Scott White on Fitness Internet Marketing and SEO

This interview is from December of 2006, keep in mind SEO and Internet Marketing is always changing so validate any of these techniques before using them.

Chris McCombs (CM): I’m here with Scott White. Scott, who are you and what do you do?

Scott White (SW): My name is Scott White. I have a personal training business in Arizona, as well as a search engine optimization company. And I basically optimize people’s websites to rank in the top of Google, Yahoo!, and the standard search engines. So, basically, that means when somebody types in a certain phrase like, for example, “personal trainer Arizona,” or “personal trainer Scottsdale” - because people search for specific cities and specific stuff because that’s what they’re looking for - I’ll have a website, or I’ll optimize somebody’s website so it will rank for that specific term in the top of Google. Because people only click on the top few in Google. If you’re on page 54, you know, you’re most likely not going to get looked at.

CM: Now, is that the answer to number one, or should I go to one or two?

SW: That was also an answer for number one.

CM: Okay, perfect. What’s the difference between SEO and SEM?

SW: SEO is “search engine optimization.” SEM is “search engine marketing.” So, for example, they’re pretty closely related but search engine optimization is basically having your website ranked in the search engines. And so, on Google, Yahoo!, MSN - and the reason I only talk about those three, those are your big players. Those are the people that really matter. Lycos and Ask, they are search engines but they also, they’re based off of Google, Yahoo!, and MSN so primarily everyone uses Google, Yahoo!, and MSN. So those are the three I really only talk about. And it’s - the search engine optimization - is having that website ranked specifically at the top of Google. I mean, you can optimize it, but you want to be at the top.

There’s different forms of search engine optimization. Like, there’s pay-per-click where you can pay for it and you pay a certain amount by bidding, and if you’re the highest paying person you’re going to be the highest ranked paid-per-click advertising. If you look at the top of Google or Yahoo! you’ll see it in kind of different color, and they’re the sponsored listings. People pay for that.

What I specifically focus on is the organic ranking, which is the ranking that people don’t pay for. So by doing certain things you have that search engine optimized for that organic ranking, that natural listing that occurs by having proper optimized things for your site.

And then search engine marketing is basically anything you do to help market on the search engine. So, you know, you can do billions of things from contacting, getting ranked, from marketing your business on the search engine.

CM: What does “page rank” mean?

SW: Page rank is specifically ranked - you know, there’s a Google page rank. So, you know, some people have a page rank of three, page rank of four. The higher page rank you have, the better. It’s basically an amount of links that you have pointing from other sites to your site. So the more websites you have pointing to your site, you’re going to typically have a higher page rank. That’s not always the case, just because with algorithms and - you know, the system isn’t always 100 percent totally true. It can get skewed, but typically it’s by the amount of sites that link to your site.

So if you take your site and if you put LINK in front of it, so “link,” then http and your website’s name, you’re going to get a list of how many websites point to your site that are actually indexed in Google at that time. So you could be currently working on stuff and not have it indexed at that point, but as Google does basically like a refresh on all their updates and goes through and changes their algorithm, then they’ll find all these new links and they’ll typically occur.

CM: What’s the difference between on-page and off-page optimization?

SW: Okay, so on-page optimization is basically what you do on your page, specifically on your website page. So, for example, there’s certain things to do on your website page. If your website is about personal trainers - and we’ll talk about personal trainers because this is the industry we’re discussing - if your website’s about personal training, it wouldn’t be smart to have stuff about cooking or cars because it has nothing to do with personal training.

The way the spiders go into your site, they’re going to read certain key phrases, key terms, key words that are specific to that site. So if they see “personal trainer, personal training, health, fitness, exercise,” those are all related key words that fit right into personal training or personal trainers. So they’re going to pick up on that and go, “Hey, okay, this is what this site is about. Let’s rank it for personal training.” So there’s certain things with all the on-page optimization that you can do to make those key phrases in bold and in strong font so the spiders are going to hold more clout to those terms than they are going to other words that are on that webpage, as well as the on-page - your directory of your links, where your headers are. So all kinds of things that basically - the content of the page specifically, that it’s original content that’s going to be specific to making that on-page optimization much more effective.

