Pandia talks to Jill Whalen about organic search engine optimization, the Social Web, personalization and her lack of trust in Google.

Jill Whalen of High Rankings is one of the most experience search engine marketing experts around and she has been in the game since 1995.

She holds her own search engine marketing seminars and publishes her own search engine marketing newsletter. She is also the owner and an administrator at the High Rankings Search Engine Optimization Forum.

She is a much sought after speaker for search engine conferences. This time we met her in New York for the Search Engine Strategies conference.

Search engine marketing in New England

We started out with asking her about her new networking organization: SEMNE.

Jill: SEMNE is a new search engine marketing organization which I co-founded for individuals and companies in New England [US]. It is, among other things, a networking organization. We have meetings every other month on specific topics with invited speakers. Both members and non-members, and anyone in search engine marketing is invited.

Search engine optimization seminars

Pandia: But you are still running your seminars?

Jill: Definitely. I have been doing search engine marketing seminars since 2002. Now I’m having three seminars a year. And this October, I will be doing one in Europe as well, in London to be exact.

Good copy - good SEO

Pandia: What is a beginner to look out for when implementing a search engine marketing strategy? Should they improve their copy writing skills?

Jill: It is important to write copy – or content – that is attractive to both search engines and human readers. I do not consider myself a copy writer, and often recommend people hire a professional copy writer that is able to write good text that is useful for humans.

What I do – as a search engine marketing consultant – is give advice on how you can write copy that is useful for the search engines as well, to make sure that the search engines understand what the page is about.

Be concrete!

For instance: I recommend that writers avoid generic terms. Tell us what the product is! Be concrete! Many web sites do not mention their products in a clear and meaningful way. Good search engine friendly writing is possible, without just sticking random keywords into text.

You can use this knowledge in pay-per-click text ad campaigns as well. Good ads must communicate in a clear way and tell the reader exactly what product or service we are talking about. Use the relevant keywords on the landing pages as well.

Keyword tools

Pandia: But in order for this to succeed, you need to know what search terms people find relevant?

Jill: Yes, the keyword research is important; keyword discovery is important, and there are fortunately several keyword tools out there that are useful, including Google’s Keyword tool and professional services like Wordtracker. Personally I use Keyword Discovery.

I do not trust Google

Personally I have not used the Google Webmaster Central actively [a portal for tracking web site performance] Our sites are always crawler friendly. Moreover, I do not want to give Google more information than necessary.

Pandia: We would guess that you, as a well known “white hat” search engine marketer would not be afraid of Google’s access to information.

Jill: They [Google] don’t even like white hat search engine optimization. Google can use the data gathered by the Google Webmaster Central to identify search engine optimization.

Moreover they can combine this information with data gathered via other services, like Google Analytics [Google’s Web Metrics service].

I know it’s hard to turn down such free services, but I do not trust them.

Pandia: Do you think that Google actively “punishes” sites that practice search engine marketing techniques – even those that are within the Google webmaster guidelines?

Jill: No, not at all. But they may certainly scrutinize them more closely than pages they don’t believe were optimized. They really like to think that they don’t need SEOs – that they can find the most relevant pages all by themselves. So the “trick” with great SEO is to write your pages so that they are not obviously optimized.

The Social Web

Pandia: Search engine marketing used to be about on page optimization — filling in title and headline tags etc – and link building. Now people are talking more and more about the social web and social marketing optimization.

Jill: Yes, with the social web, it has become more complicated. However, I do not think “mom and pop websites” – i.e. smaller company sites or personal sites – have to worry about this. They do not need to get on Digg to get relevant visitors. That is not where they would find their target audience.

That being said, all sites need to create a buzz, but you can also use traditional PR-techniques to achieve that.

I recommend that moms and pops hang out where their target audience is, for instance in relevant online forums — many of them predating Web 2.0. Press releases (for the sake of press not links) continue to work, as does especially cool content. The important thing is being creative. Very few sites work over night.

1995 compared to 2007

Pandia: What is the main difference between 1995 and 2007 search engine marketing wise?

Jill: The competition is much greater. At that time (1995) you could do some minimal stuff and get immediate results. Changing a few items on a page would give quick results.

Now you are competing with hundreds of thousand of pages online. Now search engine optimization is more than technical and it is marketing and PR all rolled into one.

Before the little guy could easily compete with Fortune 500 companies. Now that is extremely hard.

The long tail

Pandia: So should smaller sites and companies go for the long tail of less competitive search terms?

Jill: If you do some natural writing telling your readers and customers what your site, product and services are about, you will naturally be optimizing for long tail keywords.

This is why I do not believe in putting too much work in optimizing the regular text of blogs. If you generate a large number of relevant posts, you will naturally generate lots of relevant keyword phrases.

And note that I am not talking about the extreme end of the long tail here. I am talking about the keyword phrases found somewhere in between, not the top ones, but still keyword phrases that people actively search for.

Bloggers and optimization

Pandia: So are you saying that bloggers should not think about putting relevant keyword phrases in title-tags and headlines?

Jill: No, that continues to be a good idea. What I am saying is that bloggers shouldn’t worry too much about adding a particular number of keywords into their post or article text. Natural blog writing will often generate search engine friendly text.

However, I should add that it helps to focus on a specific niche.

And you should definitely focus on keyword-rich content when generating more traditional web site content. I believe keyword-rich content is 1/3 of SEO.

Jill’s SEO recommendations

In her Search Engine Strategies intervention Jill focused on how to place keyword phrases into copy. She underlined the following points:

• Avoid the use of graphic file to present text. The search engines can only read text. They do not understand Flash, but may read PDF files.
• The users comes first, the needs of the search engines second. The content must make sense for people, so this is not about “sprinkling keywords”.
• Be descriptive. Tell the visitors what your site, product or service is about. Hence the term “our search engine marketing firm” is better than “our team”.
• Focus on search phrases, not keywords. Few people find relevant content using one word queries anyway. Hence write “small cap investing” instead of “invest”, if that is what you mean.
• Focus on location. That will help you rank higher for searches of relevance to your neighborhood: Write “our New York City office”, not “our office”.
• Add variations of your keyword phrases: plural, tenses, ings etc. Do not rely on the search engines’ stemming ability. You should also take a look at words with multiple spellings (“web cam” vs. “webcam”, but do not use different spellings on the same page.
• Add bonus phrases to rank high for more than one keyword phrase. Bonus phrases would be those that are less targeted, but still relevant and descriptive.

Google and spam

Pandia: In our interviews we normally ask our interviewee to give Google advice. What should Google and the other search engines do to improve their search engine results?

Jill: As I see it, Google is caught in a conflict of interest. Much of the spam we find in Google’s results these days are pages with Google Adsense text ads. This means that Google is making a lot of money from spam. They have to do something about this.

That being said, Google is still better than any other search engine out there.

Personalized search

Pandia: What about the advent of personalized search? [Google is now adapting search results to the personal interests of searchers using the Google toolbar and the iGoogle personalized home page.]

Jill: Making the search results more relevant to the particular searcher is a good thing. Moreover, I believe it is good for us as search engine marketers as it will get the focus off the rankings themselves and on to real results: more visitors and more sales.

Vanity keywords will not generate traffic. You must check what people are really searching for. It is more complicated that just checking your present Google rankings, but also more rewarding.

If you want to know more about Jill’s techniques for good search engine friendly copywriting, you could take a look at her report The Nitty-gritty of Writing for the Search Engines

See also: Andrew Goodman on the future of Google and the search engine industry