Author: Joe Whyte

Last week I sent off interview questions to Aaron Wall and Rand Fishkin. I was lucky enough to get a reply from them both!

Aaron Wall author of SEO Book and is one of the first 100 Google qualified professionals in the world. He operates a well-known SEO news blog for SEO experts, [Threadwatch] and is a frequent speaker at the Search Engine Strategies, and Pubcon conferences.

After a Danny Sullivan presentation on search marketing Aaron created search-marketing.info. Around the time of the Florida update Aaron wrote an article that got him a lot of acknowledgement in the industry. After this article tons of people asked him to do SEO work for them. As a result his clients referred him to a few friends, who also liked what he did and Aaron had enough success and clients to do SEO for a living.

We actually purchased a copy of Aaron’s book here at Lunarpages and we have learned some incredable stuff.

As a professional Search Engine Marketer, what is the FIRST thing you look for when YOU are considering a hosting company? What are the MUST have features?

Most of the time I host sites with hosts recommended by trusted friends. As far as service goes, phone support or fast email support is a must, I like to ensure the bandwidth and disk space are reasonable. I also consider being able to use things like PHP, MySQL databases, and custom .htaccess files a must.

What is more important when considering a web host? Customer Service, Reliability or Reputation?

I usually use hosts recommended by friends. So that solves the reputation part for me, but that reputation is built off of reliability and customer service. I don’t think you can say just one of them is important. If you are creating a serious business website you need them all.

Do you prefer Windows or Linux hosting and why?

Linux. Programmers (and programs) are generally more affordable and more accessible.

When you first started doing SEO do you remember what type of hosting account you started with and what type of hosting account would you recommend to new SEO/SEM’s and Internet Marketers?

I still have many sites on shared hosting accounts. For mission critical sites I would recommend using a dedicated host.

Can you give a little SEO advice to our 100,000 clients about how they can get better results?

Here are a few general pointers for my SEO and online marketing theory:

• It is best to do market analysis and consider SEO before designing your site.

• Own a niche, people who own a small market will find their market position more self reinforcing and have more price control when compared to people grabbing a smaller share of a larger market

• What about your site is remarkable or comment worthy? What could you add to your site to make other people want to talk about you?

• Guide people to the desired goals in the active content portion of the page.

• Structure your site to place emphasis on important pages and topics.

• Add content to your site that people will link at to help boost your overall link authority.

• Try pay per click. If you can’t afford it, that may mean that your business model is bad, your site does not convert, or that you may need to build a strong brand to compete in the organic results.

If you want a bit more SEO information, I wrote a free beginner guide to SEO on Work.com and I also wrote SEO Book. Some people also learn a bunch from reading SEO forums and SEO blogs

Do you think Digg will officially ban SEO related articles and domain names?

If they do they are dumb. Doing such a thing would only alert more SEOs to the value of manipulating Digg, and get more people to game them.

Do you think Wiki search will be a strong competitor for social search in 2007?

I am not sure how much social search matters outside of how it is represented in the general search databases, such as Google. Wikipedia already ranks for everything in Google, but if it is tied to a profit model that may undermine the perceived legitimacy of Wikipedia, and thus its content quality, linkworthiness, link equity, and rankings.

Do you like Web Positions Gold or WebCEO?

Not really. I think most SEO software gets you focused on things that are unimportant. For example, many SEO software programs measure keyword density when relevancy has moved beyond that more toward semantics. The only SEO tools I use regularly are SEO for Firefox, Roboform, and a few keyword research tools.

What is the best way to draw traffic for 2007?

Create things that people want to talk about. If people are talking about it then eventually the engines will think it is good.

How do you feel about foreign search engine optimization?

Some site architecture issues can be solved without knowing the local market, but you have to know the local culture and local language if you want to compete in the local market.

Thanks Aaron!

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 2nd, 2007 at 9:27 am and is filed under Interviews, Jabber, Joe Whyte, SEO. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS feed . Both comments and pings are currently closed.