Guy Mackenzie = G.M.
Dave Jennings = D.J.

G.M.: Hello everybody, this is Guy Mackenzie from PreciseInternetMarketing.com. Tonight I am extremely excited because I am talking with Dave Jenyns. Dave is a highly successful entrepreneur, he is an author, he is a business coach and he is also a very successful internet marketer. Dave is the creator of an absolutely excellent SEO program, called the SEOMethod.com, it has been very, very successful, it’s a program that I have used to rank websites and clients’ websites and I am very lucky and very excited to have him on, live, now. Hi Dave.

D.J. Hi Guy, thank you very much, it’s a very nice introduction, glad to be here.

G.M No problem at all. So what I was thinking, perhaps I mentioned that you are an entrepreneur and that your core business is trading and stock trading. If you could just give the audience a little bit of background on that, and perhaps explain how you got into the internet marketing and also how you learned to master SEO as well.

D.J. Yes, for sure. Well, when I finished school I actually took out a loan and instead of going to University I went and did one of those week-end share trading courses where you, you know, crash-course, learn how to trade the stock market in the week-end and on Monday hopefully you’ll make a million dollars.

G.M. That would be very nice.

D.J. Yeah, that was the plan, that was at least the way they sold it and I signed up for that and went through the course and did a little bit of trading, it was sort of late in the Internet Boom as far as like the early 2000 just like everything was still running up before the big tech crash and made a little bit of money in there but I started to realize that to make money, especially in the stock market, you do need a trading float, you need a little bit of capital and here I was already 5.000 in the hole, so a friend and I that I met at this particular course, we identified a need for an education product to do with some software that was stock market software because people were using this software but didn’t fully understand how to get the most out of it so, we put together a home study course on that; it was really successful from the early days, except when I got it online I realized, you know, it’s all well and good to put your website up there but a website isn’t worth the domain name it’s hosted on unless you’re getting traffic to it.

G.M. Absolutely!

D.J. So I got interested in a little bit of classic direct mail stuff, you know, J. Abbrahams, Dan Kennedy, that sort of thing, and learned a little bit about, a sort of classic sales letter writing, long form sales letter writing, and then that kind of branched over, otherwise being interested in technology and gadgets and things like that, and I saw, the Internet was obviously springing up, got interested in internet marketing you know, how do you market on the web, and then that sort of evolved. I started again with the long form sales letters online and then I started to go ‘well how can I get more traffic to the websites?’ and then that’s what led into I supposed a pretty in depth study as far as The SEO Method, the SEO is concerned. In the early days there wasn’t a lot of material out there that you could find out, you know, about on-page and off-page optimization, it was a little bit more trial and error. So I started putting out.

G.M. It’s crazy to think, ah, when you think of just how much information there is now. In such a short period of time, how much it’s grown.

D.J. What almost feels like overnight, it’s just now, in one way it can be bad because there is so much information that you don’t know where to start, there’s lot of different things, and there’s still a lot of different myths out there about what is good SEO and how do you get a website ranked, and that sort of thing, but at least now, if you find one or two people to follow and watch what it is that they do and do your own testing, it’s a lot easier than when I first started out, that’s for sure.

G.M. Absolutely. So you set up your trade system, and as a by-product, you became interested in internet marketing, you know sort of the traditional long sales letter, of which I’m sure we’ve all seen many, and naturally you became interested in learning how to drive targeted traffic to those sales letters and as a result you started to explore SEO in more depth.

D.J. Yeah, and I think one of the first programs I remember really getting interested in, this guy called Ken Avoy, who’s behind a program called SiteSell, and his first book, ‘Make your Site Sell’, that was one of the first ones that I read and it was all about the art of the pre-sale, putting really good content out there and SEO happened naturally, cause when you do out good content out there, SEO does kind of happen naturally, people link to it and that sort of thing. What we’re trying to do now is use our SEO techniques to jumpstart that and get you up to a point where, you know, you reach that critical mass, and then hopefully the natural SEO starts to take over; but then

G.M. I think it’s a really interesting point, I mean, you know, Google, the search engines will always tell you ‘listen, if you want to rank higher, produce quality content’, and Google will reward you by ranking and you know that’s all well and good but when you’re just starting out, the fact is that even if you’re producing extremely high quality content, it will take time for people to take notice of you and get those links, and you have to give yourself an initial boost.

