SEO Mentor

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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?

Lee: Sure. Well, I grew up in the mid-west. I still work and live in the Minneapolis area. We live out in the suburbs. Probably one thing a lot of people don’t know is that I spent some time in the military, a long, long time ago. After university, I got some odd jobs, but ultimately landed in a situation where I was working for a web development company selling websites. People asked for more. They wanted more than just these template websites.

I started teaching myself some basic code and forms and that sort of thing. Then they started asking, “How am I going to drive traffic to these websites you just sold me?” That’s where the SEO thing came into play. That company I was working with was focused on just selling websites, not on web marketing, but the owner of the business let me do pretty much what I wanted as far as building up my knowledge of search engine optimization (SEO). I started playing with a site called Goto.com, which is the predecessor to Overture, which is now Yahoo Search Marketing Pay Per Click. Anyway, in 2001 I started TopRank. I decided to stop making someone else a lot of money and maybe make a couple of bucks myself, I don’t know; have a little more control. TopRank was started at the same time as Misukanis and Odden, which is a PR firm. Together we shared back office resources and marketed ourselves separately, although today most of our revenue comes from search and digital PR, mostly online types of business, so we’re known as TopRankMarketing.com.

Garrett: That’s wonderful. How about your family? Do you have kids?

Lee: Oh sure, I have three ‘munchkins’ as I like to call them on Twitter. They keep me very busy. Today is the first day of school so two of them are having a big day. I am doing the typical suburban dad types of stuff.

Social media-wise, I’m pretty active on Twitter. I played with Facebook a bit, and I probably should use LinkedIn more than I do. In fact, I do use it more professionally, not personally. Twitter is kind of a neat channel for both; it’s sort of a hybrid of personal and professional dialog back and forth between people all over the world that have similar interests. It’s kind of neat about Twitter in that it’s totally opt-in. People only hear you if they’ve decided to follow you. Of course, they can always un-follow you at any time. That’s been an interesting communication channel. It’s not for everybody. But, if you figure it out, just like any other tool, it can be pretty satisfying and also productive.

Garrett: I was reading some stats yesterday. They’re probably old, but from 2007 until early 2008 or whenever, Twitter grew 1600%.

Lee: Even while they’re having all those infrastructure issues and people were going over to Plurk and other micro-blogging services, they still continue to grow. The neat thing about Twitter isn’t so much Twitter itself, it’s the third party applications that make it easier to use, I think. There you go.

Garrett: That’s good to know. That’s an interesting fact, that you were in the military a while ago, and something probably none of us knew. That’s great.

What are some of the things you really enjoy about the search engine marketing industry and your career?

Lee: When I started out, it was me and I was doing all the SEO stuff. I was selling, making, doing just about everything, not everything. I didn’t have to do any invoicing or anything like that. I was serving up to twenty-five clients at a time. Now, one thing I really enjoy is having a team of people that are super smart, super passionate, about what they do. They live and breathe search marketing or internet marketing really is a little more accurate. We do more than just search. We do email, digital PR, and some stuff in the social media and blogging space as well.

That’s one of the greatest things, is to be with a group of people, and to work with a group of people who I am learning from all the time. We have our folks experiment with stuff. They’re supposed to dedicate a certain amount of their time to experimenting and trying different things out. Plus, the account teams work with clients, solving new problems, all the time. They come back and share that, their problems and also their solutions.

It’s kind of motivating to me to get to work in a situation where there’s always learning going on. The people around you are interested in learning. It’s a life-long thing. There’s no stop after university or grad school or whatever. It’s something that is very motivating for me. So, I get some satisfaction personally out of that, and I do whatever I can to support those folks around me who make TopRank have such a great reputation in the industry.

Garrett: That’s awesome. I totally agree with you. That’s the fun apart about this industry; it’s always changing. We are always learning.

Lee: Yes, even if it wasn’t constantly changing, you’re right. That adds another layer on top of it, people that need to be interested in learning new stuff and not get satisfied with a time-clock punching mentality.

Garrett: Let’s say a newbie is coming into the search or social media industry. What’s one or more gold nuggets of advice you would give somebody new, or even somebody at a moderate level?

Lee: With SEO and social media marketing, I guess the first thing I would say is those are two different things. There is certainly interplay between them, but approaching them would be unique. I guess I look at SEO more as a pull-marketing sort of tactic, where you are optimizing content. The key words that you are associating with that content and that you’re promoting through link building allow that kind of content to rank well in the pages. People are pulling themselves to it because they’re searching for it. They are segmenting themselves and what kind of user they are, what kind of interests they have, by the words they type into a search box.

