Rob Kelly, as best as we can put it together, is a guy I didn't quite get to work with CMP. He was a senior adviser to the SEO out on the West Coast while I was editing NetGuide in New York. Now, he's off building building a bunch of interesting sounding new companies.
Rob interviewed me the other day about SEO, and it came out pretty well, although I was talking a little faster than he could type. Click through for the whole deal, but here are a couple of pullquotes:
Ranking in the SERP (Search Results Page) is meaningless. Anyone can get to the first page for something. What I always watch for is traffic, and changes in traffic. I care about the conversion of what happens once someone hits my page…clicking the buy button or the ad. I can rank #1 on a search of “cellphone”…but if they come to my page and don’t convert, all I’ve done is cost my company money. If I can generate meaningful traffic to my reader, to my customer…that’s the win.
SEO isn’t an event, it’s a process... Too often, employers aren’t emotionally equipped to understand what SEO really is — it’s a quality process… that involves the entire company. When Toyota decided they were going to out-quality Detroit, they didn’t hire a quality guy and stick him in a cube. They hired someone who would come in and look at the operations of the entire company and build a process that baked quality in. And the best companies that do SEO, bake SEO in.
