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: 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: 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 optimizationSearch Engine Optimization: What Is SEO???
Shoemoney from Shoemoney.com emailed some of the top people in the SEO industry and polled them to see what their answers would be for the following question: “What is your definition of SEO?”. Here are their answers:
Danny Sullivan AKA godfather of SEO:
An SEO is someone who understands how people search for information (on the web and in other ways) and ensures that they or their clients are visible in the unpaid listings that are provided. A search marketer, by the way, is someone that ensures listing in both paid and unpaid listings.
Rand Fishkin:
SEO is the combination of tactics and strategies, including, but not limited to, optimization of information architecture, usability, content focus, audience targeting, design, development, keyword research, keyword placement, link building, social media marketing and any other online or offline branding/marketing elements that support the goal of receiving more traffic from search engines.
Neil Patel:
Search engine optimization (SEO) is the art of understanding search engines and and using that knowledge to make a website rank high on search engines.
Andy Beal:
Making changes to the on-page and off-page relevance of a web page in an effort to increase the volume of quality traffic from the search engines.
Regency Interactive:
Obviously, we were not polled by Shoemoney, but we thought we would let our users know what SEO is in our opinion. SEO is having the knowledge of how and why a website can/is ranked high within the major search engines and illustrating to your clients how they can achieve these high rankings as well. With an SEO friendly design, proper coding, high quality content and a good link building strategy along with some other factors your site can achieve those high rankings that you’re after. Contact us today and let us show you how!
To continue reading the article, click here.
Tags: search engine optimization, seo, website analysis, website optimization, what is seo