And then, of course, the off-page optimization is what you do off your webpage, like getting more links, writing articles, submitting them so you’re getting more links, trading links with other websites, doing all kinds of forms that help drive more traffic to your site, which would be the best for off-page optimization.

CM: Does how long I’ve had my site have anything to do with ranking?

SW: Yes, it does. Of course. Google, Yahoo!, MSN, they all have their own algorithms and systems how they work, but they’ve moved in because there’s so many more websites being created every day, and all the time there’s millions of people moving to using the web. So now Google has made a lot more clout on the age of your website. So if somebody just gets a website tomorrow and tries to rank it, and dug all these factors, well Google’s - those spiders are going to look at it and go, “Okay, are they doing all this correctly? Are they putting hidden text in there trying to cheat the system?” That’s frowned upon. And they’re going to look at the age of the site and be like, “Well, this is a brand new site.” They might not trust it.

Just like a company. If it hasn’t been around for 10 years and you’re looking at a brand new company and thinking of investing money in them, you’re going to be leery unless that company has been around for years and years, because you know it’s going to stay there; it’s not going to go anywhere. So they look at that age of your ranking and it helps a lot to get that higher ranking. So having a newer website is a little more challenging than having a site that you’ve had for four or five years. But that doesn’t mean that you can’t necessarily rank it right away. There’s still ways around it, it’s just that if everything was the same between a site that was, you know, 10 days old as opposed to five years old, the five year old one is, of course, going to beat the other page, website.

CM: Let me ask you, this one’s not in the questions you gave me, but I change hosting companies, is that like now having the website starting over at day one, or is it still considered as old as it is as long as I’ve had that domain name? How does that work?

SW: No, it’s not. That’s just a domain name. It’s basically when that register was indexed by Google, or indexed by any of those sites. So, basically, you could have a site for 10 years and never have it indexed by Google if you don’t do the proper steps to get it indexed. Most likely it will get picked up in those 10 years, but it is possible that your site’s never indexed. Once it’s indexed, it’s in their cast, so basically their memory.

You can type in a way to check and see if your site has been indexed in Google, or Yahoo! or MSN, or anything. You put “site:http:yourwebsitename” and then you’ll see it. If your website appears, then you know it’s been indexed. But if it doesn’t appear, then you haven’t been indexed. And then it will basically - when you click on the cash, it will say, “Last indexed on January 10, 2006.” Or if you have tools like in Firefox, you can check the age of the site, and you can go in and check the age of the site and it will show each year that it was indexed and how many pages were indexed. And there’s all kinds of programs that do it, but there’s also a free program if you use Firefox, and I don’t know the program off the top of my head but it’s on my search engine optimization website, that has the links to download the free tools to get that on Firefox. And it will come up and it will show the age and it will show if you have a dmoz ranking. It will show how many links you have with Yahoo!, MSN, and all those. It shows a lot of stuff along the SEO lines.

So if you just go to http://www.SEOTutorialProgram.com, on that blog at the bottom, it’s one of my first postings. It has the stuff you can click on and then you can see that and compare to other sites, and just comparative analysis from the top ranking from ones that are on the - to your site. And you compare what they’re doing with what you’re doing, and just, a lot of times it’s, let me imitate what they’re doing and do it even better. Does that answer the question?

CM: Yes, if you change hosting though, does it - say you have a site that was built five years ago but you changed hosting a year ago. Is your site five years old or one year old?

SW: So, it’s based on the index in the search engine.

CM: Okay.

SW: So, if it’s never been indexed, it doesn’t matter. The hosting companies - the only thing that they have to deal with - you don’t want to get international, something that’s slow. Like, I know a hosting company that’s based in Asia, and you can basically host as many domains as you want and it’s, like, $50 a year for 15 domain names, and it’s extremely inexpensive. But the thing is, since they’re based out of Asia it takes forever for the thing to load. It’s not as, you know - like Google or someone that’s better that’s going to be initiated right away.

