Fueled by weak beer, straight-talking and all-round Jersey swagger @Sugarrae is an SEO consultant, superaffiliate and digital marketing provocateur.
In this exclusive interview, Rae reveals her long game for bulletproof SEO, making money online and the truth behind shitty link-building.
1. What’s the biggest change you’ve made to your SEO strategy in 2011 to future-proof your online properties?
Honestly, I’ve been trying to “future-proof” my properties since 2006. I can play the algo game, but I made a decision a long time ago to build most of my sites so that deserve to rank because they’re awesome rather than sites that relied solely on being able to game the latest algorithm. I’ve put a lot of work into creating affiliate “brands” instead of affiliate “sites”. Branding is important if you want to continue to survive in the SEO evolution.
I’ve also put some emphasis on diversifying myself so that I’m not only building commercial affiliate properties. Sugarrae is more of a branded audience development play that happens to monetize via affiliate marketing. I also bought into a company that helps folks incorporate online that is a traditional merchant play vs. being an affiliate of the merchant.
As far as what’s changed in the last year, I think I look less at standard ranking and more at analytics these days. Personalization and geo-targeting is making it harder and harder to see a “standard” set of search results. I rely more on my analytics to tell me how a site is doing as far as its SEO success goes. I also use analytics to tell me which pages are essentially useless fat (high bounce rates, no direct inbound visitors, no inbound links) in regards to my search engine traffic and help me trim my sites down to as much meat as possible, which has become much more important this year in light of the seven thousand Panda updates, LOL.
Social strategy has also taken a bigger role this year. But I kind of consider that part of the branding I mentioned earlier.
2. What’s your take on the [+1] button and the social google? Does it even matter?
I’m not stressing over the +1 button. I use it on my sites that target marketers or the tech space – because I tend to get more people “in the know” when it comes to Google+ on those sites, but I don’t have it on my more mainstream sites. Even on the sites in the tech space, I usually have ten times (if not more) the Facebook “likes” and retweets on a page than I do +1s of the same page.
You hear the talk, like when Forbes published, then pulled, an article about how Google essentially told them they needed to use the +1 button or risk their rankings. But for now, it doesn’t seem to have any huge say. If and when it does, that will probably be when I begin to worry about it.
I think social matters. I just don’t think +1 is the prime indicator of social. I mean, hell, I’m as “in tech” as you can get and while I use the Facebook app and the Twitter app on my BlackBerry like they’re crack, I don’t have Google+ on there. To be honest, until I just wrote this, it never even crossed my mind to put it on there. Until I see that my NIFs (non internet friends – hat tip Greg Boser for that one) are talking about Google+, I just don’t see how it could be a factor they’d choose to rely on heavily. But then again, Google has done quite a few things that hasn’t made sense to me in the past, LOL.
3. What’s the most lightweight revenue model you use in your business?
For me, it’s not the most profitable of the types of revenue models I use (because I don’t build my sites to use it as the first monetization option) or my first choice, but there’s no denying the ease of webmaster welfare – AKA AdSense.
4. Is “link-building” a viable long-term strategy? Isn’t is just part of manipulating results?
I’ve been saying for a long time that link building is pretty much marketing in the new medium, plain and simple. Bottom line is that the engines are trying to discern the most popular and best website for every keyword that is entered into their search boxes. If you get the kind of links that also attract visitors and subscribers, you’re going to be getting the types of links the engines like – and rank you better accordingly for – by default. So, shitty link building (blog commenting, crap directories, splogs, etc) isn’t a viable long term strategy. Good link building – 2011 link building – is essentially a facet of marketing and promotion. And that’s always going to be a viable long term strategy for any business, online or off.
5. Most people focus on the on-site off-site stuff, but how important are the technical factors like loading speed, 301s, robots.txt etc?
In every SEO audit I’ve ever done, technical factors always play some kind of impacting role. I’ve seen people de-index their entire site with improper use of robots.txt. I’ve seen sites with thousands of 404 error pages indexed as viable site pages because they serve a 200 OK status even though the page claims to be a 404. One guy at an SEO clinic I did at a conference couldn’t figure out why he lost all his rankings after a “redesign” – which also changed all of his URLs and he had no 301 redirect migration plan in place. Technical still plays a big role. Robots.txt is extremely powerful, especially in the day and age of Panda if you become adept at using it.
Too many SEOs “grew up” learning how to do nothing but develop anchor based links without learning anything else. And IMO, that’s why a good portion of people are struggling to stay competitive at SEO now that links are once again back to only being a part (albeit still a strong part) of the overall equation.
