!
Jim: Alright so let’s get started!
1. How long have you been working in (insert your industry) and what attracted you to it?
I started in SEO in 2002 after being laid off as a webmaster for a town’s community portal website. I just happen upon the job position by accident actually. I needed to get my “quote” of resumes submitted for unemployment so I figured I would just drop off my resume and be done with it. Six and a half years later I’m still here grinding away at it because I like seeing the results that we can produce for our clients.
2. In your opinion, what’s the measure of a good SEO/PR/Blogging professional?
To me, a good SEO / PR / Blogging professional is someone who stays within the Google Webmaster guidelines and continues to provide users with resourceful information whether it’s original content, experiments that they’ve conducted or keeping users up-to-date with what’s going on in the industry.
3. Whose blog do you read the most?
I think it’s a close tie between the blogs at SEOmoz and SEOBook actually with several others coming in behind them namely anything written by Lisa Barone and Jennifer Laycock.
4. What’s your best “SEO secret” or blogging tactic?
If I told you a SEO secret now would it still be a secret? 
So, a great blogging tactic. Well we tend to recap great posts that we have read that we think others should be reading as well since we find the posts so informative. There’s so much out there that sometimes it’s best to let others know what posts you think were some of the stronger posts rather than having our users have to search throughout the Internet for those articles.
5. Search engine algorithms are getting smarter, and a lot of people predict organic SEO services will become obsolete. How do you plan to adapt?
I really don’t see it becoming obsolete. We carefully point out to our clients what pitfalls they currently have with their website and how to fix those issues. And besides we stay within Google’s Guidelines. As long as you stay within what they want there’s no reason for you to have to adapt your services. We’ll keep up-to-date with what’s going on, but our services are services that are only geared for the long term for our clients.
6. Please describe the biggest challenge you face in your current job.
Not having enough time in the day to try out the services and techniques that we want to try out for our clients as well as offer our clients. Although, as we grow, I see this not being a BIG problem for that long.
7. Do you have any advice for someone who is interested in SEO / SEM / Social Media, but doesn’t have a background in it, on how to get started in this field?
Well obviously there’s not too many classes you can take that will educate yourself. I do recommend taking a creative writing class though as writing great content is very beneficial. My other recommendations are to check out websites such as SEOmoz, SEOBook, Webmaster World, Search Engine Land, and Marketing Pilgrim as well as anything written by Lisa Barone and Jennifer Laycock as well as studying up on analytical programs for tracking conversions.
8. If you could rank for any keyword phrase you don’t currently rank for, what would it be?
Although we’re mostly an search engine optimization company, we are currently trying to provide more Google Adwords management services for our clients right now. So the keyword that we would like to be ranked for right now is Google Adwords Professional.
9. Assuming you had never gone into SEO / SEM, what would you be doing now (professionally)?
I would probably still be a web designer / webmaster of some sorts since I still love designing websites. To me a great design is a work of art so I would probably would still be in the design industry working for a design firm dishing out designs.
10. Do you have any interest in politics? (or what’s your favorite professional sports team and why? If you don’t want to do the politics thing.)
Well since I stay away from mixing religion and politics with business I’ll take the sports question. My two favorites sports teams are the Chicago Bears and the Toronto Blue Jays. They’re an odd pair yes I know! I started pulling for both teams because when I was a little kid I would collect baseball and football cards. Mostly it was just Topps cards with the bubble gum inside. All I would get would be the common cards for those two teams. I did manage to get a Walter Payton card though. After getting so many team common cards I decided those would be my favorite teams to watch/pull for. To this day I still pull for both teams even through the bad times.
Well that’s the end of our interview. Thank you to @MelaniePhung for writing the questions for everyone. Feel free to follow me on Twitter (@cyandle) if you’d like!
@almacy - A Digital Strategy Expert.
@melaniephung - A DC SEO Strategist.
@martinbowling - A lover of Zima.
@utahseopro - A Utah SEO Consultant.
@fairminder - A Boston Website Design and SEO specialist.
@cyandle - A Google Adwords Professional.
@melanienathan - An Edmonton SEO specialist.
@jackleblond - A VP of Internet Strategy.
@djpaisley - A Digital Communications Strategist.
@vinceblackham - A Utah SEO specialist.
@researchgoddess - A Staffing Social Media Specialist.
@monicawright - A Maine SEO professional.
SEOmoz Seminar - Sessions So Good They’ll Make Your Head Hurt!
As you all know I attended the SEOmoz Expert Training Seminar last week (Aug. 19 & Aug. 20) and I had previously told you that I would review the sessions for our readers once I got back. Well, unfortunately, I cannot review the sessions for you as they have asked us not to blog about what was taught at the various sessions. I totally respect that and have no issues with not being able to tell our readers what we learned. I can, however, let you know what the sessions were about. Then, you can see why my head hurt after the sessions were over! That’s just how good the sessions were at SEOmoz and I am definitely glad that I got to attend the event.