In a social media scenario, it’s different in that a lot of it is based on networking, connections, and recommendations that people are making between each other. They’re sharing, voting, and there is a lot more interaction in a scenario like that.

I think with social media communities, it’s really important to have a give to-get perspective. People look for silver bullets, golden nuggets, or other precious metal advice, but there’s really no one thing. I guess from a top-level thing that would apply at all times, the give-to-get advice. You have to give to get as a marketer; you have to give to get personally, if you’re going to be successful in social communities and social networks. It’s important to participate and learn how things work.

In the social communities there are publicly written rules. People can easily learn about those, but like any other social situation, there are a lot of unwritten rules. There is etiquette or things you should and shouldn’t do, but it’s not actually written on the wall anywhere. As a marketer, it’s important to understand what those things are; otherwise, you’ll fall on your face.

I think with SEO, it’s also important to participate, but that’s more in terms of not only providing consulting but having your own sites you can experiment with. You can read a lot of information on forums and blogs and go to conferences like SES, but the best learning experience for SEO, I feel, is by creating, optimizing, and promoting your own websites, and analyzing the hell out of what happens. There is a give-to-get rule there too, meaning you have to produce good content. But, you also have to promote it so people know about it, so they can link to it. You know, ‘build it and they will come’ doesn’t work.

I guess that would be my advice for someone new, if they’re going to look at social and SEO; from a social side you need to get in, participate and learn the rules, both written and unwritten, and then start to promote things of value. On the SEO side, you need to start your own site or more sites, and you need to experiment and find out what works, on top of reading what other people are saying.

Garrett: Wonderful, thank you. In your opinion, what is the most exciting trend today, in these industries?

Lee: I think with search and social and even maybe paid search, a lot more companies are looking at those as channels, and maybe looking at internet marketing a little more holistically. There are many more companies that are bringing SEO and paid search in house, but many of those companies still need help with strategy. A lot of them are short staffed, so they need help with implementation.

I know a lot of the big companies that we work with at TopRank; a big issue is ongoing link building and content promotion. A lot of these companies have absolutely brilliant SEOs that can do all the technical and code optimization, on page copywriting and stuff like that, but they’re really at a loss as to how to leverage link building and content promotion that will attract links in a meaningful way, or at least in a scalable way. They’re tasked with doing so many other things besides just straight out SEO.

That means there are a lot of involving opportunities for consultants to become even more involved with companies and their online marketing efforts, rather than less. Just because something is going in house doesn’t mean the SEO consultant needs to be left out of the picture. An SEO consultant that’s strategically capable to provide long term advice, fill in where they are needed, and maybe even offer some training, has a huge opportunity. I think that is a big trend, as opposed to someone who is just looking to be handed over an SEO project, and to implement it.

I think social media is a fuzzy thing to a lot of companies. You say it to one company and say it to another person at another company and they’ll give you a totally different answer. One person might say Facebook; another person says blog or Twitter. It’s a very big shift in how companies communicate with their customers.

I think companies that hold onto the old school or legacy communication models will really feel the pain if they don’t make the effort to understand how their companies, brands and customers are going to be affected by how people are using social media as ways to learn about and recommend products and services to buy.

Those companies that are involved in social media in their marketing really need to make sure they have a good grasp of the analytics. Just going out and chasing after the shiny object of Web2.0 might be great, like all those people that threw all that money at Second Life, for example. There is some publicity in showing you can spend a God-awful lot of money with no return, but you’ve got to have an ROI justification in it.

Someone is going to have to answer. There is going to be some accountability at some point in time. If companies are going to engage in social media marketing, they really need to have a grasp on the analytics in some point in time, in order to show that “Hey, you know what? We are getting a return off of this.”

Garrett: Right, that’s very interesting. That’s one thing I’ve noticed. That’s going to be the big push now. It’s still in its infancy, social media, but unless these consultants and people who are doing it for these companies, like you said, can show them that it’s really helping their business, they’re not going to succeed.

What’s your favorite social media site online, and why?

Lee: Hmmm. Well, I guess at the center of everything that is social media oriented that I’m involved with, it would be our blog. I mentioned before that I spend a lot of time on Twitter because of its reach. We have a little over 2,500 people following me. I really have no idea why that is. It’s an interesting thing to be able to drop a link to something; I prefer and enjoy more promoting other things of interest that other people are trying to get the word out on. If it’s something really valuable, I’m happy to promote it. If it’s not, I just ignore it.

I guess the core of what I’d like to do in terms of social media is blogging and augmenting that with off the blog types of promotion, like might happen with Twitter, or might happen with Facebook, or on other social media sharing sites like Flickr or YouTube, or something like that.

