Welcome to the first installment in Pandia’s new interview series. We will ask search engine experts on searching, marketing and other issues related to the search engine industry.

Our first interviewee is the well know search engine marketing expert Dan Thies.

Dan lives in Texas with his wife and two sons. He has been interested in search engines and search engine marketing since the middle of the 1990’s and been working actively in the field since 2001 as a writer, speaker, and teacher for beginners and professionals.

He is a member of the Executive Committee of SeoPros, the Organization of Search Engine Optimization Professionals, and a frequent speaker at the Search Engine Strategies conferences.

He recently published The Search Engine Marketing Kit, a large manual covering search engine optimization and marketing techniques.

The future of the search engine industry

1. PANDIA: The search engine scene is changing rapidly, with three big players fighting for supremacy: Google, Yahoo! and MSN.

How do you think the search engine and portal scene will look like in 2005? Will the mighty MSN crush Google? Will Google become the new Microsoft? What do you think?

DAN THIES: I don’t see any significant changes on the horizon, in the relative
positions of the major search engines.

Google is adding a lot of services, trying to become a bigger portal, but Yahoo and MSN both have a lot of users “locked in” with free email and other services.

Google will try to attract more users, MSN and Yahoo will try to get their users to search. This will all move pretty slowly.

The search engines and SEM

PANDIA: The search engine marketing industry is the shadow of the search engine industry, and there has come to be a kind of love/hate relationship between the two.

The search engine marketers brings in customers for the search engines, especially as regards pay per click text ads, but at the same time their innovative optimization techniques has led to an arms race between spammers and changing search engine algorithms.

This leads to two questions:

2. Do you think the search engines have been good at establishing a reasonable relationship with the search engine marketers and what more can they do?

DAN THIES: The record so far is pretty spotty. Google and Yahoo have both tried to communicate with webmasters about SEO, but the message is often self-serving, and in some cases we question how accurate it is.

For example, Google gives webmasters some pretty detailed instructions on how to move a site or change from static to dynamic pages, but they also appear to penalize or “sandbox” some sites that have followed Google’s advice.

All of the search engines have struggled to resolve significant issues like 302 redirects and hijacking, which from the outside, appear to be relatively simple. When you put all of these issues together, we find that a lot of sites are running into big problems with indexing and rankings, when they’ve really done nothing deceptive.

Sites doing paid inclusion at Yahoo have access to tech support, but the price is very steep. Google doesn’t offer that, which I think is a mistake.

Not that they need to offer paid inclusion, but they could offer some kind of service where they just tell you what’s wrong with your site, why it isn’t getting crawled.

So, on the organic side, the search engines are trying, or at least trying to look like they’re trying, but they have their own agendas.

Plenty of folks warned Google about the problems with redirects a couple years before it became a public issue, showed them some pretty bad exploits, and they didn’t do anything about it. That says a lot in my opinion.

Webmasters and SEOs do need to recognize that they don’t own the search results, and that nobody owes them a living. If the algorithm shifts, there are winners and losers. The losers complain that they’ve been penalized, but that comes from a sense of entitlement, which is just an illusion.

There are really two kinds of issues with SEO; those caused by the webmaster and those caused by the engine.

The search engines could do better on their side, and they could certainly provide more information and do more outreach with application developers. Popular applications like OSCommerce require extensive modifications simply to avoid creating duplicate content. Why search engines aren’t able to work more closely with developers, I don’t know.

On the paid side, I’m not sure how much better things are. All advertisers would like a lot more control, especially in areas like contextual advertising, but very little has changed. The big spenders have access to a lot of support resources, and data that other advertisers can’t get.

Yahoo’s Buzz is in beta now, allowing advertisers
to see all kinds of demographic information, but when will all advertisers have the same information?

White hat vs. black hat SEM

3. PANDIA: Secondly: Is it possible to distinguish clearly between accepted “white hat” search engine optimization techniques and “black hat” spamming?

