Ultimate Organic Search Tools & Tips: Simon Heseltine Revisited
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Simon Heseltine, Director of SEO at AOL Inc., is an organic search beast, and he’s got the hands-on experience to prove it. Responsible for all AOL and Huffington Post Media Group properties, including Engadget, Huffington Post, and Daily Finance, he’s also trained the AOL-UK teams on SEO best practices. Impressive!
Simon is a familiar face on the conference circuit and, as it happens, in the aimClear blog. Last year on the advent of Search Engine Strategies Chicago, aimClear sat down with Mr. Heseltine for a casual Q&A. This go-round, as SES San Francisco draws near, we revisited Simon with a batch of new stuff to ask (except… we accidentally asked the “hi, who are you” and the fav adult bev again… cheers!). Read on for the goods.
| aimClear: Simon! Hello, friend. Tell us a bit about yourself. Howdidja end up in the profession?
Simon Heseltine: I refer you to the answer I gave the last time you asked me. Is that cheating? Because that past life as a programmer taught me that reuse was a good thing. 
| aC: Alright, fair enough. So, your position with AOL affords you glimpses of the SEO universe only those privy to an enterprise of that kind of volume can understand. Has this experience provided perspective for working on smaller sites? What are some main observations and takeaways?
SH: It’s true that we have some very powerful, growing sites such as The Huffington Post and TechCrunch, but we also have several niche, or smaller sites that we work with (i.e. http://energy.aol.com/), so my team really works across the whole gamut. Regardless of the size of the site, the guiding principles remain the same, make sure that you put out good quality content on as structurally sound a foundation (CMS) as you can. With larger sites you will generally have more clout to get things done, as they tend to have more resources, so with the smaller sites you have to really marshal your effort to make sure that you’re getting the most benefit for what’s available to you.
| aC: Very interesting. What about SEO has changed the most over the last five years? What remains the same eternally?
SH: Undoubtedly the biggest change has been the coupling of search with social, along with the ever increasing personalization that it brings. Five years ago if you did a search you were much more likely to see the same thing as the person next to you, now it’s possible for the page to look completely different based on your friends, your location, your previous searches, etc.
As for what remains the same? The fundamentals may be tweaked, but they’re still there. Make sure that your site is crawlable, if the spiders can’t get to your content, how can they index it? You’ve got such great free tools available from both Google and Bing to let you see data directly from their crawlers so make use of it.
| aC: Your top 5 SEOs or blogs you look up to the most, and why!
SH: Hmm, there are too many to list, although most of them don’t call themselves SEO’s, so I’m going to weasel out and go down the blog route. That said, I’m now going to side-step that, after giving the plug to Search Engine Watch (where you can find my bi-monthly column), and say that I get the majority of my news from social media sites, and recommendations from my friends. If something’s worth knowing about they let me know. Five years ago I’d start every day with Bloglines and go through the latest posts on over 100 sites to see what was going on in the world. Now I monitor Twitter & Facebook and get probably a better level of information / use of my time as I see what matters to people. Of course it helps to be well connected and have a wide range of friends with differing, but trusted tastes, but I do think it works well.
| aC: Word. If you were marooned on a digital desert island and you could have only three analytics tools to measure SEO, what would they be? Why?
SH: I’d just need one. E-mail, so I could contact our great in-house analytics team.
You’re not going to let me get away with that one are you?
Ok, well, obviously one would have to be an actual analytics suite such as Omniture, Google Analytics, or WebTrends (although I haven’t used the latter for quite a while). The second would have to be a spreadsheet package to play with the data. For the third, I’d go with a diagnostics tool to identify any issues that could be affecting the site, while they’re not technically measuring the SEO, they’re giving you an indication of where you’re missing out by not following best practices, so for that you’d need to have a composite of Google Webmaster Tools and Bing Webmaster Tools.
| aC: The afternoon of Day 3 at SES San Francisco, you’ll be sharing the stage for the Successful In-House SEO session. Can we get a sneak peek at what you’ll dish up to the audience members?
