#seoisaeo Podcast - Expert Interviews At Major Digital Marketing Conferences

The father of SEO - he's been in the industry for almost a quarter of a century. He started with Infoseek. Then I say Google and my phone joins in the conversation. He then goes into the details of the 19 major search engines of the early years. And the tiny numbers we were using at the time. And how simple it was to rank, and yet complicated at the same time. Then the power of human intuition. And the glory of Macromedia Flash (that's me, not Bruce). Rumour has it that only 10% of companies have even done any active SEO. Bruce suggests that there is an 80/20 half life of evolving SEO strategies. Lastly onto E-A-T - expertise is your onpage content, authority is that peers agree with you and trust is a reflection of the sentiment / praise of your users. Ends with a delightful Einstein SEO quote.

AOL were very very big and were going to dominate the world. Did the CD work? Yes it did. At one point, for 2 weeks, no other CDs were produced in the world. Simon was doing SEO for TechCrunch, but the journalists didn't want to listen. So he took them out to lunch and charmed them into submission. Problem solved! Both Simon and AOL were precursors. They had a two-pronged approach - copywriting and tech. Then onto examples of extreme preciceness, then the vagueness in queries and results... and how queries change with story evolution (and articles must change too). Play on people's vanity to get them to do what you want. Sounds very creepy, but is less so than it sounds.

We start with a chat about talking to every single person at UnGagged. Pamela suggests that we have relationships with brands... and that brand can be our friend. We need to build relationships through connections. Then I get over-excited about entities and relationships and memory. Then onto brand personality (Pamela uses the official term - brand awareness). Vanilla is not bland (have a listen and you'll know why). Then brands have personality and need to maintain that - meaning HR is really important. ALso, please DO have a branded Google Ads campaign. Finally, use the 7 points of contact to get rid of the churners (Kate Toon !), and don't waste your ad budget on them. Finally, one of the more delightful out-takes with Pamela, Dexter (the videographer) and Hal (the photographer). Ace.

Google Colaboratory is like Google Sheets on steroids. Use it to save bucketloads of time and be terribly productive. Gerry White got very excited about the 6 use-cases Hamlet gave in his talk. For example automating duplication, writing meta titles automatically, Andrea Volpini's dance with machines, mapping redirects, writing alt tags, finding content gaps

We start with the 'soy sauce secret of sumptuous speech'. When you produce a piece of content, create it for everyone. SOme people learn visually, some auditively, some through reading. So one piece of content should be video, audio and text. Make a video, create an audio file and a transcript. And probably a good idea to adapt the transcript to be readable (as opposed to speakable). SEJ make an effort to format for Google with lists and QA etc etc. We get onto baseball and cricket - watching TV but listening to the radio. Then onto repurposing content across media (but the site is always the hub). Loren shares a neat trick to segment your email audience by learning-type. Then onto cartoons - Loren is Wreck it Ralph. ANd guess what film Loren describes as 'Goodfellas and Ralph Breaks the Internet Combined'. AT the end, I have left the short (and fun) UnGagged interview.

Cindy and I discuss an awful lot of stuff in a lovely, meandering and super informative chat. Starting with Fraggles, and how powerful they are (top middle and bottom)... Plus some experiments we have done, the risks for Google and the possibilities for the future. And onto Darwinism in search, onSERP SEO, local SEO, not needing a website, branding, offline SEO, ranking without an URL, the new EU directive, social metas. Crumbs. That's a lot.

Louisa is SEO editor at the LA Times and I feel a little overwhelmed by her and the institution that is the LA Times. First thing to know is that Louisa is there to educate the journalists rather than messing with their style. She is the stabiliser wheels for people who have 40 years of career behind them, which is cool. Moving an institution like this to a digital approach is a big, big deal. Then onto the European directive that aims to protect publishers. Louisa looks at it from the publishers point of view, I try to defend Google. Louisa then suggests a compromise and we move on very naturally to find a solution for a world where everyone is happy.

I quickly state that I won't ask about ranking factors, just the way Bing ranking works (to try to get some confirmation of Darwinism in search). Frederic is the 10 blue links guy. The team in the next office do the Q and A.... and then there is a Whole Page Team, which is an interesting development for me (since my Darwinism theory takes a SMALL hit :( All the rich elements function of the same algorithm with different weightings... but with a master 'whole page algorithm' that brings it all together. And Ads work on the same principle as other rich elements, which is terribly important (to me). Always remember that algorithms are built on human intuition, even when we use machine learning. In terms of machine learning in ranking algorithms, we need to talk about features, not factors. Then onto how pancakes and omelettes (I get confused) can help us better (batter ??) understand machine learning (and thus ranking). Each team of judges (raters) are looking at the value a specific element brings (blue links,

Slightly uncomfortable moment at the start. I then try to be professional. Not sure if I carry it off. Jerry tells me how great UnGagged is. Then we move onto doing something - the small things effectively. And then the 5 things people can start to do to move your business forwards. A lot of it is simple common sense. And we miss that more often than not. Jerry gives me a good lip twitch that is now a 'thing' :) Jerry answers the question as to how much it can cost to flip a switch. Then onto swapping goat stories.