D.J.: Yeah, and I think it’s one of those things where, you know, you just learn a little bit through trial and error. I then jumped on to a course called SiteSell, which was sort of the evolution of Ken Evoy’s work, after his ‘Make your Site Sale’, and that talked a lot about the fundamentals of, you know, building one of those solid websites, and then getting in there, learning about the keyword research, identifying what’s your buyer versus just a browser and what are different ways that you can optimize for those particular keywords. So it’s really been a long process and I suppose I’m a information junky and I constantly consuming any course that seems to come out. I’ll buy it, I’ll put it into 2 speed, load it onto my Ipod, listen to it in a few days and then move on to the next on, so

G.M. In those early, early days it was a lot easier to manipulate a search engine through various different methods. When did it become apparent that you were going to need quality links to really get those votes to vouch for the quality of your website, if that makes sense?

D.J.: Yeah, for sure, well like you said, in the early days we where doing things like keywords for lack of a better word. You just take a keyword, you drop it in as many times as you can onto the page, in your title tag you use white text on a white background so you could get more words on the page and Google slowly got smarter to some of these different techniques and I suppose it’s a little bit of an evolution. There was a point I’d say about two years ago now, when I had my second adwords account banned for, you know, they said it was a violation of their terms of service and when I asked them what it was that I was doing wrong they said ‘Look, we can’t tell you, you just need to read the terms of service’ and at that point I thought ‘Look I’ve had enough of trying to do these things that are sort of a little bit more on the , how about we just start to build good, solid businesses, that sell good, solid products, that we’re proud to promote and that’s when all the really good link building came about, because it’s trying to do, and replicate, what’s happening in nature, very ‘white hat’ SEO, and I suppose before that you could do a little bit more aggressive stuff, but they just keep on getting smarter and smarter and smarter, obviously Google has highly paid engineers who just sit there all day trying to figure out how people are ganing the search engines and then coming up with ways to sort of circumvent that, and I think it’s so much easier, you know there; nothing worse, I’ll use my AddSense example, than building up a significant business through that AddSense model and then just having it disappear over night and they’re the judge, jury and executioner so you don’t really get a chance to argue or say anything, that’s their prerogative, what it is that they want to do. So for me, I’d say over the past of 18 months-2 years is sort of when I made the switch, but they’ve been gradually doing it, like I said, small things like the density. People used to throw around densities and things like that. Density really doesn’t even come into my form of thinking when I’m designing a page anymore; I just sort of put it in naturally, make sure, and when you write naturally as well you put in those semantic terms that people keep on talking about. But it happens naturally by putting out the good content, so each stage of the way different things have sort of started dropping off. Like, the most recent one I can think off is using No Follow. You used to be able to do page rank sculpting by using the No Follow, but Google made that announcement saying that ‘we’re no longer using page rank like we were before’. That page rank is still there but it is divided equally amongst whatever links are linking off-page, whether or not it’s got the Follow or No Follow. If it’s got a No Follow it just means that no benefit is sent to that page, but it’s still divided up that way. So you can’t sculpt page rank like you used to. There’s plenty of things like that that have sort of happened other the years and each one just sort of seems to drop off and it always come back to, as long as you’re following the fundamentals, you know, making sure that the basics of your on-page optimization are done correctly and then you build good quality links, that’s the best way to go.

G.M. Yeah, absolutely, I mean there’s no doubt that the search engines have evolved massively, and as you’ve pointed out the engineers are getting so much wiser to manipulation of them, I mean there are huge businesses and their job is to return what appears to be the most relevant result for any search query and people, they obviously want to strongly minimize the websites that manipulate that, manipulate the search results; you’re having to put together a much more probably a lot harder work, as opposed to just actually gaining them.

D.J: Yeah, yeah.

G.M.: Ok, so as a result of this, you recently launched, or created, your product, the SEOMethod and I can tell you I bought the product when you launched it and I actually found I was implemented quite a few of your, of the system’s by defaults, if that makes sense without really realizing I was doing it. But by putting the whole thing together I’ve had really tremendous results for myself and for my clients’ websites. You know yourself, in the forms, there are a lot of people blowing hot air, there’s a lot of misinformation being thrown around, and there are a lot of poor products frankly being sold. But in my experience, the SEOMethod is really good grounding, it really works. If you could just talk a little bit about how you came about to put it together and maybe a little bit more.

