Our US counterpart, Jade, recently did a great interview with one of Shopzilla’s own experts in SEO and published it on the US Publisher blog. We thought it could be a really helpful post so have decided to share it with our UK Publishers, too! Check out the article below.

Bloggers, webmasters, engineers, and publishers around the world are always looking to better their SEO tactics.  We recently had the opportunity to ask our own SEO expert, Michael Nguyen, a few questions about Search Engine Optimisation.  Hope you enjoy the Q&A!

Jade: Let’s start off with a brief description of what you do at Shopzilla Inc.

Michael: I’m the SEO strategist here at Shopzilla Inc. I oversee all the SEO efforts on our main properties.

Jade: SEO and SEM are sometimes used interchangeably, should they be? How would you compare the two? Why are they both important?

Michael: I see SEM as an all encompassing term - it stands for search engine marketing. All efforts to utilise search engines to promote your business would fall under SEM. Search engine optimisation (SEO) and pay per click (PPC) are subsets of SEM. There’s a lot of confusion behind what SEM represents, so I can see how some would use SEO/PPC and SEM interchangeably. As long as you know that SEO and PPC are subsets of an overall search marketing effort, then you are set.

Both SEO and PPC are equally important to driving traffic to a site. With PPC, you have very strong targeting advantages. You have much more control with landing pages, messaging, placement - essentially the entire flow from search engine to landing page is determined ahead of time. It’s fast, flexible, and limitless.

SEO on the other hand is a more volatile environment, you have less control over everything. But the traffic potential is huge. More people click on organic results than they do on paid listings.
As for why they both are important, it’s pretty simple - because your users are looking for you in both places. When users search, they’re looking for the most relevant result and ad to click on. So if you are trying to reach them, you need to play in both spaces.

Jade: We know strong SEO tactics can help a website. Can poor SEO hurt a website?

Michael: Definitely. Many of the basic SEO tactics deal specifically with helping search engines crawl your site. If a search engine can’t crawl your site in the first place, your site has a very low chance of being returned in the search results. I’d recommend everyone at least take a quick look at some of Google’s webmaster guidelines.

Jade: Do you see an end to Black Hat SEO practices in the near future?

Michael: Not really. Black Hat SEOs have great monetary incentives to continue to aggressively spam search engines. The situation is very similar to email spam - as long as someone out there can make money with spam, they will. Search engines will obviously continue to make it harder and harder for Black Hat SEOs to game their engines, but I don’t see an end anytime soon.

Jade: What are a few simple SEO tools or tips you would use on a small blog? On a larger product review website?

Michael: I’m going to point out a few articles here as they are great references. For blogs, check out: Seomoz.org. For product review websites, check out: Dpreview.com. I’d break down what DP Review has done and mimic that on a product review site.

Jade: What would you recommend to our publishers who want to learn more about SEO?

Michael: This probably isn’t the normal recommendation you’d get from other SEOs, but I recommend publishers taking a look at their analytics and checking to see what is already working for them. Take what is already working and continue to build off of that. There’s a lot you can learn from your analytics and running tests. For more traditional resources on SEO, spend some time on: seomoz.org, seobook.com, and Google (not a joke).

Michael, thanks so much for taking the time to give our publishers great advice on Search Engine Optimisation.  If you’d like to pick Michael’s brain some more, then check out his website - socialpatterns.com!

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