Eric loves UnGagged. Then we discuss what is things to focus on in what stage of your startup journey, including which keywords. We get onto the importance of branding, brand SERPs and bringing the offline online. And when a query can be a mix of informational, transactional, and navigational. There is a lovely break where we discuss stuff 'off-record', that I left in because we completely forgot to discuss what we decided to discuss during the break.

Along with Greg Gifford, Arsen Rabinovich, Jennifer Hoffman starts with why technical SEO pays. A bit of a discussion about bells, whistles, heavy images and mega comment threads leading to poor onsite experience in terms of load time. Then onto navigation and indexation. And tracking user behaviour, the Knowledge Graph, entity optimisation... and brands as entities. We end with the importance of spring cleaning.

Sitting in two comfy armchairs, looking at the sea in Brighton. We start with a chat about machine learning in Google's search algorithm, PageRank and then onto the Knowledge Graph. There are less entities in the world than webpages. So Google's job is easier. But the Knowledge Graph is biased - the seed set for google's understanding is a bunch of librarians (aka Wikipedia editors) who have little in depth knowledge on the topics they edit, especially in anything that is not within their culture. We happily grab examples from the surrounding environment. Piers become a central point, and piers in Ethiopia in particular. We move onto fan sites, that are not necessarily accurate, and perhaps people believe that William Shatner is a space man. Errors such as that at the start of a seed set will mean learning is biased and perhaps inaccurate... and can quickly spiral out of control. They are building on what Dixon calls 'areas of light', but that is biased too. One problem is that genuinely good new ideas are go

Susan insists that voice search is happening faster than we think. 5 years, not 10. Half life theory comes into play with technology. Don't underestimate "Call mom". Then we have the great debate about the amount of voice data. And Susan nails her argument by identifying what are the fallbacks for these machines? Interestingly, even if we think the answers / system is weak now, that doesn't mean we aren't going somewhere very interesting very fast. Susan acronyms. I keep using them. But they are ambiguous. So she convinces me again... I agree. featured snippets are super important (and super exciting).

We start talking about building community. David gives some great tips - he has 22,000 people in his genius community who share 50,000 messages a month, so he knows what he's talking about. he points out we all have a community whether we know it or not. We talk about implicit and explicit communities, then have a debate about the word 'crumbs'. But then David turns the table on me brilliantly by asking about the red t-shirt... and the second half is him getting me talk about the digital nomad lifestyle and the podcast. My initial though was to only publish the first half. But David does a great job as interviewer, so I left it all. Warts and all ! At the end Susan Westwater (the previous podcast guest) joins in because she thinks we are just having a chat (and not recording a podcast). Finally, right at the end, we end with a Mexican standoff.

We start with a delightful chat about New York, Halloween and even get a quick (made up) Broadway ditty. Then onto E-A-T and how this is affecting our approach to digital marketing. You need to get your information more accurate with help from experts. The problem comes from the fact that the returns aren't immediate, which is a problem for a lot of people since their job often depends on fast results and quick returns. Is there a quick-win cheat? And is Google a chicken with its head cut off (terribly good analogy for Halloween)?

We start with an idiotic James Bond analogy. Paul pulls me back to the serious business of 'what is technical SEO'? And the definition is wider than I thought. 4 types of tech SEO. Paul has a plan to tell me the 4 types. Like a child, I keep trying to jump ahead. Paul then looks at skillsets and venn diagrams. And that we should look at (and accept and appreciate) these crossovers. SEO is one giant Venn diagram of skillsets. Then onto the fact that in SEO we are (and need to be) multi-skilled. We end with 'it's important to get into the weeds'. Who knows what that means (ask Paul)

Marty starts with his musical career and the segues very neatly into why that initial career path helps with digital marketing. And, as we all know, there are a lot of musicians in this space. Mentions for Robert Smith, AC/DC, The Monkees... And we also learn to love our lard pack... and it becomes yet another spur of the moment silly ditty

Once again I get the pronunciation of someone's name wrong. How does James find clients: referrals, conferences, content promotion... and a little SEO :) Keep a good customer base. Never have one single client who represents more than 10% of your income. Next how to hire great staff. Conferences, job sites, Facebook groups... Enthusiasm, a personality that fits in to the team, motivation... I decide we are talking about ranking factors for getting jobs. The first year is always going to be really tough. Surviving the first 3 years is key. Then you are rolling. After 8 years, 80% of Jame's job is networking. Great clients are hard to find and bad clients and easy to find.

In the pub, just before the second day of the Takeitoffline unconference. Barry hates AMP and is an attempt by Google to force the web to conform to their vision of the web. Now they are getting involved in Wordpress, and we should be very worried (especially when we get words like PWAMP). A commercial company should not be the organisation that decides how the web works - because they will do what is best for their bottom line, not what is best for the web. Google is an advertising company with 90% dominance and should be regulated. They started wanting to make the web a better place, but are now a company looking to make money. We dig into how the European Directive may pan out for news sites. Although they are playing hardball on the EU directive, and the recent updates have impacted the publishers enormously (and cost them dearly), Google are trying to be more political with the publishers. Then onto what business models might work for news publishers - not a one-size-fits-all. I vaguely float the idea of

We discuss pest control, cartoons, and eventually get onto how to get great online reviews for an offline business. It's all about relationships. Oh, and asking nicely. Bribing people doesn't work. Top 3 platforms are Google, Yelp and Facebook