So not all hosting companies are created equal, but that has nothing to do with the search engine optimization or the age of that. Because it’s the index. As soon as get a website you want it to be indexed ASAP. I mean, granted, you don’t want to index a site that’s not a site and it has spelling errors, because if you index and it isn’t optimized to begin with, basically you’re going to be like throwing rocks and it’s not going to do too much for you. You want to make sure you optimize that on-page optimization, then index it right away. So, as soon as you get a domain name you should be working on getting it indexed. And you can do that within 24-48 hours if you spend a little money.

CM: How important is the domain name to search engine optimization?

SW: A domain name is actually extremely important, because if you put the key words - if you just think before you buy your domain name, what specifically you are looking for, or what you want to rank for, or more specifically what your customers are going to type into a search engine to find you.

So, if you call your business “Bob’s Personal Training,” that’s cool if, say, you’re Bob. But people aren’t going to type in - granted, it has the words Personal training in it, and so you’re going to be better likely to help that rank for personal training. Which is good, as opposed to just having BobSmith.com. That’s great and all, it will help you rank for “Bob Smith,” but who really - unless you’re some famous Bob Smith personal trainer that everybody types in a search engine, it’s kind of pointless to rank for that. Right? So, I mean, you want something specific where people are going to search for it.

And now there’s the whole geo-local, local market. So if you’re in California and you’re not in New York, there’s not necessarily a reason to market your services to people in New York. I mean, granted, you can do online training and all that stuff, but more specifically, if you want clients in your area it’d be important to pick up your geo-local domain. So basically that would mean, “personal trainer Scottsdale,” “personal trainer Arizona,” “personal trainer Orange County,” “personal trainer Irvine.” So doing certain things to check to see if those key words are found where people search for. So, your big ones are “personal trainer Los Angeles,” “personal trainer San Antonio,” you know, people click on those, because it’s more specifically located. So if you have “personal training Chicago” or “Los Angeles” in your domain name, well now it’s going to be easier to rank that way; because search engines automatically are like, “Okay, this domain name is ‘personal trainer Chicago,’ so it must mean it’s a site about personal training in Chicago. So we’re going to hold that a little higher clout than if it just says ‘personal training,’ or ‘Bob Smith,’ even worse.”

CM: Is it possible to optimize a Flash site?

SW: It is possible to optimize a Flash site, but the thing is with Flash, Javascript, and all that stuff, it’s the spiders - and maybe I should give a little bit more detail about –

Search engines, what they do is they send out these spiders, robots, or Googlebots, or whatever you want to call them. They go and basically read your website. If they can’t read certain codes like Flash, like Javascript, and pictures, and a lot of this fancy stuff that may look cool, the thing is the spider can’t read any of that stuff. So it might be great to the visible eye and it may look cool, but search engines aren’t going to rank you well just because they can’t read any of that stuff, so they don’t know what the site is about. So Flash sites, from a search engine optimization standpoint, from an idealistic standpoint, I wouldn’t recommend them and I wouldn’t use them.

If you have your heart set on Flash sites, you can focus your efforts on more off-page optimization and optimize it that way. And do a little on-page and still have your Flash intro page. But I personally think it’s a waste of time to have an intro page because most people who click on a website spend less than a second to three seconds on there, and if you can’t get your message across in that time where it catches their eye, they’re off your website. If it’s not user friendly, they’re going to get off your website ASAP. So you want them to - catch their eye and grab them. And that Flash site, a lot of times it takes a lot of time to load and it’s a lot to deal with. So I don’t recommend them at all, but you can still optimize the site. You just have to focus your efforts a lot more on the off-page optimization, like getting links and submitting articles to get more links, and getting more content and things like that.

CM: Does having a lot of pictures and graphics impede SEO?

SW: Again, with a lot of pictures and graphics with the SEO, it weighs down the page by taking up a lot of space, because the higher kilobytes and stuff it takes, it’s going to take that page longer to load. And then, also, the spiders again can’t read graphics. It’s better to have a JPG necessarily than your BMPs and other forms of images.