Garrett: Most of my interviews, the answer has been Twitter. It’s interesting that you just stick to your blog, which is so powerful, but yet it’s still a huge social network and social media tool.

Lee: Right, if I’m using Twitter, if I ever do use Twitter as a promotional tool, I’m driving traffic to our blog. I think this is a trend that people should be aware of. Not everything has to happen on the company website. It can happen on their blog, the brand interaction, or even some type of conversion, depending on what’s being offered. It can happen, maybe, on Twitter. It can maybe happen on a YouTube channel. It could happen on a forum somewhere. I think that’s something that a lot of companies are kind of getting clued into. They don’t have to exert all their marketing effort into driving traffic just to the company website. Good things can happen elsewhere.

Garrett: All of these are channels that we can use. That’s great. Who are some of your favorite people in the industry that you continually follow online?

Lee: I’d love to answer that, but there’s a huge chance I’m going to piss somebody off for leaving them out. You can imagine the usual suspects, people who are pretty vocal and offer a lot of value. I still spend time once in a while on Sphinn. I read blogs that are aggregated at SEOMash.com. Of course, we manage a list of over five hundred blogs, and I have my RSS readers because we drop about seventy blogs off every quarter because of not posting and other reasons. But, my RSS reader keeps them all. I have almost one thousand SEO blogs in my RSS reader. Of course, I don’t read any more than a hand full of them.

I would want to draw attention to some of the people I work with because I do learn so much from them. One good example would be Susan Misukaniss, who handles the operations for our business and the day-to-day stuff. She also does a lot of strategy consulting. A lot of people don’t know her because she’s not active as a blogger. She doesn’t really go to the conferences, but she’s really the heartbeat of the whole TopRank organization, actually. It’s because of the stuff that she does that allows me to go out and speak at conferences, spend time blogging, and Twittering, and all kinds of other indulgent marketing activities.

Garrett: I bet she will appreciate those nice words you had to say. You were talking about your big list at TopRankBlog. What does someone have to do to be featured on your big list?

Lee: Link to us is always helpful. We like the links. Links are good. Nobody should link to us if they don’t think we’re worth it, but the big thing is getting noticed by us. That happens most often by somebody linking to us because our WordPress notifies us whenever someone links to us. We follow up on that.

As I mentioned before, we do look at Sphinn, so there’s a lot of new blog discovery on Sphinn, or blogs that get picked up by other sources that we monitor. We don’t take direct requests, at least not right now. People do make direct requests, and it’s happened where someone was on the blog and then they stopped blogging for a while, now they’re blogging again and they let us know. That’s totally fine. But if someone just says, “Hey, we really think we have a great blog. We really think we should be on your list.” We may look at it, but that’s really not going to be the reason we’re going to add them to the blog. It’s because of being in the blogroll of another blog that we’re already following, or again, a link to us, or showing up with some really great content on a site like Sphinn or StumbleUpon.

Garrett: That’s great. It sounds like first of all, link to TopRankBlog.com and second, have great content that will bring attention to you guys, is that right.

Lee: Yes.

Garrett: Good. Now Lee, you’re famous for your online surveys at TopRankBlog.com. Out of all of them, which results have surprised you the most?

Lee: Wow, We’ve had some polls where we’ve asked people what some of their favorite uses of Twitter online marketing tactics. Actually, that’s one. This is interesting, I’m sorry I had to bring it up. We did a poll earlier in 2008, actually February of 2008. We asked, “What are the online marketing channels that readers will most use in 2008?” The number one, two, and three thing, four, five, yeah these are really consistent, blogging, email marketing, search engine optimization, pay per click and social networks. I was a little surprised to see online PR so low, and viral marketing so low. It just seemed interesting that a lot of people didn’t vote for that. Maybe that just speaks to our audience. We do talk so much about blogging and SEO.

The other thing is that I know in a lot of other surveys, a lot of B2B companies emphasize conferences, webinars, and email as their top marketing tactics. Webinars didn’t show up in the top ten on this particular survey, but they seem to really be picking up steam. You see them all over the place now.

Garrett: That’s interesting. That was kind of a selfish question. I’ve always wanted to know what you thought because you do a lot of those surveys. I wanted to know what had surprised you the most. That is interesting.

You were at the SES Conference last week, right?

Lee: Yes.

Garrett: What did you get out of that conference? What was the big buzz or what did you get out of it the most?

Lee: We got a heck of a lot of content. We had four bloggers there, plus myself. We were publishing twelve to fifteen blog posts a day. Normally we’re maybe one a day. We lost subscribers because of that. We probably dropped a couple of hundred subscribers because they were just getting overwhelmed with all of this content. We’ll be able to repurpose some of that content, which I just did a blog post on this morning. I didn’t list that as a tactic, but this was like fifty different ways you can do that. I only listed five.

