SEO Expert Series: Mark Nunney by Rachelle Money, 11 June 2008
Wordtracker would like to introduce our very own expert in Search Engine Optimization, Mark Nunney. Journalist Rachelle Money kicks off a special interview series with Mark, in a Question and Answer article where she picks his brains on top tips for SEO work, emerging trends and advice.
Key points
- SEO is a combination of many processes working together to serve a well thought out strategy.
- Content is the key to long-term success.
- In SEO your goal should be to secure a share of online business and make a profit on it.
“I’ve been working in SEO since 1999. I was a specialist magazine publisher and I worked with experts in subscriptions marketing. I’d also done some programming at University. In ‘99 I launched a translation agency and we needed an SEO agency, so we recruited the most professional SEO agency we could find and I instantly knew they were awful. The person working on our account was clueless and we got rid of them. I did it myself.
“I did this for a year and then was naïve enough to think I could do it for a living. I wanted to live near the coast and go surfing, so moved to Cornwall (in England). I got two jobs straightaway - they're still clients - and since then I haven’t stopped.”
Rachelle: Did you think SEO was the 'The next big thing?'
Mark: “I knew SEO had great potential back then and the techniques haven’t really changed, but I’m noticing that people are starting to catch up. I can see that what was an obscure knowledge is now becoming more mainstream. I’m pleased to say a lot of SEO agencies out there still get it completely wrong which means there’s still room for me”.
Rachelle: Which sites do you do work for?
Mark: “Great Hotels of the World which, from almost no search engine traffic, is now on its way to a million visitors a month.
“Peak Performance again started with nothing and now gets over half a million visitors a month and successfully sells thousands of subscriptions and books.
“We’ve recently started working with DotComGiftShop and had a great Christmas with them.
“We also have Thinking Managers which is our own site, and it’s currently getting 80,000 visits a month. And, having got tired of making others rich, we are launching a number of our own sites.”
Rachelle: If I wanted to come up with a 'Best Practice' model of SEO, what are the top 5 things I would do?
Mark: “Best practice is hard because unless you’ve tested two possibilities ‘in combat’ in a number of different situations and over time, how do you know which is best?
“Here’s my best practice: first, SEO is not about individual things like working your page title tags. SEO is a combination of many different never-ending processes working together to serve a considered plan and strategy”.
Here are 5 stages in SEO:
- Keyword research and strategy
- Site structure and navigation
- Content - and lots of it, including the link worthy
- Link building
- Monitoring
Rachelle: Are the Americans further ahead than the Brits when it comes to SEO?
Mark: “The Americans are miles ahead. The UK online market is still very immature and naïve, and when UK sites do have SEO, it’s often poor. Working in the UK is good because working in the US is now hard.
"I guess Americans have always been marketing and sales orientated but as to why that is that‘s for someone else to answer.”
Rachelle: What trends are you noticing in the SEO industry?
Mark: “Two trends stand out for me. First, social media. Sites like Digg, Facebook, Youtube, StumbleUpon and thousands of others can be used to promote a website and get direct traffic and indirect links. This can be powerful. It's sad to see examples of great Public Relations work using these techniques, and at the same time a neglect of SEO basics when employing it. The big debate (for another day) is how much social media can challenge search engines as the main source of traffic.
“It’s also becoming necessary to have good content for long term success. It’s always been obvious this will be the case. Google is slowly removing the benefits of poor or spammy content and links, and that’s great for those of us who have built sites by putting quality content first. That to me is the most important trend. Things people were getting away with like crappy links and poor content aren’t working anymore.”
Rachelle: If I google 'Mark Nunney' I don't exactly get a lot of returns - why is that?
Mark: “The answer is that I’ve never, rightly or wrongly, had the time, need or desire to promote my company or the brand of Mark Nunney. It doesn’t bother me because I’ve always been busy. My business has been built around word of mouth. The only content I’ve put on my own website was because I once got persuaded to write an article on SEO and I thought that it was too embarrassing not having anything on my website, and that was four years ago”.
Rachelle: So no one has told you to practice what you preach?
Mark: “All the time. But what I have done is always look after a small number of clients and I guess if I’d taken another path then I’d be interested in getting business from people who didn’t know me. Imagine trying to sell SEO? It’s very hard because people don’t know what it is, or even trust it. It’s like me telling you - ‘here’s something really good, you can’t see it, you don’t even know if it’s going to work and you might not even see it for a year.’ So why would you spend proper money on that? You’ve got to believe that it will work and if you do, you need to trust whoever it is that’s doing it.