D.J.: Yeah, well I first started off space-promoting my own websites and that initial product spawned out into, you know, a whole we’ve got 4 or 5 of like trading base products that we use internet marketing to promote online and I really got interested in that so I started doing a lot of testing on my own so as to get them ranked and I had 1 or 2 colleagues, like obviously being in the trading niche there were a few people that I was chatting with and I went after a particular keyword, I can even think of one, trading psychology, and I had a good friend who had taken for the better part of 3 years to try and get ranked for that particular keyword. I came in and managed to do it with him in a couple of weeks and knocked him off and obviously that had a few people then saying ‘well hang on, what is it that you’re doing?’. He was actually the guy who suggested that we go ahead and launch it as a product. I think we started to document it, and I’m one of those avid testers that I don’t like the idea of just taking something that I’ve read in another course and regurgitating it out. Like we took everything that I’ve learned over the years, we’ve tested it on, ended up being we bought over 500 different domain names on hundreds and hundreds of different niche topics. We used public domain work, we actually got it from who’s public domain GoldMine, took that, cut it up into pieces, built these websites with your basic on-page optimization, then did the SEO method on them to see if we could rank. We started ranking for thousands of different keywords through this process. So we’ve very much tested it and refined it down to a process, because I think obviously depending on what it is that you are looking to rank for, every niche is going to be different, some are going to be more competitive than others.

G.M. Absolutely!

D.J. We tried to, you know, say on average following these steps is going to get you ranked, now depending on what it is that you are going after, the more competitive the term, the more links you might need to find and you just repeat some of those processes. The fact is you can rank for any keyword as long as you can find out and reverse engineer what it is that position number one is doing. You can found out, well how many links do they got, what’s the quality of those links, what is the anchor text they’re using in those links, and you can try and reverse engineer that. And then you need to determine whether or not the return on the investment is going to be there for you, should you get that particular keyword. Like, you can go after credit cards, or something like that. It is going to be a tremendous amount of work especially when you consider the people who have already owned that position and the links that they’re building and you obviously need to beat them. It reminds me of the story I heard SEO guide, who passed away a while ago. But he always talked about, there’s this story about two guys in the wood that are playing with this bear, and they start , you know, sort of teasing it, just a little baby cub, and then they hear some rustle in the bushes and they think ‘Oh the mother bear is coming!’ so they both turn around and they start running in the opposite direction obviously trying to get away from the bear. And then one guy just stops, and takes his backpack off, starts putting on his tennis shoes, and the other guy said ‘What are you doing man?’ We got to get out of hear, the mother bear is coming!’ And the guy said ‘Oh, no, no! Don’t worry about that, all I have to do is outrun you!’ And it’s that whole idea that all you have to do is stay one step ahead. So it’s the same thing with search engines, all you have to do is stay just that one step ahead of whoever is in that position one and do just that little bit more and stay in front of them. So the question is you just need to determine whether or not it is worth the effort to go after that particular keyword.

G.M.: Yeah, I agree with that, I mean the fact is all keywords are fair game but you have to make kind of a value judgment, do you really want to take on companies that own the keywords ‘loans’ or mortgages’. I mean some of these are blue-chip, publicly traded companies that have millions of pounds or dollars at their disposal to employ some of the world’s best SEO minds, SEO teams, You have to make the decision, are you really prepared to take these companies on, because some of them do just own those keywords. So I think there has to definitely be a kind of judgment call; it’s not to say that all keywords are impossible, I mean if you are absolutely determined that you want to rank number 1 for ‘loans’ or ‘mortgages’ or huge traffic, huge volume keywords, and you really, just how much time and probably money you are prepared to put in to it cause it’s going to be a hell of struggle.

D.J. Yeah, so it’s just a matter of identifying that and we look for that low hanging fruit and we go for your second Tier to third Tier type keyword. Sometimes we go for the long T really model specific type keywords, like very long tail, and then other times we’ll go for ones that are slightly more aggressive. The way that we do it when you sort of think of a Tier structure of a website on your homepage that T1 is usually that slightly more competitive term and our T2 is slightly less competitive, and then T3, really long tail words. And it all kind of feeds back up to that homepage, especially if you get all your on-page linking structure right.

G.M. Yeah, sure. Just to take a step back, assuming there are some people that have only a very basic understanding of SEO, could you give your opinion on why links are just so absolutely crucial for SEO? I do have a lot of companies, and some of the companies I’m dealing with, they’ve actually shown me the proposals that my competitors have given them. And these proposals would be a paper about why they need to optimize their text and get a keyword density of 2.57 and they need to re-write the description tags and blablabla, and then, you know, if you do a search on Google and you type in ‘click here’, you notice that Adobe is ranking number one for the term ‘click here’, and apparently ‘click here’ is not in the title tag, it’s not in the keyword tag, it’s not in the description tag, it’s not actually once on the page, it’s not on the site blablablabla, and then you realize that in fact it’s ranking for that purely because it’s got millions of links pointing to it, with the phrase ‘click here’. So perhaps you could explain to people why these links are essentially the lifeblood of SEO.

