Jill Whalen, Founder And CEO, High Rankings
In the early 1990s, Jill Whalen was a housewife and mom who discovered a passion for the Internet and building social media and social communities on the Web. Twelve years later, she’s involved in SEO daily and is a well-known SEO expert at her consultancy, High Rankings.
Whalen prides herself on providing close, personal care to her clients through High Rankings. Through her SEO strategies, Whalen helps clients such as Geico, Breeders.net, Proctor & Gamble, the Log Homes Council, and the Discovery Channel reach better search rankings.
Jerri: What usually brings a client to you?
Whalen: Being a pioneer in the search marketing industry for 12 years and having a newsletter subscription base of 25,000-plus subscribers has built a lot of credibility and trust around the High Rankings brand. Many of our clients have been newsletter subscribers for many years, and they want confirmation that what they’ve been doing on their own is sufficient. Often our first contact is with the Internet marketing manager of a small to mid-size B2B company who simply doesn’t have the time to keep up with everything in the SEO space.
Jerri: What do you see as some of the least successful practices in SEO?
Whalen: There are a number of things in SEO that people believe are necessary, but which in reality have little to no actual effect on bringing highly targeted search engine traffic. For instance, submitting your web site to the search engines has no effect on whether your site will be indexed or ranked well. Putting keywords into the meta keyword tag is not needed if you are concerned with Google. Optimizing for keyword phrases that nobody actually searches for in the engines is another common SEO practice that yields no results.
Jerri: What are some of the most successful practices?
Whalen: Successful practices include carefully researching keyword phrases and systematically choosing the pages of the site in which they should be targeted. Then it’s simply a matter of working them into the pages in a natural way.
Jerri: Are there any strategies that small and mid-sized business know they should be using but don’t? Why?
Whalen: We often find that the actual architecture of a site should be changed for best results in the search engines. But since this can often mean a fundamental redesign of the entire web site, it’s not something that can always be done and “workarounds” have to be found instead.
Jerri: What guidelines would you give a small or mid-sized business that is just beginning to implement SEO strategies?
Whalen: I’d highly suggest thinking about their SEO at the very beginning of their web site devel- opment, or at least while they’re in the process of a redesign. If they do that, they can get things.
right from the very start. Many small to mid-sized companies spend tens of thousands on a redesign, and then they try to hire a company such as High Rankings for SEO. At that point, it can sometimes be too late, or certainly not as cost effective as it could have been had they consulted with an SEO firm during the redesign process.
Jerri: What changes have you seen in search engine optimization and search engine marketing over the last few years?
Whalen: The greatest changes have been in how companies measure the success of their SEO cam- paigns as well as the advent of social media marketing as a link-building tool.
For measuring success, it used to be done via search engine rankings; however, as rankings have become far less static, it’s actually an impossible measurement. Search engines are no longer showing the same thing to everyone anymore. Most search results are personalized as well as geo-targeted. Today’s measurement for success is in search engine traffic, conversions, and sales.
With social media marketing, web sites such as Digg and del.icio.us as well as numerous other pop- ular online communities enable savvy search marketers to get their clients’ products and services noticed in a completely new way. Since having numerous high-quality links pointing to your web site is a big factor in getting found in the search engines, “link baiting” has become a popular new form of viral marketing that can really help an SEO campaign get off the ground.
Jerri: Will SEO even be possible as social media grows? If so, how will it change the SEO is achieved?
Whalen: Yes, as in the previous answer, it has already changed things to a certain extent. However, social media alone are not going to be half as effective if you have a “broken” web site. At High Rankings, we like to say that we “fix” web sites to be the best they can be for the users as well as the search engines. You’d be surprised how much good usability goes hand-in-hand with good on- page SEO. Very often, the things that make a web site better for its users also make it better for the search engines. After all, Google wants to find the best web sites for their users-the searchers.
Jerri: Any other changes that companies considering or even already using SEO should be aware of? How are those changes likely to affect SEO in the future?
Whalen: I’m of the SEO school of thought that the more things change, the more they stay the same. The same fundamental principles I’ve written and talked about since the early 2000s are still often the same ones we talk about today. The search engines want the same things they’ve always wanted – the most relevant web site for the search query at hand. The trick, if you will, is making your site actually be the best, and then getting the word out to others about it.
Jerri: Is there anything I haven’t touched on that you think is important for small and mid- sized businesses to understand about SEO?
Whalen: The greatest difference we see today is that you can’t fake being the best anymore. There is simply too much competition out there. The best way to set yourself apart from all the others is to truly be creative and unique. If you’re just going to offer the same product or service as everyone else, you don’t stand a chance of making it in the search engines anymore.
