Jason Acidre is the Co-founder and CEO of Xight Interactive, an online marketing agency based in the Philippines, but he’s best known for his blog Kaiser The Sage.
He is a trusted authority in SEO, with specialized expertise in link building. Last night night he took part in an AMA where he invited Reddit users to ask him anything about SEO, link building, content marketing, and blogging. It was fascinating to learn during the AMA that he fell into the SEO industry by accident in 2010, meaning he went from knowing nothing about it to a being bona fide expert in just four years. It’s hard to not be inspired by that.
His answers are valuable for anyone wanting to learn more about SEO, especially those just getting into it. I’ve recapped some of his best answers into this post. Questions are in bold, followed by a summary of his answer. You can view the full AMA here.
Jason Acidre AMA
Any advice for aspiring SEO / online marketers? You built your name from scratch. Your advice would be really helpful.
Jason believes there’s no single path to follow in the SEO industry. What worked for him won’t necessarily work for others. But there’s a few things he’s learned along the way that he really wanted to share with those who are new and trying to get their name out.
- Since SEO is an ever-evolving field, Jason says it’s important to keep yourself up to date with SEO and also learn about other aspects of online marketing.
- The best way to learn is through experience. Don’t just follow the advice of others, keep testing and learning as you go.
- Jason suggests keeping a blog, or just writing a lot. Writing about new things you learn is the best way to remember them, he says.
- Always challenge yourself.
What is your biggest fail in SEO?
Jason says he has failed a lot. He has lost a lot of projects in the past, but there’s one that particularly stands out to him.
The failure that stands out the most is the first e-commerce site he ever worked on as a consultant. He attributes the failure to not being “mature enough as leader” at the time to handle such a large project.
I’ve recently started working SEO on a fresh e-commerce website. I want to know your suggestion how to proceed further with SEO in a right way? I mean On Page and Off Page Optimization techniques.
Jason’s suggestions for a fresh e-commerce site are as follows:
- Make sure search engines are only indexing pages that are useful to searchers. Block access to the less useful pages via robots.txt or by using the noindex tag.
- Build more internal links to the site’s key pages. A blog is an ideal place to build internal links.
- Build inbound links to the site’s key categories. Building up the PageRank of the site’s category pages will pass PageRank down to the product pages under each category.
- Implement structured data markup (visit schema.org for more info on this).
- Find 3-5 high authority blogs in the same niche and try to become a regular contributor by submitting content several times a month. Jason says this is a better approach than guest blogging on hundreds of different blogs.
- Monitor where your competitors are getting links with services like mention.net or fresh web explorer. This will help you understand your competitor’s marketing tactics.
- Build relationships and strategic content partnerships. Invite guests or regular writers to contribute to your blog so you can hopefully gain some of their followers.
Your blog is really well known and is actually earning a lot of mentions ie: links, social shares etc. How do you measure if your written content is actually enough and competitive to get a lot of readers online.
Jason details his writing process as follows:
- Jason always starts with the draft, which he says doesn’t necessarily involve doing research during the initial stages. His drafts include original ideas and information he believes isn’t available on other blogs.
- After the draft is done, Jason conducts competitive research. He looks for similar content from competitors to ensure his content is more comprehensive.
- Jason then writes out the entire post, which he says takes between 5-8 hours.
This is what I found to be the best advice from his AMA, but I strongly encourage you to view the whole thing here.