SH: It’s still a work in progress, so it’s going to be nice and fresh for the audience, but what I can say for now is that it’s not going to be a “get an exec on your side and give the devs a beer and the world will be rosy” presentation. The panel and I will talk about some real world situations that we’ve encountered, things that worked and things that didn’t. We’ll talk about the challenges that in-house people face, how to work with consultants / agencies, where the SEO team fits within the organization, and when to pick your battles.
| aC: Lightning round: Favorite adult beverage, ethnic cuisine, and outdoor activity – GO!
SH: Somerset Cider, although Magners will do in a pinch.
Kung Pao Bean Curd… mmm…
Playing soccer, or at least it will be once my calf heals up again 
| aC: Right on! Great, now I want Kung Pao bean curd… well, thanks for your time today, Simon Safe travels to SFO!
http://www.aimclearblog.com/2012/08/01/simon-heseltine-interview/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+AimclearSearchMarketingBlog+%28aimClear+Search+Marketing+Blog%29) Don’t forget to comment and subscribe to the authors blog.
Yelp’s Traffic & Review Count Have Doubled in the Past 18 Months
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I like to share interesting posts and information about internet marketing that read in my Google reader. Let me sort through the junk to bring you the real goods when comes to local internet marketing for small businesses. I thought this was super useful. if you like it be sure to share maybe subscribe to the authors blog: http://www.smallbusinesssem.com
Yelp announced its latest quarterly earnings today, but rather than the financials, these are the numbers that caught my eye:
- Cumulative reviews grew 54% year over year to more than 30 million
- Average monthly unique visitors grew 52% year over year to more than 78 million
Both of those numbers are about double what they were 18 months ago, at the end of 2010. At that time, Yelp announced that it had about 15 million reviews and monthly traffic of about 41 million uniques.
Wowza. Closed out 2010 with +41M unique visitors & +15M reviews in Dec! Feeling good things for 2011! http://yfrog.com/hsjn3xj
— Yelp (@Yelp) January 5, 2011
I still generally believe that overall review counts are meaningless, but I do think this bears watching in light of Google’s risky switch to the Zagat ratings/reviews system. I’m curious to see how that will play out, and if the switch will hurt Google in the long run, while helping competitors like Yelp that are sticking with the familiar 5-star system.
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This is a post from Matt McGee’s blog, Small Business Search Marketing.
Yelp’s Traffic & Review Count Have Doubled in the Past 18 Months
http://www.smallbusinesssem.com/yelps-traffic-review-count-have-doubled-in-the-past-18-months/6230/) Don’t forget to comment and subscribe to the authors blog.
Google Hangouts Now Rolling Out in Gmail
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I like to share interesting posts and information about internet marketing that read in my Google reader. Let me sort through the junk to bring you the real goods when comes to local internet marketing for small businesses. I thought this was super useful. if you like it be sure to share maybe subscribe to the authors blog: http://searchenginewatch.com/ Google is removing the video chat function from Gmail that has been available since 2008 and replacing it with a Hangouts style feature as seen in Google+. Google promises Gmail users this will mean higher reliability and enhanced quality.
http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2196150/Google-Hangouts-Now-Rolling-Out-in-Gmail?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+sewblog+%28Search+Engine+Watch+Blog%29) Don’t forget to comment and subscribe to the authors blog.
How to Improve Your Website’s Conversions [ Free Recorded Webinar – Watch Now!]
See on Scoop.it – Small Business SEM, SEO & Google Places Optimization
Here are some ‘take-aways’ from the conversion optimization video:
Olympic athletes with the most social buzz [infographic]
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I found this post interesting and I thought I’d share here:
I like to share interesting posts and information about internet marketing that read in my Google reader. Let me sort through the junk to bring you the real goods when comes to local internet marketing for small businesses. I thought this was super useful. if you like it be sure to share maybe subscribe to the authors blog: http://www.lostremote.com 
As the major TV event that is the Olympics continues to roll out, athletes are getting more individual exposure than any other previous games. Which athletes are getting the most love on social and why? Bluefin Labs put together an infographic that looks at data that goes beyond just when people are tweeting while watching TV, but a look at buzz around the entire event. http://www.lostremote.com/2012/08/02/olympic-athletes-with-the-most-social-buzz-infographic/) Don’t forget to comment and subscribe to the authors blog.