But what you can do on the backend of the pictures, which is called an “alt tag” in your code, or if you use a FrontPage or Dreamweaver or something like that, you can just add in the properties in the description of the picture and put key words and phrases. But, again, you don’t want to just say “personal training Chicago,” “personal training Illinois,” “personal training, personal training.” You don’t want to just spam these key words and key phrases. You just want to write a good description about the picture and then optimize it. So, for example, yourself, “personal trainer Irvine,” and something along those lines. Maybe it’s a picture of you put “personal training” and your name, or something like that.

Because, also, now you can - like in Google there’s Google images, Yahoo! images, those also get ranked. Not many people necessarily click on them, but if you’re on the top page and people type in “personal training” and they’re looking for an image, and you’re face pops up because it rates your name and “personal training,” now you’re going to rank higher. And some people may go to the images page and click on your page. So it’s another tool to get clicked on and drive traffic to your site. That’s really what it comes down to.

So, a ton of pictures isn’t great and I wouldn’t recommend a ton of pictures, but a few pictures here and there on your webpage is okay. So, a lot of people what they’ll do is they’d have these big banners and all this stuff, and - well, first of all, the spiders can’t read it; and sometimes it’s unclear to the eye for people to read it, like there’s a phone number on it an all these images and the links to click to other pages. So if you do more text, because spiders can read the text, and then now search engines can be like, “Oh, hey, this is about personal training.” But if you have a banner that says “personal training, Irvine, California,” and it’s a picture and there’s no description, search engines can’t read the picture so basically that effort has gone to waste. But if you put it in text they can read it be like, “Oh, okay, this is what this site’s about. Let’s rank it for that.”

So the more things you do to optimize, it’s going to only help you. I believe in doing everything possible to progress you towards your ultimate goal as opposed to doing things that may look cool, but is really not going to help you. But you can optimize those pictures by putting in an alt tag. So if you want pictures - and I’m not saying not to have pictures, but have a few and then optimize them specifically using those alt tags to create that description about that picture, because then the spiders will read that description and then can rank that picture as well as your site better based on those key phrases in that description.

CM: What do search engines look for when they are ranking a site?

SW: Basically, there’s a handful of things. You’ve got your links from other websites pointing to your site, the more of those - and you have to use what’s called proper anchor text. So if you just put your name and that links to your website, or just the HTML code right to your site, it’s not going to be as specific. But, for example, if you type in a search engine, like Google, and you type “click here,” Adobe will pop up because everybody on their site has that link called “click here” that goes to their site. So they get ranked for that term. So, ideally, if you’re trying to link your business in Irvine, and it’s about “personal trainer Irvine,” you should have your link “personal trainer Irvine,” and have that point to your website from other people’s sites, and so forth. So links are very important.

Then, of course, the content is really the king. Having more original content than anybody else, having articles on your page, making your site more original and content driven. So, basically, just think about a consumer. Someone who wants to go to your site and want to learn. So the more they can learn and be like, “Wow, this is a great site! I want to keep coming back here.” It works the same with the spiders. So the spiders are going to go, “Hey, this site is great, this is awesome. It’s always updated. Content has new stuff. It’s all original. Let’s keep this at the top of the search engine because this is a good site. We’re going to hold this site.” It’s very similar pages that your site has, more internal links that you have - so more pages with your links on it, it’s going to help that site rank higher.

And, of course, the key words and key phrases that are on your website. And, of course, you should have your meta tags in place - your title, description, and your code to specifically rank your site.

CM: What is “black hat SEO?”

SW: Black hat SEO is basically the bad stuff, what you can get black balled for. It’s cheating the system is the way I look at it. You can find ways - like when I first started researching SEO, I learned a lot of techniques. And at the time I didn’t necessarily know what the difference between black hat and white hat SEO was. White hat is basically the honest approach, saying, “Okay, this is what the search engines want. I’m going to do everything in my power to do what they want and not cheat the system.” Well, black hat cheats the system, finds little glitches in the code, and basically tricks the system.

