Interview with Tim Nash – SEO Consultant

Today I’m joined with the legendary SEO Consultant – Tim Nash. Tim has been active within the Search Engine Community for a number of years now and has a number of successful sites: Tim Nash, Venture Skills and Payment Blogger. He is also a moderator over at David Castle’s superb SEO Forum.

Tim is currently running an online seminar for Social Media Optimisation on the 14th of November. Places are limited so if your interested in social media optimisation then get in contact with Tim asap.

Me: Hi Tim, I noticed that you have branched out into private SEO training classes. Do you feel that a lot of companies are starting to turn towards “in-house” optimisation instead of seeking out proper agencies. What are the benefits of “in-house” SEO and the dangers in your opinion?

Tim: Hi Paul, well the training courses are something I have been doing for a while and not just for Web development companies or in-house SEOs. The advanced SEO Programming course has had a great take up by SEO companies here in the UK and as there is currently no real education or training schemes out there – these style courses fill a niche for an SEO company that wants to take what they do to another level.

That said I feel SEO is becoming more and more a part of the web development process and there has been an expansion in on-page SEOs/Accessibility developers working “in-house” as part of a core team with the linking building and social media side being hired out afterwards.

Me: I’m interested to know what your take on Jacob Nielsen’s saying that SEO has a shelf life of around 5 – 10 years?

Tim: That really depends how search engines adapt and change, people will always need to search in some way for information and there will always be people optimising sites in an effort to get their information in front of the searchers so I can’t see it dying, changing yes, maturing I hope and losing the peripheral hanger ons’ but I can’t see a day in the near future when people won’t be optimising and trying to maximise their sites visibility.

Me: I’m an avid reader of your blog posts and like the style that you use to get your point across. Some of your posts have recently targeted Google’s crackdown on paid links and Matt Cutts stating the way forward for webmasters is to sculpt their site with the use of NoFollow to get the best out of the pages they wish to seed well with the search engines. What is your view on this whole episode?

Tim: I think this debate was needed it has shown and I think shocked people into understanding what happens when you create a monopoly and then rely on it for your livelihoods. Ultimately you can scream and shout, put forward valid points, encourage debate until your blue in the face as Google or any other monopoly doesn’t have to listen.

I think the fall out will be greater then the event, Googles use of PageRank as a means of punishment was I think and about time the last death nail for that metric. As a cynic one might think the whole paid links issue was meant as a way to destabilise the industry surrounding PageRank rather then the purity of a an already spam filled index.

Me: There were a few casualties in the latest paid link conflict. Certain directories, marketing blogs and also a famous Seattle based SEO figurehead got caught in the tracer fire. Do you feel that Google’s actions has created divides in the community?

Tim: No, I think the community was already divided all they done is shown the divide. Having different views and opinions is not necessarily a bad thing as long as we also have common ground. What seems to being happening is that there is almost a sense of a witch hunt if know your competitor or an SEO consultant who is quoting for a job why not report them for paid links or “out them” on a blog.

This might sound some what unprofessional but I think the problem at the moment is as a community the SEO and in particular the bloggers have put certain people on pedestals almost idolising them, we are not talking about corporations here but tiny mom and pop companies thrown into a spot light that normally the likes of Google would be in. These companies do not have marketing departments and public relations people and are bound to make mistakes.

It’s worth remembering we placed them on the pedestal and there is only one thing we enjoy more, knocking them off. Lets hope we can stop the infighting and silly Google infatuation that seems to have come over people (“please sir he’s a paid linker sir”) and get back to being a collaborative community.

Me: You have blogged about your attempts to crack StumbleUpon’s algorithm.
Just how close did you really get?

Tim: We created a pretty accurate simulation of historical stumbles, though our model was not the one we published which was simplified when I originally wrote the blog post and handed it to a friend he suggested that if I needed to write the equations using LaTeX then I may need to simplify things.

The model we showed is a good basis of the basics but like all things its worth pointing out we can only match to historical data barring very generic statistical analysis I have no way of knowing how well content will do (mathematically) so hindsight being the exact science our algorithm is pretty good at hindsight.

Me: I have found that social media (such as stumble, digg, reddit etc…) traffic is pretty poor when it comes to conversion. Would you agree this traffic is better for promotion rather than selling?

Tim: Again pulling on our statistical data we have collected the gap is not as large as many people think with many “social groups” clicking ads almost as often as a normal user. That said you have to tailor what your selling or offering.

The average Digg user is less likely to be buying knitting patterns then other groups for example, but is far more tempted with free goodies particularly technology goodies and are susceptible to giving far more of their information freely then perhaps other groups.

Me: There are a number of social media sites out there – some more powerful than others. What are your favourites, Tim, and why?

Tim: Every social site is different each has a slightly different user base if I wish to promote a web seminar on social media I don’t do it on Digg, but if my client has some new videos of their latest gadget Digg is the first place I go.

However for my personal content I use Stumbleupon extensively both for submitting content and for finding new content.

I think I maybe unusual in the SEO community in that I actually use Stumbleupon, not really to game it or to become a “power user” just because it’s a really cool tool to find stuff most sites I stumble across I don’t thumb up or down leaving that for stuff that I genuinely like or dislike my like ratio is nearly 1:15 with a thumb down ratio close to 1:20 if I wanted to be a power Stumbler I would be rating every site.