D.J. Yeah, well I think you hit the owl on the head as far as links is where it’s at now, as far as like SEO is concerned you can rank a website even a flash website that doesn’t have any information that can be read on the site by the search engines, purely based on the number of links and the Adobe example is a perfect example of that. I suppose, you hear people throw around, I don’t know of anyone doing any tests to verify this, but I mean they say that, as far as the classic 80-20, that 80% of your ranking factor comes from links, whereas 20% of your ranking factor comes form your on-page optimization. Whether or not that is true or not, but I suppose the idea being that the most important component of any SEO campaign is the links, and I think it just comes back to the way that the Google search algorithm was designed, like it’s based on that academic research report theory and that idea that a research report gains weight in the eyes of the community the more people that are referencing it in their research reports; and it’s based on that academic research report theory and that idea that a research report gains weight in the eyes of the community the more people that are referencing it in their research reports; and it’s like one big popularity contest online.

G.M. Citation, yeah?

D.J.: Yes citation, and the more times that you’re cited your research report gains weight in the community and the same sort of thing is happening online obviously. A citation is when somebody links to you from their website and that’s when your website starts to gain a little bit of extra weight. So it’s all about having the right links. And it’s also important that those links are saying the right thing when they do link to you, because you want to make sure you’re telling the search engines what it is that this particular website is about.

G.M.: Yeah, I mean, when you’re attracting actual links, there is no guarantee that you are going to get the exact match anchor text that you want, but certainly when you are engineering your own popularity, which is essentially what you’re doing when you’re building links actually, you really want to make sure you are getting the anchor text in the back that you want cause it has a very, very positive effect on rankings.

D.J. And I think that’s one of the reasons why it’s important to make sure you get whatever your keyword is, your primary keyword that you ultimately want to rank for; when I was talking about the different Tiers and going for your most aggressive keyword on your homepage, that’s why you obviously want to get that keyword into your URL, because then when you do your directory submissions or people start posting links back to your website, a lot of times people will link with the URL, and by linking with the URL it’s going to have the keyword in it and therefore it’s kind of telling the search engines that this particular website is about that. I’ve heard people talk about in the past, and I think it was more so true than what I’m starting to see recently but they were saying that the reason that a domain name ranks for the keyword that is in the actual domain name has to do with that reason I just told you, which is a lot of people are linking back to that domain name with the keyword, but I also think

G.M. You’re getting a natural anchor text then anyway.

D.J. Yeah, but I also think that in my testing we’re saying we’re registering domain names with our keywords in there, doing very little off-page optimization and just making sure that the on-page is right, and then having the keyword in the domain name and we’re popping up for those keywords really quickly so I think Google must be looking at that as something that ‘clearly that shows that you’re on topic if the domain name has the keyword you’re trying to rank for in it.

G.M. Yeah, it is, it is interesting, I mean if the keyword has very low competition, if you have a keyword domain name, an you do the most basic SEO, if it’s got little competition, you can rank highly, just purely on the basics of the domain name; so it is certainly a suggestion. Of course no one, people will never reveal the exact equation for the algorithm, but I think there is strong evidence to suggest that you must put some inherent weight on the actual domain name, having the keywords in it.

D.J. Yeah. I think the other huge factor is, regarding SEO, I see a lot of people, a lot of client, they pick out one or two keywords that they want to get started with and they really get fixated on those two keywords; what I try and do is you pick a basket of keywords that you want to rank for, you throw as much up against the wall as you can, see what’s sticking and where you’re already getting traction from that initial amount of keywords that you throw up against the wall and then focusing on those, focusing on where you’re already strong; if you notice you’re getting some traffic for a particular keyword and you’re on position number 4 and you’ve done a little bit of article marketing, or a little bit of off-page optimization, whatever method that you go for, and you’re already getting a little bit of traffic from that point, now you want to go back, keep an eye on your Google analytic stats, go back, identify those pages, and then target in on those pages where you were already strong first; and I think a lot of people, they get fixated on the one or two or even just a few keywords, they go ‘ah, SEO doesn’t work!’ because they’re just focusing in on those three. If you

G.M. Well, it’s a really, really good point, I’ve managed quite a few websites for clients and I’m looking at their analytics and reporting back to them, and from my personal experience ou really want to try and rank for tens, hundreds if not thousands of keywords because even if you spend all your time chasing two, or three keywords and you do manage to rank for them, usually by themselves it’s not enough, you need to be building a kind of comprehensive scope of keywords; just in my experience I don’t think having just one or two is enough to get a sufficient amount of traffic.