So, a few years ago you could do hidden text and it would help your site and rank extremely high, because you throw in all these key words, key phrases in the hidden text that nobody could really read. For example, a hidden text would be having white text on a white background, or black text on a black background. So nobody could really read it, but search engines can because they see it in the code and they pick it up. So you could load your page with that and it has a lot of key phrases and a lot of things that search engines want, so it tricks the system. And you can do doorway pages, [indistinct] pages so it basically looks like you have a billion pages on your website, when really it doesn’t. It just tricks the search engine and spider.

The thing is with doing black hat, the algorithms keep getting adjusted; and Googlebots and Yahoobots are getting smarter and smarter in finding those ways people are tricking the system and, you know, if get black balled you can get your site kicked off of Google, or whatnot. And it’s a pain in the butt to get it back on Google, or Yahoo!, or MSN. So you don’t want to do - I’m not a big believer in doing anything that tricks the system and kind of cheating the system because, in the long run, they’re going to only figure you out. These are the top programmers in the world you’re messing with and so, eventually, they’re going to figure something out and be like, “Okay, this is how they’re cheating the system, let’s boot them off the system.” So that means you no longer have that website and you’re not going to get ranked.

So black hat tends to - black hat SEO and people that do black hat SEO - tend to get their website ranked extremely fast, but they’re normally not in the search engine for a very long time because they’re normally getting kicked off.

CM: How many key words per page should I have?

SW: You know, a lot of people ask this question and there’s not a real specific amount. You should have a handful of key words and key phrases. So a key word would be “personal” and then “training,” key phrase “personal training.” So specific to the business that we all do is “personal training,” “personal trainers,” “personal fitness trainer,” so you want to use a variety of different ones so it picks it up. Then you also want to use phrases like “exercise,” “fitness.”

You could give somebody an exact number, but depending on  the percentage, 10-15 percent - just about maybe 3-5 percent of your key phrases should be on your page. But don’t try to - just write your page, put your key phrases on there a handful of times, and don’t stress out about it. Basically, when somebody reads your page - if somebody reads your page and knows that it’s about personal training or knows it’s about real estate, that’s all you need to do. If it’s redundant and it’s like, “Okay, I get it, it’s about personal training” - when you read it and people say that, then it’s overkill, too many key words. So take it real general basic.

Don’t stress yourself out by like, “Oh, I’ve got to have three percent. I’ve got to add another ‘personal trainer’ in here somewhere.” Don’t be that anal. Just write a page, write something specific on that term and, you know, don’t worry about your key words. Just understand that you should - when you read an article or when you read anything - people should understand what it’s about.

You go to business meetings and you talk to somebody and you talk to them for an hour and you still don’t know what their business is about, that’s someone who’s not doing their job in marketing their business. Same with your website. If you don’t know what you’re reading about then you’re ineffectively marketing your website. So just write your page so people understand what it’s about. Have some bold places where it says “personal trainer,” stuff like that.

CM: I’m not sure if you answered this in the last one, but how many times should I include my key words on the page I’m optimizing?

SW: Again, I kind of covered it - two, three, five percent at the most. But, again, as I said, don’t go overboard with it. You don’t want to overkill it. Just put enough so people understand, so if somebody’s reading it they understand your business is about this. Your header on your website should be basically what you do. So I just look at this way: if I’m driving down the street and I see a shop and it’s called “Bob’s,” you know what? What the hell is Bob’s shop called? What’s in it? Is it bicycles, bagpipes, who knows? But if it’s called Bob’s Bicycle shop, I know it’s a bicycle shop and I’ll go in there to get my bicycle fixed or get a new bicycle. Same with a website. If I go to it and it just says “Bob Smith,” well, terrific. That’s great, but who and what is it about? So you just want to have those important places like your header, right at the top, so people understand right away when they click on it.

Your title page.  A lot of people in their meta tags don’t do title pages, their title description. And it’s very important because if you’re going to click on something and you don’t have a title, why are people even going to click on your website from the search engine if there’s no title there, or if it says something like “books” when it’s about personal training.

