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January 2012 Issue --> Cover Story Article

SEO Mozzer - Rand Fishkin Talks SEO

By: Ric Thompson and Rand Fishkin

Rand Fishkin is the CEO and co-founder of SEOmoz, the web's most popular SEO software provider. He is also co-author of the remarkable The Art of SEO, and has placed in both the 40 Under 40 List, and the 30 Best Young Tech Entrepreneurs Under 30.

Rand has been written about by scores of influential media outfits, including The Seattle Times, Newsweek, and PC World, and has served as keynote speaker for many search conferences across the globe. He is also particularly passionate about the SEOmoz blog, which tens of thousands of search professionals frequent each day.

In his spare time, Rand travels all around the world with his amazing wife, who chronicles their journeys on a fascinating travel blog.

Ric Thompson: Let's talk about SEO. Obviously, you're the expert. Most people are aware of the power and value of SEO, and getting those engines to like us and send traffic to our online businesses. Spend a minute to give us an idea. What does SEO really mean? If I talk to 10 different SEO people, I get 10 different answers.

Rand Fishkin: We should introduce you to different SEO's. They should say the same thing. To be fair, that's very true and common scenario. One of the issues about that is because SEO is not a regulated industry. There are not a bunch of requirements to become a professional SEO. Many people do it entrepreneurially and come about the practice very organically. That means wonderful and amazing things.

It means the industry is extremely creative. It moves very fast. It's not hindered by organizational or bureaucratic structures, but it also, of course, means that it's still the Wild West out there. There are a lot of people doing some not-so-great things that sometimes give the industry or practice a bad name. That's frustrating. SEO, at its core, is the practice of making changes to a website and investing in marketing initiatives that will bring greater search traffic to a web property.

Those practices are extremely far-reaching in terms of the quantity and ways that it can be done. The basic principle behind all of them is to get ranking for more keywords; bring more keyword-directed traffic to your site by ranking higher; and improve your visibility in the listings by giving you annotations or visual cues that make more people click on your page.

Google is getting three billion searches a day now, up from two billion this time last year. That's a lot of opportunity to be in front of people who are saying, "I want this product or service right now." Being listed in those results is absolutely huge for businesses.

Ric Thompson: As you mentioned, it's highly competitive. With that many searches going on, everybody is fighting to get a piece of the pie.

Rand Fishkin: Absolutely. I think the SEO field has grown dramatically over the last decade. Certainly, the competition level for many keywords-not for all of them, but for many keywords-is quite high today.

Ric Thompson: Correct me if I'm wrong, because I'm not the SEO expert. I have a passing interest in it because I operate online. However, I've understood that if you're not in the top page of results, there's just not much traffic there to get. It's almost all or nothing, basically. It's either the first page or nothing.

Rand Fishkin: Yes. That's only recently changed a little bit. I'll explain why. It tends to be the case that you're right. Ninety-five percent of the clicks, maybe more than that, happen on the first page of results, which means the top ten. Even then, it's disproportionately biased to the top three or five results. You really need to do well in the very top of the rankings for the keywords that you care about.

However, that being said, there are two things that are changing that a little. Number-one is the continuing growth-and this has been growing for seven or eight years now-of the long tail in search. What I mean by that is the demand for keywords that are not the common or typical keywords. For example, Ric, Internet Marketing TNT might want to rank with 'Internet marketing'. Those are extremely competitive keywords.

Yes, a lot of people are searching for it, but in fact, there is a ton of people who are searching for different terms like 'Internet marketing for pet store websites'; 'Internet marketing for auto dealers'; Internet marketing for newbies'; or 'Internet marketing for PR professions'. Having pages that are targeting those longer tail queries might not get as much search traffic individually, but they actually add up to a great deal more than the quantity of people just searching for 'Internet marketing'.

The long tail is a powerful thing, and it means that virtually every website can see some search traffic coming to it if it is producing unique, authentic, quality content. The other principle that's changing this is the social graph. You can see Google getting very serious with their investment in Google+ with the connections that they now let you make if you're logged into Google, which about 25% of the web users are, to Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and even Yelp and Cora.

Because of those things, if you are connected to someone who is using one of those social networks, and they have shared a piece of content on the web around your keywords or terms, you can actually rank in the results just for the people who are connected to your social network, even if you wouldn't normally rank in the top 100 results in Google.

That's changing things dramatically as more and more marketers are investing in growing their social connections, sharing more of their content online and trying to get it re-shared by people in their networks to expand the number of people who would see those in the search results. It's a very interesting time in the search world.

Ric Thompson: Let's dive into that more. That's the one biggest complaint or concern that I hear, and that I have personally. It seems that the game is always changing. It's hard to figure it out. Are you saying that social media is probably the hottest factor in what's going on right now in the rankings?

Rand Fishkin: It's hot because it is new and there's still a lot of opportunity, and it is not as competitive, nor as much winner-takes-all as classic SEO has been. However, it's certainly not the most powerful or influential factor. If you and I were to build pages and target a gobbledygook keyword that no one ever searches for to see who could rank first, and all I could do is use social media to Tweet and Facebook and Google+ to promote it, but, you could link build and keyword optimize it, you would still win.

I'm not suggesting that social signals can overwhelm the value of classic SEO ranking signals, which are things like making sure the page is accessible, or making sure the page is targeting the keywords properly in the title, headline and content, and that the page is actually about that topic and does a good job of serving users well, and makes them happy; and of course, it earns links from the rest of the web.

However, if you're in those competitive battles, social media can really help put you over the top, and it can also expose you to people in your network who are already following you in interesting ways.

Ric Thompson: Let me put you on the spot. Obviously, the disclaimer is that things can change tomorrow. However, for right now, today, how much would you recommend in terms of time being spent on the typical stuff, like the back-linking and keyword optimization, versus social media. What percentage of your time would you spend?

This article is just a small portion of an hour-long interview, and is only one of several interviews conducted for Internet Marketing TNT. If you'd like to see the full call, as well as other interviews in this series, simply visit Internet Marketing - Very Important Profit Systems.

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