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.
SEO: Reasons Why Your Google Traffic Might Have Dropped
Recently, Ann Smarty over at Search Engine Journal posted an article “5 Reasons Why Your Google Traffic Might Have Dropped” and today we’re going to summarize what she’s pointing out to you in the article.
The main reasons why your Google traffic may have dropped are probably related to one of these situations:
- You’ve been penalized.
- Your site has been hacked.
- Google is tweaking its algorithm.
- Overall (seasonal) change in searches.
- Your competitors increased their promotional efforts.
If in fact you have been penalized by something that you did then you will need to work hard to figure out what exactly it was that you did on your website that Google did not like. Once you have taken off anything that may be conceived as something that violates their guidelines then you can ask for a re-inclusion. If you pass a human review, then you should be forgiven.
The second likely option is your website being hacked. If your website has been hacked and this is a common scenario here lately, you will need to figure out just what they did. Some red flags that you have been hacked are Google webmaster tools showing you that some of the terms that you were found by recently are not relevant to your website as well as getting an increase in traffic for keywords not related to your website such as casino or hotel. Once you have taken off anything that may be conceived as something that violates their guidelines then you can ask for a re-inclusion.
The next item that could have caused your rankings to drop was Google making changes to their index. They are always going to continually update their datacenters to weed out spam and whatnot.
Obviously, if you sell Christmas trees and it’s only June you’re going to see a dip in your traffic simply because nobody is searching for Christmas trees in June.
The last option is that your competitors increased their promotional efforts based on your website outranking them. Always keep an eye out for what your competitors are doing while continuing to improve your on-site SEO.
If you need any help with understanding why your competitors have passed you by in the organic rankings, the Support Team at Regency Interactive can assist you with getting your website back to where it was previously in the search engine listings.
Tags: search engine optimization, seo, web design, website analysis, website design, website optimizationWebsite Redesign: What’s Wrong With Best Swim Wear?
We have a new site for the series “What’s Wrong With This Website” as I came across this website this weekend while I was looking for some new swim trunks: BestSwimWear.com. The first thing that stuck out to me was the out-of-date look the site had to it with the “default” link colors around the images due to borders being set up on the images. Then, when you scroll to the bottom you see that the website was designed and copyrighted in 1996. I’m willing to believe that this is how the website looked back then in 1996. Let’s begin the analysis!
The first thing that I noticed is that the main header image is predominately gray, but yet the name brand images have a shadow behind them while also having a white background around them as well. This would look more professional if it was all just white minus the shadows since the rest of the website is white.
Next, you can see that they are using a text-based navigation menu that is actually an image. There’s no rollover to these images so I’m not quite sure why they used an image. Especially since the font is just an ordinary font each user would already have on their computer. There are so many images that can capture your attention above the fold that you can actually miss their navigation and scroll right on past it. You should always make sure your users can find what they need on the website as well as be able to find the menu to click on.
We already pointed out that the images use a default blue border around them which means that they are not using any up-to-date CSS or anything. They could just update their look real simple by using CSS.
Which leads me to my last item critique. I came across this website by doing a search on Google for “mens swimsuit” and yet they only have 3 name brands to offer its male customers. However, they have 35 name brands to offer its female customers. By offering more lingerie and women’s swimsuits it’s pretty obvious that your website is not really catering towards men.
This brings a close to the series “What’s Wrong With This Website” for the time being. With SMX Advanced being today and tomorrow we’ll be posting some topics that come up from that conference. I’m sure it will be a good one!
If you’re interested in a website critique, feel free to contact Regency Interactive today at 252-428-0200!
Tags: web design, web redesign, website analysis, website design, website redesignWebsite Redesign: What Is Wrong With USB Media Company?
Hello folks! We’re back with our series on “What Is Wrong With This Website” and today we’re featuring USB Media Company. The support team at Regency Interactive came across this company when we were looking for custom USB jump drives.
Here are a few things that we don’t like about this site:
- The colors are too plain on the site; the color scheme is more like a boring doctor’s office colors rather than a high tech product’s website. Their products come in all different sizes and colors so why can’t their website?
- The company information that they provide you does not give you enough information about them. Who’s to say that this isn’t a company that just drop ships the products to you from a third party company?
- We also think their customers do not like the fact that they cannot order straight from their website. Money spent on online ordering is growing exponentially each day so why would you not provide this option to your customers?
- As a company looking at custom flash drives we were looking for some flash drives at least 8 GB in capacity and theirs seem to only go to 4 GB. Right now you can get flash drives as high as 32 GB as well as 64 GB.
- The last big thing that sticks out to us is they show you what services that they can offer you, but they don’t demonstrate the type of work that they can do you. A portfolio of custom USB jump drives that they have done in the past would be enough for a customer to look past these other flaws that their website has and order from them anyway.
- As far as SEO issues that the website has we found quite a few things there that they could improve such as title tags, their body content, link title tags and so forth.
Stay tuned tomorrow for the latest post in our series!
Tags: regency interactive, regency interactive corporation, web design, web redesign, website analysis, website design, website redesignWebsite Redesign: What Is Wrong With http://www.controlnoise.com/
Today, starts the first post in regards to our “What is Wrong With This Website” series that we will be doing at Regency Interactive. Each day we’ll pick a website that one of our team members came across here recently and we will dissect their website somewhat to point out issues on their website. First up is ControlNoise.com! Recently one of our team members at Regency was looking to soundproof one of their spare rooms so that they could turn it into a studio and came across Control Noise’s website.
Issues We Noticed
At first glance the design issues are very easy to spot. the site looks outdated with their design and it also appears that the site was designed for a display setting over 640 * 480 pixels with default link colors to go along with a boring color scheme. With today’s design methods it’s easy for websites to make their links match the site’s color scheme.
Upon further investigation you can see that the website does not work the same in Firefox as it does in Internet Explorer. You can also see that their logo does not include their company name. You have to scan to the far right to see what their company name is and that’s not good design.
Also, their links suggest that you can “search” amongst their products, but once you click on “Search By Product” all you get on the next page is a list of links for particular products. This does not allow a user to “search” through their products. It also makes their users “click” one extra time than they really need to do on the site. If they listed all of their products on the homepage then a user could find what they need quicker on the site which would help with sales conversions and so forth. The same thing goes for “Search By Application” as well.
Next, we noticed that they have pages within the website that you can only get to from certain pages of the website. This is not good for the users as it will make it harder to find certain pages. Granted, there is a sitemap on the website, but you still should make the site easier to navigate for your users.
Finally, the big turn-off about the site is their color scheme. The color is not very appealing to a user as it’s very boring. Given the choices they offer for fabric choices you would think they would know about color schemes.
These are just a few things we were able to spot on this site that we thought needed to be corrected. Believe it or not, how your website looks to your potential customers will tell them right off the bat if they are going to buy from you or not. Stay tuned for tomorrow’s website!
Tags: usability, web design, web redesign, website design, website redesign