“Fetch as Googlebot” tool helps to debug hacked sites
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I like to share interesting posts and information about internet marketing that read in my Google reader. Let me sort through the junk to bring you the real goods when comes to local internet marketing for small businesses. I thought this was super useful. if you like it be sure to share maybe subscribe to the authors blog: http://www.mattcutts.com/blog
One of the most tenacious blackhat webspam techniques we continue to see is hacked sites. I wanted to remind site owners that our free “Fetch as Google” tool can be a really helpful way to see whether you’ve successfully cleaned up a hacked site.
For example, recently a well-known musician’s website was hacked. The management firm for the musician wrote in to say that the site was clean now. Here’s the reply I sent back:
Unfortunately when our engineers checked this morning, the site was still hacked. I know the page looks clean to you, but when we send Googlebot to fetch http://www.[domain].com this morning, we see
<title>Generic synthroid bad you :: Canadian Pharmacy</title>
on the page. What the hackers are doing is sneaky but unfortunately pretty common. When you surf directly to the website, you see normal content. But when a search engine (or a visitor from a search engine) visits the website, they see hacked drug-related content. The reason that the hackers do it this way is so that the hacked content is harder to find/remove and so that hacked content stays up longer.
The fix in this case is to go deeper to clean the hack out of your system. See http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=163634 for some tips on how to do this, but every website is different.
One important tool Google provides to help in assessing whether a site is cleaned up is our “Fetch as Googlebot” feature in our free webmaster console at http://google.com/webmasters/ . That tool lets you actually send Googlebot to your website and see exactly what we see when we fetch the page. That tool would have let you known that the website was still hacked.
I hope that helps give an idea of where to go next.
Something I love about “Fetch as Googlebot” is that it’s self-service–you don’t even need to talk to anyone at Google to diagnose whether your hacked site looks clean.
http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/fetch-as-googlebot-tool-hacked-sites/) Don’t forget to comment and subscribe to the authors blog.
Street View in Space (Center)
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NASA and Google have collaborated to provide Street View imagery of the Kennedy Space Center. The project is the largest special collection of Street View imagery to date, totalling 6,000 panoramic views of the Space Center.
http://googlemapsmania.blogspot.com/2012/08/street-view-in-space-center.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+GoogleMapsMania+%28Google+Maps+Mania%29) Don’t forget to comment and subscribe to the authors blog.
Yes You Can Link Your Business To The Oylmpics Too
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I found this post interesting and I thought I’d share here:
I like to share interesting posts and information about internet marketing that read in my Google reader. Let me sort through the junk to bring you the real goods when comes to local internet marketing for small businesses. I thought this was super useful. if you like it be sure to share maybe subscribe to the authors blog: http://www.smallbusinessonlinecoach.com When first reading this headline you might think “I could never afford to advertise at the Olympics”, well that may be true, but there is ways to connect your business to the feeling of the Olympics and gain some cool advertising opportunities at the same time. Reading this article “Connecting Your Brand with the Olympic […] http://www.smallbusinessonlinecoach.com/blog/social/link-business-oylmpics/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+SmallBusinessOnlineCoach%2FMwlZ+%28SmallBusinessOnlineCoach.com%29) Don’t forget to comment and subscribe to the authors blog.
6 Simple Steps to Marketing on Foursquare
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I found this post interesting and I thought I’d share here:
I like to share interesting posts and information about internet marketing that read in my Google reader. Let me sort through the junk to bring you the real goods when comes to local internet marketing for small businesses. I thought this was super useful. if you like it be sure to share maybe subscribe to the authors blog: http://www.smallbusinessonlinecoach.com There is no doubt Foursquare has become a popular mobile social site, that small businesses should not ignore. Marketing on Foursquare is not that hard and very similar to networking on Twitter, Facebook, & LinkedIN. The cool thing about Foursquare (as opposed to other social networks) is you are able to engage with customers who […] http://www.smallbusinessonlinecoach.com/blog/social/6-simple-steps-marketing-foursquare/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+SmallBusinessOnlineCoach%2FMwlZ+%28SmallBusinessOnlineCoach.com%29) Don’t forget to comment and subscribe to the authors blog.