It’s amazing what I’ve seen on people’s websites I’ve worked on. Some people don’t even have the meta tags for the description of their site. That’s the first thing people see to click on their site, so you know how important first impressions are. So you want to make sure you have those meta tags and in place so people are going to click on it. And those key words, for the optimizing per page, just don’t be anal. Just make it specific so people know what your page is about.

And, this is the biggest thing with most people, when you’re writing your webpage - and, I don’t know, say personal trainers might have a little more ego than most - but don’t make the webpage about yourself. People don’t care about how many certifications you have, this and that. They just want to read specifically about how it can benefit them, and what the personal trainer is going to do for them. So direct towards your customer. That’s just a part of marketing of your site, which is important. It’s not totally necessary for the optimization part of it, but it’s going to keep people on your site and keep traffic coming. And word of mouth and having other people gets them to your site. So it’s all about every way possible to increase traffic to your site.

CM: How important are links to SEO?

SW: Links are very important. The more inbound links you have pointing to your site the higher your site is going to rank necessarily. So basically, you look at as the top ranked sites on the internet are what everybody wants to go to. So if you go to Alexa.com and you type in - do a specific search on fitness sites, or you can go to the top most searched sites that month. And you’re typically looking at Google, Yahoo!, MSN just because their all your search engines, and then you’ve got MySpace and Alexa, and then you have Britney Spears if she did something that month or 50 cent or something along those lines.

So basically, the more famous your page is and the more awesome your site is, the more people are going to want to point to your site. That’s another reason you want to have great content and have your site - have important things so that people point to your site. So links are extremely important for the fact that if Google and Yahoo! and MSN see more sites pointing to you, they’re going to be like, “Well this site must be pretty important, so let’s rank it higher.”

There’s different kinds of links. So there’s a link exchange, for example, exchanging your website link with other relevant sites is a good thing, because that will help increase your rank in search engines. And you want to work with relevant sites. So if you’re not in the porn industry, I don’t recommend personal trainers exchange links with websites in porn, because it’s frowned upon and it’s not a like-to-like site. So if you exchange links with other personal trainers at other locations, other health food stores, other fitness place, gyms, and whatnot, that’s more of a relevant business that you’re going to rank your site higher for. So the more links you get, the better. And those are link exchanges.

They put less weight on link exchanges, slightly, because people found a way to buy links and do link exchanges and they just got massive amount of links. But they exchange site, so that’s when one site, for example my personal training site - say it’s exchanged with your personal training site. Well, that isn’t as quality. Say my website is just pointing to your website, that means I have awesome content and I have more people pointing. Or you can purchase links where you just get a bunch of inbound links, one-way links pointing to your website, which is even more powerful. And there’s all kinds of ways to get more links, but links are very important to SEO because it helps the search engine understand this is a very popular site, let’s rank it higher.

CM: Does article submission really help SEO?

SW: Articles are an excellent way to get more people, because when you write articles and you submit them to websites now you have another website promoting yourself as more or less an expert. Because their site ranks high and you have your article on there, and people go to their website and read your article. Then after reading your article they go to your website, but it’s going to help drive more traffic. It’s always about more traffic. It helps with the optimization factors, if you have links on your article then people can click on that link and it points to your website, so that site is pointing to you now. So it definitely helps with search engine optimization.

CM: Does pay-per-click really work?

SW: Pay-per-click is very phenomenal. It’s not as effective as organic ranking. It’s about 75 percent less effective. But if you’re - I recommend anyone who gets a domain, first thing they do (of course, host it and get their site up) and they’re not linked because it takes a little time to get into the organic search engine and rank their website for their specific key phrases and key words. So do pay-per-click ASAP and, of course, you want to figure out your cost ratio. If it’s costing you more than it is making you money, then of course I wouldn’t recommend it. Or I would recommend adjusting your campaign, your [indistinct] campaign, or whatever campaign you’re using to do a pay-per-click listing, to figure out how to write and add properly so people click on that site. Or maybe you’re not bidding enough money or putting the right key phrases.