Other sites I use include Dzone a great resource for programmers and developers and of course Sphinn which is turning into the golden boy of the SEO world, though I try not to self promote bits here I tend to think of Sphinn as a good sounding board of what the community is thinking and feels about content. It’s also made me realise how much snake oil selling is out there, even amongst “top SEOs”.

Me: I have found great success in running social media projects for clients’ sites and gaining some excellent rankings in the process for some of the more competitive generic keywords. Do you feel that Social Bookmarking will eventually oust the traditional way of gaining links (articles, directories, press releases) ?

Tim: Will? I think in many cases it already has, certainly the way we organise press releases for clients on the web has changed gone are submitting copy of the release to every PR site out their now, the press release sits on the clients site, along with a media and blogger information pack, as much media as we can and of course an announcement blog entry which is then promoted.

Many of the formal press releases that once would have been the stable of getting a corporate message are left more and more unread, yet the message is out in the blogosphere very quickly and with many journalists now using the same techniques as bloggers to get stories.

Using these techniques we can get information in front of them far quicker then we
ever could do through a traditional wire service. Directories another example of the changing web the traditional directory has been dying for years, the big ones will adapt to survive turning into CSS galleries or social media sites the smaller ones will just dry up to be replaced by something new.

We are shifting into a new time for the web with many walled gardens appearing such as Facebook and while there are many bridges Open Social also appearing trust is going to become a big thing along with an increasing pace what was new and fresh today will be old tomorrow as Google speeds its crawl and algorithm process ever closer to real time staying at the top will be as much about maintaining a continuous trusted presence as optimising a site.

Me: I want to ask you how you feel about the current state of the search engine ranking pages. For example if I were to type “SEO” into Google I’m confronted with 2 sometimes 3 sponsored links at the top of the page, a stock market quote, 2 wikipedia entries and then finally the first entry for an seo company on position 3 but forced below-the-fold thanks to the Google gloop beforehand.

Just how much importance do you feel is being given to organic listings today by the search engines?

Tim: As broadband penetration increases so does the uses of the Internet, the web is slowly turning away from the textual background and to a more media rich environment.

Google has like all of us to adapt to this changing world. The current way the SERPs work I think is a transitional state for Google who have to not only combine a search mechanism for all these new forms but balance them against each other.

So while it can be frustrating to see your hard work further down the page, than you would like, you can take some comfort that its there at all!

That said Wikipedia entries popping up for company names above the company shows perhaps an issue with a simple trust system that if only authority sites are ranked highly for non competitive keywords you effectively block out whole sets of results.

Me: Do you feel that the relevance of results has improved or gotten worse with the introduction of Google’s latest attempt to show a variety of different results (websites, video, images, product listings etc…) for a searched term?

Tim: I think the results have changed and we will have to live with that for the time being, it’s interesting to see how Google is coping with not so much the textual relevancy but that of the video and other media.

I noticed a few inappropriate video’s popping up from YouTube for a tennis player the other day in the SERPs certainly not suitable for young fans. The reason they were there is they had been tagged on YouTube with the player’s name, so for the video a single set of keyword caused its appearance in the SERPs on the front page.

Without some means to rank video content relevancy it will be difficult to avoid such things happening again and again. Spamming Google SERPs right now is very easy aim at YouTube.

Me: Do you think the layout has to be redesigned in order to compensate for all the media results that a search term may bring back i.e. Ask’s attempt to separate the results on a single page in a more structured format than that of Google’s current state?

Tim: Yes, But I think Google knows that to and is watching closely both Asks attempts with interest. While Google standard SERP has not changed dramatically in many years it has subtly been moving to a more modular system I expect we will continue to see modifications to the pages and through personalised search the options to fine tune how the page and content looks.

Me: I read that you feel that the horizontal rule tag – HR – carries some weight in on-page optimising. Have you ran any tests on this?

Tim: People seem to take everything on faith in our industry we all know that H1 tag helps us rank well but very few people stop to ask why, I used the fact that the HR might influence rankings not because I consider it a major factor but more that it hopefully got people to stop dead in their tracks and go what!

When asked for proof of heading tags improving rankings most people provide anecdotal evidence, a few people will quote a section from a local search patent, ironically the section they state is also the section which mentions that text above and below a hr tag “could” be weighted within a page for terms. The same evidence that suggests heading tag “could” be important indicates so “could” the horizontal rule.

Me: Finally, Tim, if you could get your hands on Google’s algorithm for a day, what would be the top 5 things that you would like to be considered before it determines a pages seeding in the search engines.

Tim: Do I need to cackle in a manic evil laugh?

1. Some basic logic
if (site = Wikipedia) {
SERP position = -10
}

Or at least provide a natural penalty against Wikipedia to prevent it ranking above companies own sites.

2. Actually rank content on relevancy and more importantly check for link relevancy (this is actually much more complicated than it sounds) and weight links not entirely on Authority but Authority plus relevancy. To put it another way an overriding command into the algorithm trust does not equal authority without relevancy.

3. Slow down the time between crawl and rankings to allow check for duplicate content. Most scraper spam is removed from the index pretty quick but wouldn’t it be better if it wasn’t there before?

4. If we are going to move to a rich media way lets think of a better way to determine relevancy then a set of 4 tags from a single user!

5. Insert an override switch allowing me to instantly rank a site?

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Tim has said that he will handle a few Q&A sessions via the comments. So if you have any questions that you would like Tim to answer from SEO to Open Social then please add a comment below.