Day One
Thinking Like A Search Engineer - Rand Fishkin
Elite Site Architecture - Rand Fishkin & Stephan Spencer
White Hat Cloaking - Rand Fishkin
Spam Detection & False Positives - Nick Gerner
Legal Issues - Sarah Bird
Site Reviews - Rebecca Kelley & Rand Fishkin
Global Search - Will Critchlow & Duncan Morris
Sitemaps & Webmaster Tools - Rand Fishkin & Stephan Spencer
Crawlability - Jeff Pollard
Day Two
Reputation Management - Will Critchlow & Duncan Morris
Social Networks For SEO - Jane Copland
Opportunities & Pitfalls Of Buying Links - Seth Besmertnik
Enterprise Link Building - Rand Fishkin
Vertical Search Inclusion - Stephan Spencer
Future Of Search Engines - Danny Sullivan
Expert Q&A - Danny Sullivan, Rand Fishkin, Stephan Spencer, Nick Gerner, Will Critchlow & Duncan Morris
These sessions were so great we’re going to implement quite a few of their suggestions in our services at Regency Interactive. Just to give you a hint of what we will be implementing; we’re going to offer more in depth site reviews, more social media services, putting more thought into conversions for our clients and so forth.
P.S. It was also great to meet the people I treat with on a daily basis: Alex Bennert, Brian Carter, Dana Lookadoo, Danny Sullivan, David Mihm, Derek Edmond, Dr. Pete, Duncan Morris, Jane Copland, Jeff Donenfeld, Joshua Sciarrino, Martin Bowling, Monica Wright, Stephan Spencer, Taylor Pratt and Will Critchlow.
P.S.S If you are ever at one of these events and by chance see something on someone’s shirt like say some chocolate from a Twix they ate a couple of hours before lunch then be sure and let them know it’s there. Otherwise, they will walk all around at lunch and throughout the rest of the day with chocolate rubbed in on his/her shirt. That’s not a good way to network now is it?
SEO: Matt Cutts Interview
Eric Enge of Stone Temple Consulting sat down with Matt Cutts to do an interview on link building tips so that everyone in the SEO industry would have a better idea as to what you CAN do and what you SHOULDN’T do in regards to link building.
Some key points are:
- You can create widgets and give them to your users, but do not embed hundreds of invisible links pointing back to your website.
- Researching a particular subject/task and documenting what you found out is a good way to get inbound links to your website.
- It’s okay to hire social media experts to help you achieve this inbound links; just make sure they don’t purchase any of those links.
All in all it’s a great insight as to what you should be doing to get inbound links to your website. Currently, this is not a service that we offer at Regency Interactive Corporation, but hopefully in time we’ll be able to offer it for our customers. To continue reading the article and see what other examples/tips they divulge, click here.
Tags: link building, matt cutts, regency interactive, seoLink Building: Remember To Keep It Simple!
There’s a great post from Eric Enge on Search Engine Land today as this is something that we at Regency Interactive run into all of the time! It’s also similar to the K.I.S.S rule for design except this one is for SEO. Here are some of Eric’s simple explanations to common questions that we at Regency Interactive are asked every day.
1. Why link building is important: “Link building is important because links behave like votes for your site. The more votes you have the better your rankings will be. This is why Amazon ranks more highly than other sites selling books (e.g. Joe’s Book Store).”
2. All links are not created equal: “Search engines value the relevance of the link highly. Links from unrelated sites don’t hurt you, but they don’t help nearly as much as links from a relevant site. Also, a link from Amazon counts more than a link from Joe’s book store, because Amazon itself has more links pointing to it.
3. Why link building is an ongoing activity: You must continually do link building because at least one of your competitors will do so. It does not help you that much to climb to the top of the mountain and then rest, because your competitor can still catch up with you and pass you.
4. Why search engines have canonical issues: It is entirely possible to serve up different content at yourdomain.com and www.yourdomain.com, and it’s possible for that content to be controlled by different people. As a result, search engines need to treat them as separate pages, and this makes one version a duplicate of the other.
5. Why 301s are the preferred redirect: 301 is the only server side redirect which is defined as “Content Moved Permanently”. All the major search engines therefore treat this as a signal to pass through links and history from the old page to the new page. Other forms of redirects do not pass link juice from the old page to the new page.
6. What search engines do with duplicate content: Search engines only want to list one copy of a piece of content in their search results. So they pick one version of the content to include in their results for a particular query.
7. Why search engines care about duplicate content: If a user clicks on one search result and sees a given article, but it is not what they are looking for, the search engine is not helping them by showing more copies of the same content. Diversity in search results helps search quality.
8. How is duplicate content defined?: Exact copies are duplicate content, of course, but so are near copies. Common menus and boilerplate on a site are ignored, and the page’s unique content is evaluated to determine the degree of similarity with other pages. Similarly exceeding a given threshold is considered duplicate.
9. Why buying links is bad: Search engines want to count links to your site as editorial votes for its quality. A purchased link is compensated, and therefore likely not editorial. While discovering paid links algorithmically may be hard, your competitor can spot them visually and report you.
Hopefully some of these will be useful to you too when you are asked these same questions day after day. Just remember to keep it simple so they understand the basis of your answer. It will make your life easier! His article continues here.
Tags: link building, seo, web design