DAN THIES: I think its possible, but it depends on your perspective.

To me, “black hat” should be reserved for those things that are just plain wrong, even if search engines didn’t exist. Screen scraping, stealing content, spamming blogs, cross-site scripting exploits, and the like.

These activities are a nuisance, and its far too easy for people doing these things to hide behind proxies, anonymous or false domain registrations, etc.

In the middle, there are a lot of things that the search engines would like to be able to filter out of their results. Duplicate content, paid links, link farms, machine-generated content, that sort of thing.

If you’re doing something that the search engines would like to filter out, you know you’re doing it, and the search engines have every right to filter this stuff out, but it’s really up to the search engines to figure out how.

“White hat” is harder to define. Do the search engines like the fact that we use content distribution to build links? I don’t know, but I do know that it’s a worthwhile activity even if you ignore search engines, because it builds a brand and generates traffic to a website.

What I would hope the search engines would recognize by now is that many things they would like to filter out, that they don’t want influencing search results, might still be legitimate promotional tactics.

Link exchanges, even massively automated link exchanges, can drive traffic to a site. Paid “text links” in the right context may also be profitable advertising. Search engines need to learn how to ignore these things, without penalizing the sites that do them.

Intermission

4. PANDIA: You are lost on a desert island, and you have only one book to read. Which one would you prefer it to be?

DAN THIES: I suppose it depends on how long Ill be on the island. Right now, I’m trying to get through Neal Stephenson’s Baroque Cycle trilogy, and its possible that I’ll need to go find an island in order to finish it.

5. PANDIA: We know the feeling, Per has been working hard on volume 3 in the series, The System of the World, for six months now. As an historian of ideas he finds them highly entertaining, though!

SEM beginner’s problems

Back to business: You have been coaching web masters and company representatives in search engine marketing for several years, and you have your own search engine optimization course. What seems to be the main problems beginners face when developing search engine marketing practices?

DAN THIES: I’d really refer to my coaching program as a training program, its much more than just a search engine optimization course, its a personalized training program that lets us address all aspects of SEO and SEM based on each students specific needs.

There are a few things that beginners seem to fall into.

One problem is trying to sort through all the information and disinformation. You can avoid making mistakes by finding the right sources, but even with completely accurate information, it can still be overwhelming.

I can tell you 100 ways to build links, but only a handful will be the right ones for a specific website at a given time.

Another problem is seeing search engine marketing as a source of free or cheap traffic, thinking in terms of volume. The great thing about search engine marketing is that you’re able to target people who are looking for something, you can target very specific markets and segments.

Unfortunately, that’s usually the last thing on the beginner’s mind, they’re just thinking lots and lots of traffic.

The biggest issue, though, is that beginners have a hard time looking at the rest of the picture. Their #1 problem is probably not traffic, it’s conversion, usability, opt-ins, follow-up, pricing, making the right offer.

You can use search engine marketing to help you solve these problems, but if you don’t solve them you will eventually fail. Those who make the most profit per visitor have the most resources to compete for rankings and ad placement.

When I speak with someone who wants to improve their rankings, I usually ask if they do pay-per-click. Invariably, the answer is “no, we can’t afford that.” The bad news is that if your website can’t convert well enough to support a PPC campaign, you’ll often find that SEO is even more costly, especially in the short term.

Our goal in developing strategy with clients and students is to find the right balance, and map out a path to a stable, sustainable marketing effort. This often involves things that are only peripherally related to search engines, but you have to build the right foundation for success.

Where to focus

6. PANDIA: What should beginners focus on when trying to get better rankings for their sites and web pages?

DAN THIES: When you say “better rankings,” better might mean getting the right page into the rankings, not necessarily getting higher rankings.

Keyword strategy — getting the right words onto the right pages — that’s first. I don’t worry about rankings until we have the keywords on the right pages.

Now that we have the right pages targeting the right search terms, then we want a well-structured site. We want to use internal linking to reinforce our keyword strategy as well as our conversion strategy. If you do it right, there’s synergy between the two.

