2015 seo

We sat down – virtually, of course – with acclaimed author and SEO marketer Jeff Deutsch, author of the viral Inbound post Confessions of a Google Spammer (which hit over 160,000 views and 90k+ Facebook shares). He gave us some awesome, original insights on SEO basics for current marketers in 2015 (and beyond). It’s a read any online marketer should take the time to make. Tell us a little about how and why you got started in SEO. I’ve always dreamed of changing the world through mind control. As an introvert, SEO seemed like the best way to approach it. I probably got the dream from my dad. He was a pretty prolific writer. When I was 8 years old, he taught me how to hypnotize people. He used to proudly tell me stories about how, in college at Columbia in the 1950s, he would make his (pretty, female) subjects regress to memories from the womb—and beyond. I thought that was pretty cool. In college, I majored in political science. Because I thought they were going to teach me how to do mind control on a mass scale. (Spoiler alert: They didn’t.) So I tried doing it on my own. My first experiment came in 2003. At the time, the debate was raging on the need for war in Iraq. I was fervently against it. I had carefully collated all the projections on how many lives would be lost and money spent. Then I put up a website with the facts. Then I advertised the website by stapling and taping hundreds of bright lemon yellow flyers all over the conservative, war-hungry streets of New Orleans. The next day, I saw most of my flyers had been torn down during the night. My anti-war website got no traffic. That was the first time it dawned on me how important it is to have a reliable source of traffic that other people can’t easily take down. I wish I could say I started doing SEO back then, because man! It was easy back then. Unfortunately, I only started to figure it out in 2008, when I was doing marketing for a company in Beijing that had virtually no budget. By 2010, I had started my own little SEO company in Plainsboro, New Jersey, in an attempt to escape the Beijing pollution and relocate myself and my then-pregnant wife to the U.S. The relocation failed, but the SEO succeeded in a big way. How big have SEO basics changed since the day you started out in SEO compared to today? Nowadays, it takes a LOT more money, charisma, or tech skills to start an SEO agency. Today’s SEO basics are a lot different that yesterday’s. Back in 2010, anyone with limited tech skills and the right cheat-sheet could easily start a successful SEO agency on a $1200 budget. I even wrote a post about it on backlinksforum.com if you want to know the details. But the basic concept was building parasite backlinks using spun content and force indexing them. If you don’t recognize those terms, never mind. They’re not going to help with SEO for the big money keywords these days anyway. However, I talked to some guys at one SEO agency at Opticon and according to them—amazingly—these methods STILL work for very low competition keywords. They use them to rank for reputation management clients’ names. But they are the exception to the rule. Most successful agencies these days have the money, charisma, or tech skills to have a comparative advantage over you and me. They gobble up all the keywords (and clients… and money…) by combining that advantage with the scaling power of automation and social media to force the Gini coefficient of SEO ever upwards closer to 1.0. Money SEO agencies These guys just buy links on high PR guest blogs like HuffingtonPost, or buy whole sites on Flippa to turn into pumpers or feeders, or pay to build a big ole PBN. They have the resources to reverse engineer their competitors’ backlink profiles and outbid them on quality link placement. Profile: Think in-house link buyers for online casinos. Zodiac sign: Taurus. Star Wars equivalent: Think Senator Lott Dod, Minister of the Trade Federation. D&D counterpart: A NEUTRAL EVIL human rogue. Charisma SEO Agencies These people know how to network, be popular and get tight with high traffic sites. And get them to link to their creative content. Which they know people will like because they extrovertedly talk talk talk to everyone. Profile: Think inbound marketers like Dharmesh Shah, Neil Patel, Joel Klettke. Zodiac sign: Libra. Star Wars equivalent: Queen Padmé Amidala. D&D counterpart: A LAWFUL GOOD half-elf bard. Tech Skill SEO Agencies These folks know how to automate outreach and find loopholes to rank and bank. Mostly these guys are pretty agnostic about the method, and only care about the result, so it’s hard to label them “white hat” or “black hat.” If, for example, they develop a WP plugin that gets them cloaked links, and they only rank reputable sites, who are they hurting really? Or maybe they develop the scripts to find high value expired domains with aged backlinks to build PBNs or 3BNs. The main thing is that they are mavericks who zig when everyone else zags, and they almost assuredly rock the pants off PHP, Python, Ruby, or all three. Profile: Think Justin Mares from ProgrammingForMarketers.com and any SEOs on StackExchange.com. Zodiac sign: Aquarius. Star Wars equivalent: Han Solo. D&D counterpart: A CHAOTIC NEUTRAL halfling swashbuckler. By the way, as you can see from my $1200 guide above, back in 2010 people like me used to hand out actionable, effective SEO basics advice on forums for free all the time. Those days are over. Nobody does that anymore for The Three Reasons People Don’t Publicly Share Effective SEO Tactics Anymore. The Three Reasons People Don’t Publicly Share Effective SEO Tactics Anymore Google’s anti-spam team reads the forums to find and close loopholes the way agents in the … Read more