Mitch Joel Discusses CTRL ALT DEL at Content Marketing World 2012
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Mitch Joel who is President of Twist Image — an award-winning Digital Marketing agency. And his first book, Six Pixels of Separation, is a business and marketing bestseller. Mitch’s next book, CTRL ALT DEL, is the topic of his opening keynote on Wednesday September 5th at Content Marketing World in Columbus.
About Mitch Joel:
Mitch Joel is President of Twist Image – an award-winning Digital Marketing and Communications agency (although he prefers the title, Media Hacker). Marketing Magazine dubbed him the “Rock Star of Digital Marketing” and called him, “one of North America’s leading digital visionaries.” Joel is frequently called upon to be a subject matter expert for BusinessWeek, Fast Company, Marketing Magazine, and many other media outlets. His first book, Six Pixels of Separation (published by Grand Central Publishing – Hachette Book Group), named after his successful Blog and Podcast is a business and marketing bestseller. His next book, CTRL ALT DEL, (also published by Grand Central Publishing) will be coming out in Spring 2013. You can follow Mitch on Twitter @mitchjoel.
About Content Marketing World:
Content Marketing World is the largest gathering of content marketing professionals in the world. Content Marketing World is the one event where you can learn and network with the best and the brightest in the content marketing industry. You will leave with all the materials you need to take a content strategy back to your team – and – implement a content marketing plan that will grow your business and engage your audience. Content Marketing World 2012 takes place on September 4 – 6, 2012 at the Columbus Convention Center, Columbus, Ohio.
Transcription (edited):
Arnie: Hello everyone. I’m Arnie Kuenn, President of Vertical Measures, a search, social, and content marketing agency in Phoenix, Arizona. I’d like to introduce you to Mitch Joel, who is President of Twist Image, an award-winning digital marketing agency. His first book, “Six Pixels of Separation”, is a business and marketing bestseller. Welcome, Mitch.
Mitch: Thanks for having me, I’m happy to be here.
Arnie: Great. So, Mitch, you’re next book “CTRL ALT DEL” is the topic of your keynote address on Wednesday, I think it’s September 5th at Content Marketing World in Columbus this year. Why don’t you give our viewers kind of a quick overview of what you’re going to present and talk about? Of course, we’ll probably discuss the book as well.
Mitch: Sure. Well, thanks for the opportunity. First off, the exciting thing is that the book’s only coming out next May, so Spring 2013. It’ll be a very early preview of the content. For me, the past couple years have been really fascinating, being involved in the digital marketing, and media space specifically, that convergence of everybody being a publisher, while brands can use a better connect to consumers.
It’s sort of strange to start thinking about a world where everybody who you’re trying to connect with is also a publisher in and of themselves, and everyone’s vying for this attention in, what probably in some psychological circles, would’ve been some psychopathic type of way. I think the output of that is that business has actually fundamentally changed, and what I’ve netted out to in the book “CTRL ALT DEL”, it’s really two parts.
The first part is really about what you need to do to reboot your business in such a different and connecting world. The second part is what you need to have as an individual to be valuable in terms of being an employee, or an entrepreneur, or a start-up within that new framework.
So, without going into too many sort of details on some of the key takeaways for me, and I think most relevant to the audience at Content Marketing World, is going to be the idea of understanding the power of these direct relationships is very profound.
When you think about the ability for you as a consumer to have a direct relationship with a brand, you go, “Well, no big deal, right? I Tweet them that their customer service sucks on Twitter and someone will respond.” But it’s pretty profound when you start thinking about brands now actually can have this direct relationships with their consumers. What I feel is happening is that, we’ve entered into a really unique moment where there’s almost this battle or a war happening, where brands and companies B2B and B2C, you’re not just competing with their competitors to make that happen. But you’re actually competing in a very, very deep and big way with your partners and providers.