"You either trust the SEO agency because someone has told you they are good or you trust the paraphernalia of the stuff they put on their websites."
Rachelle: When someone comes to your SEO consultancy, what should they be aiming for?
Mark: “I’d say that my goal for SEO would be to secure a share of online business and make a profit on it. If a significant chunk of your market is online or is going to be, you need to get a piece of it. Then I’d temper that with some advice, because so many times I see companies who think they can get it with almost no effort. If you think like that then you are trying to break the laws of economics, and you'll fail”.
You'll find a lot of information on keywords in our keywords category page. You may also find our social media marketing page of interest to you.
About Rachelle Money
Rachelle Money is a freelance journalist based in Scotland, UK. She graduated from the Scottish School of Journalism in 2005 where she was awarded an internship with two national publications - The Sunday Herald newspaper and The Big Issue magazine. Rachelle has been working with Wordtracker since August 2007 and is a regular contributor to the newsletter.
32 comments
Another helpful article, Rachelle! Thanks for the great interview (Mark, too), and keep plowing forward with the gradually-getting-better content on Wordtracker.
Good interview by Rachelle and strong answers by Mark. We tell clients we are about 2 years behind the US market, it may even be further. Just hope the big G manages to get to good content and good links but it may not be possible with what we have currently.
Fantastic article, really interesting, thank you for sending it to me Wordtracker!
I've been on the WordTracker SEO course led by Mark and I strongly recommend it. Mark is a great presenter and clearly knows his stuff, and I went away with a firm plan of action and the knowledge to implement it.
great article - and great representative for our craft.
Here in the states, we have so many pretenders regurgitating the same ol' garbage that may or may not be true.
It looks like Mark follows the responsible approach, using logic and best practice fundamentals to help brands compete --- without the phony promises and gimmicks.
Hats off, brutha'
Christian http://run100miles.com
Loved the article. I am always searching for solid and unbiased information that will help me with my new site. Mark's comments are very helpful as I move forward. It's refreshing to get straight forward insight into SEO.
Thanks for the article Wordtracker!
One of the hardest parts of doing good SEO work is convincing traditional paper catalog companies that simply transferring their print content to a web page is NOT developing a quality site. Nor is a 3 line product description using sales-y words amid a half dozen javascript images creating quality content!
The battle wages on!
"You either trust the SEO agency because someone has told you they are good or you trust the paraphernalia of the stuff they put on their websites."
Well said Mark.
Best way to grow your business is by providing excellent service and asking for referrals.
-Gerrid
Solid link building is the heart of any SEO project, in my opinion. It is the most work intensive part of this game - getting your company name and message across the entire internet universe.
It is what will make your site sticky for the long term. All the others are just secondary.
Very helpful article.
Manuel: Two questions:
What's the best way to get deep links? Quality content.
Is there any point in 'solid link building' without lots of content to target lots of keywords and actually benefit from that link building? Not much.
So lots of quality content beats 'solid link building' because it is 'solid link building' + it targets lots of keywords.
The real point is that you can't do one thing (eg solid link building) on its own. You need research, strategy, content, link building, structure, navigation and monitoring.
Mark with all respect there are lots of ways to get deep links that do not involve quality content much at all - as an example SEO Friendly directories which will give you relevant anchor texts links to your interior pages.
Its a fact (perhaps a sad one) that Rankings don't really require much content, though I will concede that once you get the traffic to the website that content is going to be important to your ROI, just not so much to your rankings. There are endless examples of pages that rank for keywords which don't even appear on the page.
Well, yes, you do have to consider all aspects of the puzzle but IMO you will be much more effective if you give greater consideration to your link building activities.
Very helpful information! I have a fairly new online business (just celebrated our first anniversary -- www.ChesapeakeBayGiftBaskets.com) and I've been working very hard at SEO with some limited success (Google page Rank of 2) -- I would love to learn more about the Wordtracker SEO course that Mark does (mentioned by Christian above) -- how might I access that?
Laura
You had me at first, but you should have known that any SEO guru would verify. Great Hotels of the World is NOT "on it's way to a million visitors per month". It receives just 30K (avg)with a sawtooth pattern. I am dispointed and feel manipulated.
300 thousand visitors is a huge number and even 30 thousand is impresive. whilst it does seem to be true that rankings are determined by inlinks rather than content, its the content that is the best way to get those links naturally!
Gerry V -- I'm not sure what you used to verify the traffic, but if it were Alexa, Alexa only gives traffic for those who have the toolbar installed. I know I don't.
