Interview with SEO Guru Benj Arriola

I had the idea to interview a friend of mine who is very knowledgeable in the ways of Search Engine Optimization and Search Engine Marketing. Benj Arriola has won numerous SEO awards, including 1^st place in the 2007 SEO World Championship, 2^nd place in the 2008 SEO contest by UK Webmaster World and has worked on SEO campaigns for top companies for various Fortune 500 corporations and is currently the SEO Director at the SEO agency, Internet Marketing Inc. The questions I came up with are geared towards those with little understanding of what SEO practices are, what they do and how they can affect your presence on the web. While researching for interview questions I tried to keep it as simple as possible, but still provide an in depth inquiry of Search Engine Optimization techniques. Ongoing; I plan on creating more articles that go further into the topic of SEO and SEM.

MoG: What is SEO?
Benj: Common people think SEO is all about ranking. For me that is partly true. My definition of SEO is the whole web marketing strategy in increasing targeted traffic from organic search that lead to an increase in conversions. A conversion can be a sale or a lead or sometimes even an inquiry.

MoG: What is page rank?
Benj: PageRank is a metric of Google where simply put is somewhat reflective of a sites importance, authority, and trust. This is in a scale of 1 to 10. This was initially formulated by Larry Page, hence the name PageRank.

MoG: Could you briefly explain the PageRank algorithm?
Benj: Initially the PageRank algorithm was heavily based on links. The more inbound links you have the better. And the more higher PageRank pages linking to you have a higher benefit to your own PageRank. Today, PageRank has so many patch up to it’s original formula and according to Google reps, PageRank today is based on more than 100 factors.

PageRank is a very overrated metric and does not really indicate any success of an SEO campaign. People that highlight PageRank as a success does not prove anything. Ranking, organic search traffic and online conversions are the real metrics of success.

MoG: What are backlinks or inbound links?
Benj: These are simply links going to your website. Links are viewed like votes. Votes of trust, votes of authority, votes of credibility. The reasoning is simple, if a person likes you, they talk about you. Same with websites, if people like websites, they link to them. If they like it, the link to websites for a reason, They are trustworthy, they are credible, they are authoritative, they are significant.

Link building is a part of every SEO professionals arsenal of SEO weapons. Although every SEO person may do this different. Some are more conservative where they try to build buzz around their SEO clients to influence people linking to the websites and make links naturally. And others can be very aggressive in creating their own links posting on various websites where links can be obtain and somewhat making this false impression of popularity trying to influence search engines increase a websites ranking. This is perceived as artificial link building and search engines have continuously learning ways to detect artificial link building and giving corresponding penalties and decreases ranking.

MoG: What is Black hat SEO?
Benj: Some people say Blackhat SEO is the illegal way of doing SEO. First thing is there is no SEO law. And if there is no law, there is nothing illegal. Some people say Blackhat SEO is the unethical way of doing SEO. Now what is defined as ethical and unethical is inconsistent from one SEO person to another. Search engines give out webmaster and SEO guidelines, and as the name guidelines is defined, they serve as guides. And when you have guides, this means you may or may not follow them. Some people define Blackhat SEO as SEO techniques that go against Google’s Webmaster Guidelines.

What is my definition of Blackhat SEO? I share the same views as Quadzilla where he once defined Blackhat SEO as taking advantage of a small simple ranking factor and find ways to blow up this small ranking factor into large proportions in some automated way until it start to be a large SEO factor.

Blackhat SEO can be a bit risky since search engines do not like people gaming the system and can slap serious penalties where the worst is getting banned in search engines.

MoG: What is White hat SEO?
Benj: Whitehat SEO involves all strategies that as much as possible avoid any reasons to get banned from search engines.

MoG: What industry sites, blogs, and forums do you regularly read?
Benj: Blogs: There are so many, so I stick to a few. Search Engine Land, Search Engine Journal, SEOMoz and SEOBook, sometimes SERoundTable also. These are pretty comprehensive and if ever there are other blogs that mention something important, more often than not, the blogs above will report about it so I get to read about it also.

Forum: Probably 98% of the time is SEO Philippines (seo.ph) and on some occasions I would be lurking on WebmasterWorld or if I want to amuse myself, I’d check whats happening on Digital Point from time to time.

MoG: What SEO Tools do you regularly use?
Benj: “Tools” is too general today. There are many tools for SEO. Keyword Research: I use Google Adwords, Google SKTool, Google Suggest, Google insights, Google Trends. Keyword Discovery, Market Samurai. For Ranking Reports, I would use SEOBook’s tool, RavenTools, WebCEO. For analytics, whatever the client has, Omniture, CoreMetrics, Google Analytics (GA), etc. If the client does not have a decent one to use, I would just suggest GA. Diagnostic tools… mosty a bunch of Firefox Plugins. I think there are tons more tools out there I forgot to mention, but this question is too general.

MoG: What is an “on page” element?
Benj: SEO factors can be classified as onpage and offpage. Some people call this on-page, on-the-page, onsite, onpage. They all mean the same thing and I am used to refer it as onpage as one word. Onpage factors are simply optimization factors that involve doing changes on the page you wish to be ranking in search engines. Offpage is simply factors that are not on the page you are optimizing but still influences the page you are optimizing. In short, offpage is all about links.

MoG: Which “on page” element do you think is most important in SEO ranking?
Benj: That’s easy, the Title tag

MoG: Can you describe a few techniques that are important when generating solid organic SEO?
Benj: Come up with good compelling content that people love. The more people love it, the more they talk about it. The more they talk about it, the more it gets passed around. The more it gets passed around, the more links it gains over time from various people.

MoG: What are spiders?
Benj: Spiders, bots, robots or crawlers are simply online programming scripts that check all links on a website and check all the pages it links out to and repeats the process. For every page visited, all ranking factors are recorded and interpreted by the search engines and indexes these pages. Ranking is based on these recorded ranking factors by the bots.

MoG: What steps can you take to change the exposure of your site, or various pages within your site to search engine spiders?
Benj: Make sure you have no deadlinks. Make sure old pages 301 redirect to their corresponding new pages. Always serve a 404 for pages that do not really exist and create XML sitemaps. Avoid using JavaScript onclick links or HTML <select> tags as navigation.

MoG: Have you ever had something you’ve written reach the front-page of Digg? Sphinn? Or be Stumbled?
Benj: Yes. Digg a few times. Sphinn, many times. StumbleUpon, hmm it does not matter to me. I’d value frontpages of Reddit more than StumbleUpon, although I never got frontpage of Reddit yet.

MoG: How much do META tags matter?
Benj: Meta descriptions are not critical ranking factors. But they help increasing clickthrough rates (CTR) in organic search results since they may appear as the search engine results page (SERP) description snippet.

MoG: What SEO steps would you take if a client was changing domains?
Benj: 1. Save all existing URLs with a crawler.
2. Save all existing indexed URLs in all major search engines.
3. Map out these old URLs to their new URL counterparts and do 301 redirects.

MoG: Is content in your opinion the most important aspect of SEO?
Benj: Yes. I know many non-SEO people and SEO beginners will agree. Then when these SEO people start to discover the power of links… and Google bombing, they start thinking content is not important, it is all about links… then in the long run… they start to realize… link building is not really easy. And the best links can be gained naturally when content is great. So yes, content is the most important. Many websites out there rank well and has never done anything by their respective site owners SEO related but still rank well.

Some of these questions were copied or inspired from allthingssem.com