D.J. And I think that’s why, we obviously work with a lot of different sites, you know; I’ve done a lot with AddSense, I’ve done a lot with just e-commerce sites, I’ve done a lot with sales sites, and I think looking over everything e-commerce sites are really the ones that stand out for me and I think John Reese talked about it once, when he mentioned the idea that the more pages that you got out there in the search engines it’s like more tickets in the lottery so

G.M. Absolutely! Every new page that you optimize you’re giving yourself another chance on getting picked up on more keywords.

D.J. And that’s why e-commerce sites work so well, because you can have a e-commerce site that is loaded with 1000 different pages and all of these different keywords that are optimized for specific product names, and these are the long tail things that people are searching if they’re about to buy so going for that can be a hell of a lot easier than trying to tag two or three pages to try and get someone to a long form tail, that really is about volume; and there’s also the other benefit as well: if you’ve got that amount of pages you can control your internal linking structure. A lot of people don’t put a lot of weight on the internal linking structure.

G.M. I mean I really think it is highly underutilized SEO technique. I think some people are doing it, but it is so, so powerful, because if it’s on your site, you control where you put the link, what anchor text it has and what type of link it is.

D.J. Yeah, and I think I’ve heard this before, it’s the idea that Google doesn’t necessarily rank websites, it ranks individual pages; so you want to think in terms of the amount of links you’re going to get. I don’t think you’re going to get as much of a benefit from getting an off-site link back to your website, but it definitely adds, and you get a lot more control over it, and it also makes it more; it’s all about passing that right link reputation, like I mean when you’re linking you can make sure that you’re telling Google what it is that this particular page is about. Now with other link building methods, if you’re trying to build lets say deep links, where the keyword might not necessarily be in the root part of the domain name, you might have it in sort of an extension, but your keyword isn’t as clear because it’s been diluted and the density of that keyword has been diluted because there are other keywords, or words, characters that are linking in that particular anchor text. So when you’re doing a lot of your own link optimization on-page you can really control that and say exactly what that page is about and not dilute what it is that you’re trying to rank for.

G.M. Yeah, I mean it’s a really, really good point you’ve just made and the way I see it is that your internal linking, if you’re trying to rank for say ‘dog training’ and you built a number of pages, subsidiary pages around your homepage, and your trying to rank for ‘dog training’, if you’re using these sub pages around it and linking to it, you’re basically telling Google, or the search engine, that this page is about dog training; I think the search engines will take that into account but there is always some degree of mistrust in websites, because all website owners might have some sort of commercial intention. So they can’t just go on your word alone. So if you tell them internally that your page is about ‘dog training’ and then back that up by other sites, links to other sites saying in fact yes it is about dig training, sooner or later you are going to rank for that keyword., if that makes sense.

D.J. Yeah that’s exactly what we’re trying to do.

G.M. Yeah, so you’re telling, with your internal linking, listen Mr. Google this page is about dog training and there are all these sites on the net that are telling you it’s about dog training, so logically you are going to have to assume it is about dog training and it will award you with a high ranking.

D.J. And the way that we do that, like using the e-commerce example, when someone visits the page, almost like Amazon, clients who looked at this product where also interested in these products and then you’ll have the three other products and then beneath that I’ll have the text link, because you don’t really want to have these site-wide links, when you’ve got in your left hand navigation, unless, like I’ll pick out a few pages that we use for these site-wide links, but typically for those few pages I’m funnelling the link juice into almost like a category page rather than individual product pages, and on the product pages I’m linking to other relevant pages using that anchor text. So lets say you’re looking at a particular Sony camera or something like that. Clients that looked at this Sony camera also checked out these other Sony cameras, so the link is coming from a page talking about Sony, linking to another page with Sony with the right anchor text and I think that’s the way to do it rather than, a lot of people will burry right down in the footer o the page all of their links to their different pages on their websites with the right anchor text. I think you should do that but really target the keywords that you want to rank for, because people talk about site-wide links and the fact that they can have a negative effect.