The conference itself seems to have matured a little bit in some areas. In some areas, it’s still trying to get its footing, I think. I didn’t go to a lot of sessions. I went to an Orion panel with (I’m not going to remember everybody’s name) Danny Sullivan, Robert Scobel, Matt Cutts, Kirsten Mangers, and a couple of other fellows whose names I don’t remember, but one of them was the founder of Hulu. That was a really cool panel. That was really neat. They had a lot of interesting things to say. The moderators were Kevin Ryan and Mike Greehan. I thought that was an impressive panel because it reminded me more of an Adtech kind of thing. It was very professional, but it was light-hearted and funny too. That was really good to see that. Of course, the room was absolutely packed with people.

The other sessions that I saw were really good. At the very end of the conference, there was a session on “In House SEO”. Of course, in house SEO could be any size company, but they tend to be really huge companies at these search-marketing conferences. They want to have these big brands talking up there, which was fine. Our SEO company does a lot of work with very large companies. There was a fellow there from Microsoft and someone from Yahoo, and a couple of other folks. That was really insightful on how they were tackling technical SEO issues with websites, with millions and millions of pages. In fact, I think it was Derek Wheeler, from Microsoft, who said they really don’t know how many pages they really have at Microsoft.com. That was pretty interesting.

The networking was great. Of course, the post conference activities like Google Dance and Search Bash were awesome. Yahoo had kind of a non-party so that was non-eventful. Over all, the networking was very good. It’s great to see friends you’ve had in the industry for a long time that you only get to see at these conferences. Making new network contacts is always very valuable as well as reinforcing network contacts you have, but there is no substitute for in person contact, having coffee, lunch or dinner with somebody.

Garrett: It sounds like it was an overall success and you had a good time.

Lee: I thought it was worth going to. I really did. I thought it was a good conference. I still think they’re still finding their way a little bit, but they’re certainly a lot further along than they were maybe a year ago, after things changed over.

Garrett: What conference will you be speaking at next? Is there anything coming up soon?

Lee: Yeah, you know for some reason I agreed to do something on both coasts within the space of two or three days. Next up, I’m at Omma Global, in New York. That’s on September 18, 2008. I’m going to be speaking on a panel that they came up with, called “Digital Asset Optimization”, which is a concept that TopRank has been promoting for about a year now. It’s what we use to describe how we approach SEO holistically. They created a panel for that; we didn’t even pitch them for it. They just reached out and said, “Would you like to speak on this panel?” I was like, “Yeah, we made up the word, I suppose it would make sense for us to talk on the panel.”

Then on September 20th, I’ll be in Las Vegas. I guess it’s not on the other coast, but it’s close enough for me. We’ll be moderating an SEO panel at Blog World Expo. That panel is going to have Michael Gray (aka Graywolf), Brian Clark from Copyblogger, and Stephan Spencer from Netconcepts. Those three fellows have not all three been on a panel together ever before. I think that’s going to be a pretty cool session to attend.

Garrett: That sounds great. Thank you again, Lee, for your time and everything you do for the industry, for your wonderful content. And finally, if my listeners would like to find out more about you and your services online, where should they go?

Lee: Thank you, Garrett; you’re very gracious to say those things. We’re just trying to grind it out here and have fun doing what we like to do. As far as getting hold of us, our company site is TopRankMarketing.com. Our blog is TopRankBlog.com. We’re always welcoming people to check us out on Twitter, which would be twitter.com/leeodden.

Garrett: That’s great. I will have this transcribed. All those links will be over at YourSEOMentor.com. You can check that out in case you didn’t get the spelling. Or, you’re a search engine guru, so you could always search “Lee Odden” and you will be right there.

Lee: Yeah, the phrase I like to use “online marketing”. Just type in “online marketing” on Google. Unfortunately, Wikipedia does rank higher than us, but that’s it.

Garrett: Oh man, you have to beat them out.

Lee: I think Wikipedia’s love affair with Google still persists even though Knol’s around. I can’t get in between that relationship.

Garrett: Again, thank you and have a great day.

Lee: You too.

To find out more about who transcribed this interview check out Tamara Bentzur!

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 27th, 2008 at 4:03 am and is filed under Monday Interviews, SEO, SEO Friends, SEO Podcasts, Social Media, Your SEO Mentor Podcasts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Tags: Big List, Garrett Pierson, Interview, Lee Odden, Podcast, SEO, Social Media, Toprankblog