From there, we want to promote the site, and get links into it from other resources. Look for links that can generate some traffic on their own, and try to drive the link into the right entry page.

I often use a hypothetical web hosting company to illustrate this concept. If I get a link from an article about dedicated hosting, then I want that link pointing to my web page about dedicated servers, not my home page that talks about shared hosting, email hosting, etc.

SEO boils down to a few simple things: optimized pages, site structure, linking and promotion.

Optimizing the web page, the copy, that’s the easiest part. The rest of the story is often overlooked or misunderstood, but if you’re really trying to get good business results, the rest of the story is critical.

Innovation front

7. PANDIA: What is the innovation front of professional search engine marketing right now: in the area of paid search or in organic optimization (i.e. improving rankings in regular search results)?

DAN THIES: Analytics is becoming very important, because the tools are getting good enough that you can really take the mountains of data you get, and make some sense of it.

There’s a lot of good research and innovation going on right now in the area of landing pages, follow-up marketing, conversion, optimizing bidding and matching strategies. All of this is really powered by analytics.

On the organic side, there’s not so much “new” going on, as there is an effort to become more efficient in applying resources. This is necessary, because the number of competitors keeps growing. A lot of people are looking for more “free” traffic.

The number of folks who are willing to waste resources grows in proportion to that, so you have to have better strategies.

Intermission

8. PANDIA: Are you a cat person or a dog person?

DAN THIES: Both, I guess. We have two cats, and two dogs.

The cats have been with me for 10 years, and the dogs are fairly recent invaders. The dogs weren’t my idea, my wife and kids wanted them, but Ill admit that they’re a lot of fun. You can’t play fetch with a cat, but a cat doesn’t need you to play fetch — they can entertain themselves.

Customizing SERPs

9. PANDIA: What should the search engine companies focus in order to improve their services: Fighting spam? Developing new services in areas like local search and yellow pages? Should they look at personalization
of search or something else entirely?

DAN THIES: The search engines should listen to their users, they should try a lot of things, because there’s money flowing in right now to make that kind of development possible.

I think it would be a good idea to make the SERP [search engine result pages] customizable. Allow users to turn the paid ads on and off, decide what gets displayed where, etc. Most users will not customize their search results page, but those who do can tell the engines a lot about what people want.

I’m going back and forth between Google and MSN for searches right now, I like a lot of the innovative stuff MSN is doing, but Google’s innovating too.

With the right Firefox extensions, you can build a better personal search portal from Google. For some reason the Open Source developers just aren’t that interested in improving Microsoft’s product.

Running your own SEM company

10. PANDIA: In your book you have a separate chapter on running a search engine marketing business.

Is there room for more mom and pop shops in this area, or will the industry be taken over by large conglomerates?

DAN THIES: There’s a lot of room for a very diverse market.

Large agencies may be better suited for large clients, and there will be some consolidation there, but there will also be new agencies spinning off all the time.

The largest clients will be targeted by a lot of large agencies, but that leaves millions of smaller businesses that aren’t really a good fit for the large agency’s business model.

When I see a one-person shop answering an RFP from a Fortune 500 company, I really wonder if they know what they’re getting into. The key for small shops is to recognize areas of opportunity, and focus on the personal attention they can offer to their clients.

A small agency can probably do more for a small firm, to help with things like analytics, conversion, PPC campaigns, etc.

I see a lot of specialization coming, too. My company does keyword research, we have a team of five people doing that, but outside of that very specialized function, it’s just me. I do coaching and consulting on strategy and tactics, and we can help a lot of people that way, but we don’t manage the implementation.

We don’t have copywriters, link building specialists, and that sort of thing. My business is really based on supporting the people who have to execute the strategy: in house professionals, business owners, and SEO/SEM consultants. This business works because there are a lot of people out there who can do the work, they just need direction.

More information on Dan’s search engine marketing kit
More information on Dan’s training program and new blog.