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: SEO Site Reviews Step-by-Step
A couple of weeks ago SEOmoz posted a Whiteboard Friday video of SEOmoz Global Associate, Tom Critchlow, explaining the “site review” process. We wanted to summarize what the video was about so that our readers could see just how thorough site reviews are as well as how well thought out they are too!
Feel free to check out the video after you have finished reading our summarization.
- First Impressions - Look at the website as the user would. For example, look at it as far as conversions, usability, long forms and are concerned.
- Accessibility/Spiderability - Look at it as a robot by turning off javascript, cookies & CSS to see what the website looks like; does it have all of the content visible? Also, be sure to check out the robots.txt file to make sure you’re allowing robots to crawl your website. Next, use the crawl test tool on SEOmoz’s website to see if your website is crawlable. Also, be sure to browse as Googlebot so that you can see what it will see.
- Google Health Check - Make sure to do a Google health check, i.e. performing the following:
- site search: “site:regencyinteractive.com” (minus the quotation marks)
- Brand searches such as your company name
- Look at the Google cache and pay particular attention to your important pages to see if your content shows up.
- Duplicate Content - It’s important to make sure that there’s not duplicate content within the web results. Search for content strings within quotations to find content scrapers. Also check the web results for non www vs www versions of your website as well as check all domains look hosted on that particular web server. Look at all of their domains (use site only ip check).
- Website URLS – You need to ensure that the website only has one URL per page. Don’t have a dynamic URL for it as well as a static version. Also, make sure your URLs are clean, short and descriptive with your keywords targeted in them.
- Title Tags - Make sure that your website has unique title tags and that they are descriptive.
- Content Review - Make sure that you have enough content throughout the website and that you also use header tags that contain your keyword phrases.
- Meta Tags - It’s key that you don’t have a meta description that is too long. Also, make sure if there is a robots tag that it has been done correctly.
- Redirects - You should use live http headers (Firefox extension) to check out headers codes and so forth. Also, it’s helpful to check everything else as well.
- Internal Linking - You should check the # of links then check out the # of links on homepage then the # links on category pages to make sure it’s a good ratio and that it will not stand out to the search engines. Also, look to see if there is any anchor text within the content as well as look for links to nofollow. He makes reference to also checking for pagination.
- Geo-location - Make sure your IP address is the right address for your targeted location. Be sure to check out SEOmoz’s tool for this as well.
- External Linking - Look to see what anchor text is pointing to your site to make sure that they’re not all the same anchor text. Review any type of deep linking to make sure that all of the links are not just to the homepage, but are actually spread throughout website. Also, look to see if they look natural. If you have any paid links and they look obviously paid then you need to fix it.
- Semantic HTML - Look through the website to make sure that the website does not have bulky pages (long load time), poorly formatted code or that it’s missing alt/title text relevant to page that it’s linking to on the website.
SEO: Google’s Design & Content Guidelines
Every person knows Google is #1 when it comes to the major search engines. Thus, it’s important to follow their guidelines. Here are some helpful design and content guidelines that Google would like for you to follow with your website and its design.
Design & Content Guidelines
- Make a site with a clear hierarchy and text links. Every page should be reachable from at least one static text link.
- Offer a site map to your users with links that point to the important parts of your site. If the site map is larger than 100 or so links, you may want to break the site map into separate pages. Create a useful, information-rich site, and write pages that clearly and accurately describe your content.
- Think about the words users would type to find your pages, and make sure that your site actually includes those words within it.
- Try to use text instead of images to display important names, content, or links. The Google crawler doesn’t recognize text contained in images.
- Make sure that your TITLE tags and ALT attributes are descriptive and accurate.
- Check for broken links and correct HTML.
- If you decide to use dynamic pages (i.e., the URL contains a “?” character), be aware that not every search engine spider crawls dynamic pages as well as static pages. It helps to keep the parameters short and the number of them few.
- Keep the links on a given page to a reasonable number (fewer than 100).
Be sure to follow these guidelines with your website so that you can stay in the good graces of Google.
Tags: google guidelines, seo, web design, web design guidelinesSEO: Common SEO Tips For The Beginner
From time to time we come across companies that just do not understand the basics of SEO work. There is a lot of out of date and black hat SEO advice out there, which acted upon will get your site banned. The SEO tips below should inform the reader what they can and cannot do in regards to SEO. If you need more in depth help, Regency Interactive has a staff of employees with over 30 years combined experience that is ready to help you!
- Do not use the same exact title on every page on your website. The search engines may determine that all your pages are the same if your titles tags are the same and thus those pages would not have as much relevancy!
- Do not link to link farms or other search engine unfriendly neighborhoods. You also shouldn’t buy any links as well. It’s known that Google does not like sites that purchase links.
- Describe your images with the use of alt and title tags. This will help the engines index your pages better in terms of relevancy and helps readers who use text only browsers.
- Do not use doorway pages. Doorway pages are mostly used for robots and not humans. Search engines like to index human-friendly pages.
- Do not “spam/keyword stuff” your site with meaningless keywords in meta tags or anywhere else on your website.
- Do not use any type of black hat cloaking. Blackhat cloaking is when the content presented to the search engine spider differs from the content that is presented to the users’ browser. They want to be able to see the same content your users see.
- Do not use hidden content within your website. Search engines want your content to be visible to your users and will penalize you for hidden content.
These are just some basic hints and tips that any website owner can use to enhance their website.
Tags: search engine optimization, seo, seo tips, whitehat seo