So pay-per-click is very important. Most people’s website, when I start off with them, I do pay-per-click campaign because it will take a while to get that organic listing. And as soon as they get that organic listing, if they want they can drop off that pay-per-click. But sometimes they’re making a considerable amount of clients from their pay-per-click. Whey stop doing something that’s working? So, of course, it’s very effective.

CM: What are Google Adwords, and is it worth it to use them?

SW: Google Adwords is basically like a pay-per-click campaign. So Google Adwords is just using the pay-per-click campaign. Yahoo! has - it was Overture, but now I think it’s Yahoo! Panama. And so they all have their own specific - and there’s canoodle, there’s all different forms of pay-per-click that you can use. And, like I said before, they’re all worth it and they’re all very important. Granted, that organic listing is numero uno when it comes to the traffic that you’ll get. More people click on that organic ranking than they click on that sponsored or pay-per-click link, from a study that was done with the heat sensory of a mouse click. And it shows dramatic, like 75 percent increase, in the organic ranking as opposed to the pay-per-click. So they are important, they’ll get you business. Especially if you don’t have the organic ranking, I highly recommend doing pay-per-click.

CM: What is the Google Sandbox?

SW: So, Google Sandbox is basically when your site has been kicked off. So, some people think it’s a myth, some people think it’s not out there, but I’ve seen it happen before. It’s basically when you’re cheating the system, you get kicked in the sandbox. You’re stuck in the penalty box. Your site is not going to be seen until you either fix what Google didn’t like, or you’re stuck there forever. Of course, if you have a website that can be very dramatic, especially if your business is doing well with your website you can be effected. So, a lot of times black hat SEO people get websites stuck in there.

CM: What’s the best way to optimize a heavily searched term like “real estate investing?”

SW: So, for example, “real estate investing,” or “personal training,” or “gambling,” or whatever it might be - so something that’s heavily searched like “real estate investing” or just “real estate,” more people search for that than anything, as opposed to “real estate investing” or “real estate investing Arizona” or “real estate investing California.” So if you start off at a smaller market, so when you check how many people check for certain terms, for example “real estate investing,” if you find out a million people search for that a month, well there’s going to be a lot of competition for that term. If you start out smaller like, you know, off the top of my head (I don’t know without doing the research) but “real estate investing” if you just stuck to a specific state or specific city, that ranks first. So if you start and get ranked for “real estate investing Arizona” so now you’re number one in Google for real estate investing in Arizona, now it’s going to be a lot easier to start moving up the chain and getting real estate investing in another state, or focusing now on the bigger term “real estate investing.”

So, it’s focused on smaller key phrases that are searched less, then once you get those build up because that might only get 30 hits per month, but 30 hits is going to be 30 hits more a month than you got before. If it comes to personal training, 30 more customers a month is a whole lot. I don’t know most personal trainers that would complain getting 30 clients a month, by any means. But start with the smaller search term by doing the research and figuring out what would be less than trying to shoot for the stars and just go for the term “real estate,” or going with the term “real estate investing.”

CM: What should I look for when hiring a company to do SEO?

SW: There’s a lot of things when you’re looking for the company specific. Are they going to have your best interest at heart? Are they going to do black hat techniques like I talked about before? Are they going to optimize your webpage and tell you, “You should change this, this and this,” or are they going to focus more on off-page optimization? You want to look at how they’re going about doing their SEO. Are they trying to have you do hidden text? Are they going to have you purchase a ton on links? Do stuff that’s going to make [indistinct] pages, doorway pages, things like that. Things that search engines - things that aren’t necessarily friendly to the white hat. If their doing things that are covert that can get you into trouble, I wouldn’t recommend them at all.

Also, you want to look at that company and be like, “Hey, let me know what your websites are.” So, for example, a lot of companies out there will be like, “Hey, you know what? I rank for this term.” For example, “personal fitness trainer Ohio, Miami.” It’s like, “Big deal, anybody could rank for that, no body searches for it.” It’s simple to rank for that.