G.M. I mean, I think the best example of what you just talked to us is wikipedia. If you click on wikipedia you notice that nearly every single page on that site has multiple links to other related pages, it’s probably one of the most powerful websites. What I wanted to ask you, a really common question that comes up in the forums, I mean I have my own theories and opinions; what’s your opinion: people are very, very paranoid, about building back links; I can’t tell you the stuff I’ve read in the forums about if you build more than 13 back links within an X period of time you will be sandboxed, or if you do this, you know you’re going to be search engines. My personal opinion, and obviously I don’t work for Google and I can’t prove this, is that I don’t believe that you’re ever going to be punished for building back links purely because you have no control over it. If the search engines were going to punish sites for building back links then I could just head over to RentACoder, hire a team of people to just find nasty links in another website and rub my hands as my website climbs higher and higher as they’ll all be deindexed. I just don’t think that’s the way they work. What’s your opinion on that?

D.J. I agree, it’s one of those things where otherwise you can clearly identify your competition and target them for a particular keyword and aggressively link to them. Now, I think there are a whole lot of factors that go into making a websites and how quickly you can build links and that sort of thing. Obviously the domain name age is a big one, the lot older the domain name, obviously Google is trying to stop people from gaining the search engine, so if you’ve got a domain name that, and they’re trying to see what happens in nature, so if you’ve got a domain name, you’ve registered it last week and today you’ve got 30.000 links, that’s probably not so natural, unless the links are coming from particular reputable sources, like I mean within all of those links, if you’ve got a lot of high quality links, that would be very hard to, like cnn type websites and things like that, that can kind of counteract; I feel like they must have whole series of filters and looking for different ratios between certain links. That’s why, when I talk about building links I always talk about making sure we do it in a diverse manner and even though directories submissions aren’t nearly as effective as they used to be, you could get a website ranked based purely on directories submissions; but I’m not using directory submissions now so much for I want to get my website ranked for this particular keyword; if that all happens as a by-product for some of those long T tail keywords it’s fantastic, but the reason I do directory submissions these days is more so to build that link diversity so you’ve got a whole lot of links coming to your website, from a variety of sources, different websites, hosted on different class IPs, all linking back to your website with varying sort of-actually, the reason I use the directories is not so much for the varying, because when you submit to directories typically they don’t send deep links, they’re only sending it through to your homepage, so I’m using that to build up a good base of links back to my website with the URL in it, and I think it comes down to sort of those ratios, making sure. Like, you can be very aggressive on your link building as long as you’re getting your ratios right, you know you’re not just sending all deep links with a particular targeted keyword that you try to rank for; so you want to look for a good number of links, from various sources, saying a variety of things, linking to a variety of parts of your website, with the majority going through to your homepage with the URL. Especially if you’ve got an older domain name, you can be even more aggressive, because you obviously aren’t trying to game the search engines if if you’ve been around there for 3 years or something like that.

G.M. So it’s probably just caution if you’ve just bought your domain name, you want to get a nice link velocity, and you’ve got to get that-it’s all about getting that variety of different sources. It’s obviously something that you go into heavily in the SEOMethod Obviously you’re never going to get a definitive answer from the search engines. But I think once you’re up and running and you’re attracting natural links anyway you can get away with being pretty aggressive in your link building. I can’t see any way of how they-I don’t know, it’s a tough one; it’s a very tough one.

D.J. I think the best thing that you can do is just, they way that you do build your links is stagger them out, like I have some websites and have had experiences when I’ve been very aggressive on my link building and have seen it just sort of drop out; but I find if you continue building those links, the website usually ends up bouncing out of it. It may go into a ‘sandbox’, but you keep building that because if you are consistently building links, that’s another thing with SEO, a lot of people will just do a little hit of SEO and then leave it. I think really, until you get to that point, to that critical mass when people are linking to you and SEO is happening naturally, you want to continue to build that naturally and slowly. That’s why when I try and do some of my link building methods I do also like some services where they’re dripping those links out over a set period of time; so that sort of is building, building, building, building.

G.M. Absolutely, I mean you’ve got to be a bit smart; you’ve got to think what happens naturally. You mentioned getting your domain name as a link. This is how people link to sites. They link with the actual domain name. It’s a natural thing going on around the web and the amount of data that the search engines must have collected and they can obviously deduce certain patterns; it’s just about, I think, being sensible. Don’t register a domain name and build every single link, say you’re targeting ‘dog training’, with the keyword ‘dog training’ to your homepage, no other page and from only a couple of sources. That’s just asking for trouble. I just think if you’re sensible about it, you mix up the links, I’ll tell you one thing that’s useful is to build links to sites that are linking to you. If you’ve submitted a few articles, you include a link back to your main site, you know get some links to those articles, get some links to the videos.

