What's working and what's not in SEO?

>> What's working and what's not working? And especially as the landscape is changing as more and more people are not just going to search but also finding things from their friends, the importance of social media, the importance of partners. So what do you think is working or not? Dean assumed spelling I'm gonna ask you to go first in a little bit cause you are running a site. You said actually that you have a different point of view than just search out there.

>> Sure.

>> Tell us a little bit more about your strategy.

>> Yeah Charlene had asked me once we were preparing how much traffic we get from search engines and how important it is and the thing I mentioned to her is you don't get to 10 million uniques a month just by optimizing for search. It's a very important part of the strategy but I do think that the partner network is very important. I think having a widget strategy, a distributive strategy is also very important as well as your social media. So in terms of those different categories I think 1 of the more interesting areas that Simply Hired has done some great work is in the partner network and I think you know there's a great quote from Mark Twain who talks about the holy passion of friendship is of so steady, so sweet, so loving and enduring a nature, that it will last a lifetime if not asked to lend money. laughter And I think what we have certainly found is that if you can figure out a way to help people make money that they will be your friends for life and I think that figuring out how to make money has to start from day 1. I know this particular panel is about traffic but I would encourage all entrepreneurs not to put their product into Beta without putting their business model into Beta at the same time, cause I think there are a handful of companies like YouTube, Google, Twitter, Facebook that get to hold on to that religion of it's about the user, user experience, user experience, user experience. 99.9% of us, we have to build a business that generates revenue and profits.

>> I know you've been very successful at getting to search; you actually kind of fell into search a little bit. I was reading about your bio. Can you just talk a little bit about what you have found to be successful in driving traffic? Again search is a big part of it.

>> Yeah search is a big part and people are always going to use sites like Bing, you know Microsoft, Google, although I use Google not Bing, but Google, Bing and other search engines but I think what's effective though a lot of companies are starting to leverage but haven't been so much in the past is the blogosphere. If you can get a few big bloggers to start talking about your company and your brand what's gonna end up happening is it's going to create a ripple effect in which other smaller bloggers are going to start talking about your company and brand and sooner or later a lot of those visitors aren't just you know gonna to come to your website that are reading these other blogs but they're also going to convert into paid users; especially if those other bloggers are saying good things about you right? So for example if you get Mike Larrington assumed spelling from Tech Run to say great things about your product or servers there's a good chance that you know out of his I don't know 2-3 million readers or whatever he has, a small % are going to go to your website and sign up.

>> That's a big if though and you're hoping they say good things too. So...

>> Well if you create a good product or service I don't think it's a big if to getting people to actually convert into paid sign-ups. So what I've seen every time I've been on Tech Run I've seen other people as equipped, as a quick disclaimer I do Tech Run's internet marketing, it's quite a bit effective.

>> Ok inaudible.

>> Well because SEO has changed a lot and I mostly do organic SEO rather than paper click, search is crucial because the people who are out there who are your potential clients or customers are looking for you not under the name of your company but under the key words. So organic SEO is still as crucial. I keep seeing articles saying SEO is dead. No, it's changed. It's more from what it was 5 years ago. But it's certainly not dead and what we what you need to do as a proctor of service is get the word out and part of that is your organic SEO. Part of it is getting in the search engines and being found not just in Google but in Yahoo, in Bing, in the smaller engines as well even though not much of the traffic goes to the smaller engines what does happen are the smaller engines are inbound links to the big engines and that's a really important thing and as your starting to be found there you then switch over to a social media type of program or social media marketing where you let the different social media sites know about who you are and what your service is or what your product is and I think blogs are also crucial. I've been blogging since 2002, and blogs are also extremely important. So getting, making comments on other people's blogs that are relevant to your product or service. Not splog, not spamming the blog, but making actual comments and then saying well check out my site because it's relevant to you, you'll get a lot of people following not only in the comments but following the blogger as they write about you as well.

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