So, a lot of times they’ll say, “Hey, I rank number one for this, I rank number one for this,” but you can rank number one for that by doing like five things in five minutes, because there’s no competition. So, a lot of times people will rank for such small search terms and it’s kind of pointless because nobody searches for them. It’s a waste of time. But they’ll say, “Hey, I rank for this stuff. I can get your site ranked number one in Google and Yahoo.” Whatever. And that doesn’t necessarily guarantee because the algorithm constantly changes. So that means they always have to stay updated with what’s going on in the search engines and the algorithm, how it’s working, so they can continue to update, make changes, so they always keep that website as high as everybody else and compete with all those other pages to make sure that your page and your ranking is going to be number one, or the page that they’re ranking for you is going to be number one.

And then, look at the websites they’ve done SEO for, for other companies. And then type in the key terms that they’re for and find where they are in the search engines. If they’re ranking one, two and three, even four or five that’s good, that’s awesome. But if you can’t find them it should make you wonder.

Also, if their company isn’t ranked, and their website’s not ranked, it’s funny just for the fact that they’re a search engine optimization company. Don’t you think they’d want to optimize their own website? Go figure. But, a lot of times the way they design there site, it’s not necessarily totally search engine friendly. And, granted, that doesn’t make them less of a person or less of a business; that doesn’t mean they can’t rank your website number one. It should just make you question them. I say question anybody in general just to understand if they can do it, then find a website that they’re doing - other websites, other companies that they do and that they’ve ranked successfully.

CM: What’s the average cost of a successful SEO campaign for a marketing a personal training business, and how long does it take to get in the top rankings?

SW: It just depends, again, on your key phrases, your key terms and what you’re trying to rank for. So, if somebody came to me and said, “Hey, I want to rank for ‘gambling,’” I’d probably say “good luck,” just because everybody and their brother has a gambling website. So it’s a very heavy market. Not saying you can’t do it, but it’d take them an extremely long time and a lot of stuff because your people in your gambling industry and your porn industry are basically pros at SEO because they have the highest competition out of anybody. So, it’s going to be extremely challenging and extremely hard, and a lot more work that needs to be done on that site, as opposed to if the site is something with a smaller search term you can get it ranked in typically a month to six months on average.

I’ve ranked websites for specific key phrases in as little as three weeks, sometimes even shorter than that. It just depends. I mean, there’s so many factors that go into it’s hard to say a specific number. But typically an SEO company’s contracts are three to six months. If you stay with them three to six months they should have you ranked in the top of your search term, depending on your search term. But if it’s a normal search term, three to six months is a normal contract.

And then the average cost of a successful SEO campaign just depends on everything they’re doing for you. Are they doing the full campaign? Are they doing just specific features like getting links? Are they fixing your met tags, your key words, doing all the research? So it just depends on a lot of factors on what the cost is going to be. So it can range from - for some companies anywhere from $1000 a month to $50,000. It just depends on the size of the site, the size of the campaign, and the company. There’s not necessarily - it’s just like the personal training industry. There’s not necessarily any requirement out there in licenses saying “this is the way it has to be done, this is what you have to charge,” and so forth. It’s kind of a wide open market, so you’ve got to just make sure you have the research and you understand what you’re hiring.

CM: Where can people learn more about you, your products, your services, your contact info?

SW: There’s two websites, of course, with the search engine optimization if you want to learn how to do it all yourself and have all the secrets to get it ranked extremely fast, there’s http://www.seoTutorialProgram.com. And there’s http://www.PersonalPowerTraining.net. And then from those two sites, it’ll direct all the information. Again, my name’s Scott White and if you want stuff about the search engine optimization, of course go to the search engine optimization company. And then about personal training and stuff like that, which goes into ranking websites as well, and goes into the PersonalPowerTraining.net site.

This has been a fitness internet marketing, seo and search engine optimization interview

This interview is from December of 2006, keep in mind SEO and Internet Marketing is always changing so validate any of these techniques before using them.