D.J. The important thing to do with those is that you can be a hell of a lot more aggressive building links to those; I mean if you’re building links through to articles, youtube or things like that they obviously have a lot of links pointing back to their site and they’ve got that diversity, which means, like I said it’s all about making sure that that balance is there. You can be a lot more aggressive and a lot more targeted firing links; like you can really go after ‘dog training’ in a few variations of and only fire links of that nature to a page like I’ve said ezine, youtube, because they’ve already got that link diversity and what you’ll find is you’ll then get that pop and the page rank is going to funnel threw. I’ve seen a lot of clients do it incorrectly, when they’re not having that action to make sure, because when you do that obviously you’ve got a bit of potential to have that particular page ranked and you want to make sure that each bit of content you put out there links back, and not just links but the person into wanting to visit back to your website. I think that’s another thing where a lot of people do go wrong, is they do SEO for SEO’s sake, without having a reason or focus as to why it is you’re doing it, we’re not just putting up these pages for the sake of putting up pages. We’re putting it to get both the search engine benefit and the user benefit. When the user visits that page you want them coming back to the site and that’s why we talk about putting out good content.

G.M. Yeah, absolutely, I mean this is so important, again if you go in the forums, everyone obsesses about traffic, traffic, traffic; I personally made it a mission of mine to learn as much as I can about landing page optimization and conversion rate optimization. You can become an SEO master and learn to dominate thousands of different keywords, but the people coming to your site are not taking an action, whether it means standing up to a newsletter or taking their credit cards and purchasing your product. So essentially all your efforts are in vain.

D.J. I think the conversion, and I mean if you’re driving just, let’s say for easy numbers 100 people to a website and you’re converting 1% of those so you get 1 person, your conversion rate can get that up to 2%- so what have you done? You’ve effectively doubled, eve tough you’ve done a very small incremental increase, you’ve doubled the amount of value that you’re getting from that one SEO campaign. So I think there’s a lot to be said for a little bit of testing and then playing around with the page conversion as well; you can supercharge, take the traffic that you’re already getting and get more out of it. So that’s a lot of area that a lot of people miss.

G.M. Yeah, absolutely. One thing I’d like to touch upon, is you go in the SEOMethod, it’s kind of what I’d call advance SEO, something that I know a lot of serious players in internet marketing are doing, and that is leveraging their own network of sites. And I would just like to get your opinion on that, how do you think it’s best to do it? Again there’s a lot of debate whether you need separate IPs, whether you need to mask certain information, again search engines find that you are linking between sites that you actually own, you’re going to get penalized, I just know that a lot of people are doing it and haven’t a lot of success with it. I’d just like to get your thoughts on that.

D.J. I think a lot of people can really get caught up in putting their focus when they head down this track. You just need to see it for what it is, and then apply some few basic things that I’ll talk about and you’re going to be much better off than if you do try and o off. Like, I’ve done it, especially when we were doing the tests with the 500 domain names, we were looking at putting each of these little clusters aside on different unique class C IP addresses, we were registering the domain names in different people’s names so that way they weren’t all linked together, you need to make sure that you’re avoiding tings like putting the same AddSense account across all of them, in fact it’s better not to have any AddSense on there. Same with Google and Linux, there are so many ways that Google can tie those networks together that you can constantly feel like you have to look over your shoulder and you should really be focused on building those pages getting your good content out there, rather than spending your time focusing on ‘Oh, have I stuffed up here, or have a I cross linked something?’ and then effectively that whole network is going to get taken down and I think it comes back to that idea I was talking about right at the start- it’s all about building the good quality business that’s going to last not necessarily going for very black hat type techniques; now there is a line as to what’s reasonable and what’s unreasonable. I don’t think Google would say that having a few different websites is-people do that, people have multiple websites, and the way that it’s sort of linking together you know, you see people talk about all the different wag and wheel, all the different linking structures, there are so many different ways that you can do it I think you’re better off by selecting, once you start to build your own network, you build maybe, depending on the competitive niche, but you might register 3 or 5 different blogs on different domain names, start building that content up on those, don’t stress too much about having them on a different class C IP addresses; if you do have a couple of hosting accounts it can’t hurt to spread them out and then just start to build good quality links into those websites and then be strategic in the way that you send the links over, don’t use one of these plugins where you drop in a keyword and every time that word is used on the page you’re just going to link back to that specific page. You might send a few links here, a few links there, it’s also important, that’s why we talk about using Web2.0 properties and other websites to build your own network. So now when I think about building my own network, it’s not just about on my own domain name, I’ll also go and set up a blog for it in WordPress and also go and set up a blog for it at Blogger and use some of these other websites where we can leverage off of the age of their domain names, and the links that they’re already getting and build a site there that then we can use that to shoot back targeted links. I think the benefit of building your own network is the fact that you can so tightly target and be really specific about what links you’re sending to where, but to get caught up in a lot of that other stuff can just get you off track when really you just need to be focusing on ‘hang on, lets build a business’. To summarize I suppose the main thing is just being able to focus on 3 or 5 different, additional sites and do good off-page linking to those and then make sure you don’t excessively cross link between each of your different websites in that network.

