SEO Mentor

I had the wonderful honor of spending some time with Lee Odden of Top Rank. He gave great insight on the changing SEO Industry and the up and coming Social Media industry. Also Within the interview that you can listen to above or read the transcript below you will find that Lee is not only smart but a really great guy and down to earth. So take a listen or check out & read the transcript below:

Garrett: Hello, it’s Garrett Pierson, Your SEO Mentor, here today with Lee Odden. Lee is known for his TopRankBlog.com and TopRankMarketing.com sites. How are you, Lee?

Lee: I’m very good Garrett. How are you?

Garrett: I’m good. It’s good to have you. I really appreciate you taking time to spend some time with me and my listeners. It’s a great honor to talk with you. I’ve been following your stuff for a long time now and I really appreciate your wonderful content for the industry that we’re in.

Lee: That’s very kind of you to say that. I appreciate the opportunity. I also appreciate that you’re one of the few people who actually says my last name is “Oh-den”. Most people say “Aw-den” or some other variation of that. They are kind of like key word permutations or something. I don’t know.

Garrett: That’s a big reason why I do these short and to the point interviews. A lot of us follow you, or follow some great authorities within the industry, but we don’t know a lot about you. That brings me to my first, introduction question. What could you tell us about yourself that we might not know about you your background in the SEO, social media industry, your family, and your hobbies, anything you want to talk about?

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There has been a lot of questions about how Social Media is affecting the SEO industry. The question I would like to ask is how can it help the SEO industry and how will affect the SEO for my clients sites and my own. The major issue with Social Media sites and how they play a role in your SEO these days is a majority of them (especially the big boys e.g. Twitter) use the Nofollow link. “Well your asking what does this mean and why do I need to worry about it.” First of all don’t worry about it, this is not the end of the world but what it means is that going to all these major social media and networking sites and linking back to your website will for the most part have no affect on your search engine results.

The NoFollow link (e.g. <a href=”url” rel=”nofollow”>) was originally created to block search engines from following links in blog comments, this was due to the very high amount of blog comment spamming. The wonderful Wikipedia definition says, “nofollow is an HTML attribute value used to instruct some search engines that a hyperlink should not influence the link target’s ranking in the search engine’s index. It is intended to reduce the effectiveness of certain types of search engine spam, thereby improving the quality of search engine results and preventing spamdexing from occurring in the first place.”

With Social Media sites popping up daily and with them being very easy to place user generated content and links spammers began the same old routine and therefore we suffer from their actions. The top social media and networking sites quickly found that they too needed to use the nofollow attribute to help reduce the amount of spam submitted. So for the most part placing a link on Social Media sites will not directly help your search engine optimization efforts. That doesn’t mean Social Media can not help in gaining valuable links to your sites here are a couple of ways Social Media and Networking help:

• Ask for links to your site from those people you are networking with
• Social Media is a great Link Baiting tool
• Create instant awareness of your website or blog posts making it easier for people to find and therefore link to

So these are just a few tips and examples of how you can use Social Media and Networking site to help gain valuable links back to your website for SEO purposes. Although the majority of these social sites we use daily will not directly help our site SEO here are a list of some that can:

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My interview with Alejandro Reyes aka Successfool was the bomb this rockstar is so smart and has so much passion. Take a listen to the interview above or read the transcript below!

Garrett: Hello Everyone, Garrett Pierson here. I am here with Alejandro Reyes. How are you buddy?

Alejandro: Good, thanks for having me on your show.

Garrett: No problem; it’s a pleasure. I just wanted to tell everybody that I’m so excited to have you and talk with you for a little while. I’ve been totally impressed with you, what you do, and I think of you as the “master connector” and “relationship builder”. That’s what I call you.

One thing that has impressed me is that you’re not afraid of anything. Would you agree with that?

Alejandro: Wow! You’re reading my mail.

Garrett: You’re not afraid. You love to connect with people. I think that’s so powerful. In some of the questions I’m going to be asking you today, we will get into a little bit more of that.

A little bit more about Alejandro; he is a social media marketing consultant, entrepreneur, blogger, connector, speaker, family man; he has a little girl, four months old. Is that right?

Alejandro: Yes, little baby Sadie.

Garrett: Awesome! He runs Successfool.com. For all those listening at iTunes, or anywhere else, just go to YourSEOMentor.com, search for the Alejandro Reyes interview, and you can get all the links to his stuff.

Successfool.com is a blog for entrepreneurs and internet marketers for understanding how to use social media to better connect with the audience. It’s an awesome, awesome blog. You all need to get over there and check it out. One thing that Alejandro helps people with is he helps them become rock stars online. Isn’t that right, Alejandro?

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For this SEO & Social Media Monday Interview Podcast Series I had the opportunity to interview myself. Yea I know I am weird but hey your chance to learn a bit more about me Garrett Pierson Your SEO Mentor. I also go into depth of why and how I do these interviews and stay tuned to my next interview with Lee Odden of TopRankBlog.com on Monday August 25, 2008!

So check out and listen to the podcast above or check out the transcript of the recording below:

Hello everyone, this is Garrett Pierson here; Your SEO Mentor. You’re here for my Monday interview series. Welcome, and thank you for being here.

Today, I have the opportunity to interview myself, Garrett Pierson. The interviewee that I was going to interview fell through but that is okay. I have the opportunity to interview myself. That’s a good thing, because I’ve had a lot of listeners, people who follow me, and friend ask, “Garrett, you’re doing these great interviews with some great experts in the SEO and Social Media communities and industries, but we don’t know a lot about you.” This is a great opportunity for me to tell you all a little bit about myself, to tell you why I do these interviews, and to go through what these interview series are all about. Thank you for this opportunity. Hopefully you guys will stick around and listen. I’m going to make this very quick and to the point.

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Ideas by Garrett Pierson and Illustration by Mike Dyson

With all joking aside I am totally excited about Pubcon this year and there is a sweet lineup of speakers and the extra bonus of the conference being in Las Vegas. Just got word that they posted the conference session schedule.

Anyways this was just a quick fun post! Just wanted to lighten up the mood in the industry!

So I just wanted to keep everyone in the loop quick and talk about two top news items today that I thought were worth throwing a quick post up about.

First Google just announced the new analytics–Google Insights. You can read more about the announcement and check out the new tool but here is what I think quick and then I will give you Andy Beal’s post about the topic.

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