You think about this story that I’ll probably tell is, if you went out to buy a pair of headphones of, let’s say, Beats by Dre, Beats by Dre will say, “Like us on Facebook and follow us on Twitter, and join our Facebook world,” and whatever else they might tell you. At the same time, Target, where you bought those headphones would tell you, “Like us on Facebook and follow us on Twitter.”
Now, stop and be the consumer for five seconds and realize that you just bought a pair of headphones for $100. No big deal, right? Yet, there are all these marketing messages that are being demanded of us, as if you’re going to be missing something if you don’t and the truths are the value chains. For me, that’s one of the bigger, more profound things that I’m hoping to share with the audience.
Arnie: Yeah, that’s super. Super. I think you’re going to also really talk about mobile. I don’t remember the exact title of the keynote. Obviously, what you just described, going into the store and buying your headphones and all that could apply with mobile.
Mitch: Yeah.
Arnie: But do you have anything specific there?
Mitch: Well, I think the big thing for me is that we live in a world now, where people are talking about this idea of the “four screen world”, that there’s TV, and computer, and mobile, and iPad, and all these sorts of things. The truth for me, and one of the sort of big core components of my presentation, is I view what I call the “one screen world”. I think through The Cloud computing, asynchronous apps, and things like that, the only screen that matters is the screen that’s in front of me.
I tell the story of my niece, who if I go back to when she was 16 a couple years ago. She’d come home from school and plunk her knapsack down and pull out her laptop. She’d open the lid, turn on the TV, plug in her ear-bud, listen to her iPod, and have her blackberry messenger going. If I fast-forward to this day and age, I’ll see that same niece come in from school, plunk down that same knapsack, open it up and just take out her tablet.
Her tablet is her TV, and it is her computer, and it is her Twitter, and it is her Facebook. It’s all of those things. Not to say that we’re quickly leaving a world of companion devices and things like that, but we are sort of leaving this world of multi-platforming, where there are unique things happening on each screen, versus that asynchronous experience.
I think those doubters are the people who sort of doubt what I’m saying and all of that’s not going to happen sooner or later. Human beings are very good at maybe looking at lateral grown, and not exponential growth. I think the key message, too, is that from a content marketing world, we’re actually moving into this world of massive exponential growth. It’s something we can’t even comprehend.
Arnie: Yep. I totally agree. Well, I can’t remember, were you at Content Marketing World last year?
Mitch: I haven’t. This is my first time coming down, and I’m actually really excited. I’ve met Joe a couple times and we’ve hung out. I’ve heard of tangentially about this famed event, and Joe was like, “You’re going to come down to keynote.” I said, “Yeah, sure. Let’s have some more drinks.” Sure enough, now that’s actually happened. I’m really excited.
Arnie: Well, I tell you. You’re going to really like it. Joe runs an awesome event. It’s one of their few I think that are just totally focused on content, which is your focus. The audience is excellent. It’s educational and entertaining all in one. It’s hard to believe that last year’s event was the first event. It was just that well done. So, I think you’re going to really enjoy it.
Mitch: It has a great reputation already, so there you go.
Arnie: Super. All righty. Well, that’s all the time we have and I appreciate all of your insights. I look forward to seeing you there, and for everybody who’s watching it, it’s September 4th through the 6th in Columbus, Ohio. That’s Content Marketing World, and if you’re there, you’ll see Mitch’s keynote the first day. I appreciate it.
Mitch: I look forward to it. Nice seeing you.
Arnie: Thanks, Mitch. Bye-bye.
Related posts:
- Joe Pulizzi Discusses Content Marketing World 2012
- Google’s Search Plus Your World? – Not in My World!
- Content Marketing at Conferences with Lee Odden [VIDEO]
http://www.verticalmeasures.com/content-marketing-2/mitch-joel-discusses-ctrl-alt-del-at-content-marketing-world-2012/) Don’t forget to comment and subscribe to the authors blog.
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