G.M.: I mean I think that’s really, really sound advice because if you actually concentrate on building an asset essentially, if you decide to get out the niche, you’ve got 4, 5 sites, you can always sell the whole package together, if it’s actually a viable business, rather than just, if you’re actually building pages with actually quality content on them and you make an effort rather than just building for their own sake I think you’re going to have a lot better standing with the search engine, but I do think there’s a great value to having your own kind of network to leverage. Ok, we’ve covered a lot of interesting points without going in too much detail about all the methods in the SEOMethod. Say you’ve picked a website and some relatively low hanging keywords and perhaps you picked tougher keywords to go for the homepage. What’s the typical time cycle that you go through to start applying your SEO techniques SEO is obviously not an overnight business, it’s not like your AddWord account where you just turn it on and you’re driving traffic. It can take time to start building up the ratings and building up some page rank. I’m just interested to know how you kind of structure ?

D.J.: We’ve started playing around with what we’re doing with the SEOMethod and we’ll probably going to be releasing a little bit of an update because the initial method that we launched, even if it works incredibly effective when we launched it, that particular video is about 8 months old, having a look now, the things that have changed and what’s evolved and what we’re applying now is more the process in which we apply the SEOMethod. Everything has pretty much stayed the same. But, I mean, as far as shifting directories so that’s the first stage of the process, and because they get we now put directories submissions as one of the first things that we do do, we try and get as many directory submissions as we can because we’ve found that some of these directories that we use, even tough sometimes we used to do only PR 2 and above, but now we’re happy to take whatever because we know that a lot of these directories will evolve into higher PR ranked websites and sometimes paid sites and you get in for free. And also, the reason I’m using directory submissions is not so much for those links as it is for link diversity and making sure that we’re getting a good amount of inbound links with the URL as the anchor text. So we start off with directories, we do some of the articles submissions as well, when we go through the step by step process we try and basically go for, well I’ve broken it up into two areas where we have what is most leverageble, what we can outsource easiest and apply that, throw that against the wall, see how the site sticks after a certain amount of time, then we start to go then we start to go. this is that thing I was talking about, identifying where it is you’re strong, going back and then really targeting your link building campaign. So having to think about things that have changed like, I mean the Web 2.0 and using video and stuff like that, typically we do that in our second wave of link building. The first wave is all about your articles, your directories, a little bit of social bookmarking, and that’s more so for indexing, not so much for links, we try to do it in a little bit more of an automated process rather than just sort of jumping out there and doing it manually. We try to get through the first part, like I said, your directories, your articles, also using some of the blog networks as well, and a few other little things we do. We try and o that within the first month. Then usually we just let it sit for a little bit, just a few good weeks, just let everything have a little bit of a settle and some things are still dripping out anyway. Then we go back and we start to monitor and have a look at how Google analytics identify where are we getting that biggest bank and then we’re a lot more targeted and we start to see what keywords are getting us the right type of traffic, the keywords that are converting and now we start to build up some of those and video things which are a little more difficult to outsource and need typically a high quality outsourcer, which obviously usually commands a high price, we can be a lot more specific in targeting what it is that we want to go for. So I suppose, again just to recap, you’ve got a good month for the first part of the campaign, let it sit for a little bit, do some analysis and then we start the second part, which is, I’d say another month, and then after that you just have some more slower, ongoing, link building processes, just to keep it looking natural and keep those links building.

G.M. Maintenance essentially.

D.J. Yeah, yeah