At Pubcon 2014 in Las Vegas the SEJ team had the opportunity to catch up with Jake Bohall of Virante, and Joe Youngblood of Winner Winner Chicken Dinner, about SEO trends.
Jake discusses how he’s starting to see a shift towards SEO being integrated into all company practices, while Joe discusses some interesting new ways to build links.
Hear them explain more about this in the videos and recaps below:
SEOs Tools: An Interview with Jake Bohall
Here are some key takeaways from the video:
- Jake believes the future of SEO is shifting more towards using tools and having people on your team who are capable of using those tools, instead of some of the more specialty skill sets people have.
- Technical SEO will always be there, says Jake, but certain aspects are becoming more integrated within other business units in a company. For example, link building has become more of a PR strategy with a growing focus on outreach and relationship building.
- Jake thinks the days of writing content by following an SEO on-page checklist are going away in favor of using tools like nTopic to help you create authoritative content.
- To clarify, SEOs will never be replaced. SEOs bring a very valuable skill set to the technical side, whereas developers don’t have that strong marketing sense when they’re building a site. Adhering to Google’s guidelines is not as much of a concern for developers as it is for SEOs.
- Jake says our role as SEOs is going to be more based on the technical side, and then taking that technical expertise and building innovative tools that companies can use in house.
- As SEO becomes more and more complex you’re starting to see more SEOs specializing in individual areas, like keyword research, or local search, etc.
- Jake says the biggest thing an SEO can do right now is identify what their core competency is and focus on that. For a company, the best thing you can do is find a way to educate your staff about SEO practices so you can integrate it throughout your organization.
Quality Link Building: An Interview with Joe Youngblood
Here are some key takeaways from the video:
- Stop being so afraid of building links, Joe says. A lot of site owners try to take the shortcut of buying links due to the instant gratification, rather than putting in the work to try to earn links.
- Instead of asking “What if I do this content marketing thing and I don’t get any links out of it?”, site owners should be more concerned about angering Google by taking the easy way out, and having your site buried in the search results.
- Link building takes time, but you have to stop being afraid to do it.
- One of the biggest concerns Joe sees from site owners is the thought that they might invest a lot of money into creating content that doesn’t gain any traction.
- Instead of second guessing yourself, just start putting in the work. You’ll never see if it works if you don’t do it
- Something Joe pushes a lot is a tactic called “scholarship link building.” You can do a scholarship for as little as a few thousand a year and hand over the management to an entirely separate company, then you’ll get a number of high authority links from universities.
Please visit SEJ’s YouTube page for more video interviews.
Category
SEO