As to deep links, although there are numerous was to create them, how many directories pass high-quality link juice. Article marketing is another good strategy. But again, the quality of the Article site will determine how much link juice you receive.
Both, quality content generation and link-building campaigns need to be done, especially for long-term traffic.
Mel Nelson: yes there are lots of ways to get deep links but my point
is that quality content is the best. This is because people link
directly to quality content and are by definition linking deep. Plus
the content is the 'bait'. Can't beat it.
Laura: top tip for your 'category pages', eg, your 'chocolate gift
baskets' page: add some copy to the start of each page and write a bit
about their subjects. You gotta have the words.
Gerry V: You're right to be skeptical but I'll guess that your figures
come from something like a free tool using a small sample and perhaps
even a US-traffic bias. Here's a bit of fun I like to have that might
interest you:
Search G with some of the many keywords you can make with this formula
and see how many times www.ghotw.com makes page one:
luxury/5 star/five star + spa/business/golf/honeymoon/romantic + hotel/ hotels/resort/resorts + in + (any major and many minor town/city/ country in Europe and plenty outside)
Eg: '5 star golf hotels in florida' or 5 star hotels florida' or
'luxury spa resort milan'
Add some more words to the formula, including variations on the names
of a number of luxury hotels, and if you had the time your count would
reach 100s of thousands.
Very good interview and intriquing comments by Mark. Thanks for writing about him.
I am curious about the "social" links such as digg, del.icio.us, furl, Newsvine, etc. Why are the important to have on ones site?
Let's distinguish between having links to the 'social' sites on your site and having links to your site from the social sites.
The latter places links to your site - preferably deep links to quality content on your site - in front of a relevant audience. This might not directly pass on link power as measured by Google because the links are usually 'nofollow'. But you can get follow links indirectly if someone finds your content and then links to it from elsewhere. And you can get visitors directly too - any are the sites that have, for example, StumbleUpon as one of their major sources of visitors.
The former - links to 'social sites' from your own pages - makes it easier for readers to add your pages to those social sites.
I greatly appreciate the quick reply, but still am in the fog on many of these SEO and SEM strategies. What books or links to training online training would you recommend for me to get the broadest education in SE optimization and marketing? I am subscribed to lynda.com. They have only one course that I know of, which I have viewed.
nice...
Dave: On Wordtracker we will be publishing lots of training articles and we also run a number of training courses. Sign up to our newsletter to be kept up to date.
Cool its a great post. Well having Faith in SEO experts is the toughest part when u know there are a huge force of mixed SEO's in the market. I think SEO industry is the toughest and challenging job ever as each site differs and when it comes to Country specific optimization it becomes much tough and challenging. Every day for an SEO won't be the same :)
I always have a hard time determining if getting good links outweighs having the best content. I see these articles about "booming" traffic in a matter of a month and I always wonder. I understand grabbing a link from a very high PR site is the best, but what is the "ideal" time frame a new site could reach a PR3 or PR4 rating?
Rob: Don't worry about PR numbers for your own site, concentrate on lots of great content that will target lots of keywords - deep into the long tail - and is ideally worthy of being linked to. (So it's content and links plus good content is needed for quality link building). Promote that content. Place all this within a strategy based on keyword research and an optimized site structure and navigation. Be prepared to wait up to a year for good results from Google. Meanwhile the above work is building links that will bring direct traffic.
I love the quality content idea. I feel like I'm preaching to the choir when I talk about clients that dont understand that great sites are derived from great (and usually unique) content, thanks for the backup.
Mark - hoping that people will link to your site because of your great content is kind of a paradox in my opinion. First off in my experience there are not all that many generous souls in this world who take the time and trouble to link to others sites just because they like them. This may be more true in information sites but the commercial sites that I am familiar with are more interested in promoting their own business than adding links to others.They are simply not going to link to their competitors regardless of how great their content is.
But mostly because before people can link to your content they have to be aware of it and in order to make great gobs of people aware of your site it has to rank well which requires those links which you hope to get as a result of people finding your great content. Catch 22 IMO.
There are literally thousands of sites with great content but few links.
Mel Nelson: Catch-22? Our challenge is breaking through that 'paradox'. It can be done. If not, Google's results would rarely change. You need great content and you need to promote it. If it's great, plenty will link - 100s of thousands do every day.
Great Passage. I am really new to SEO and would love to learn more about that.
However, I think if one want to learn SEO, then have to run site with some traffic before he can really experience what is SEO.
Great thread. Superb questions and solid answers. Mark, by the way, how many pages does www.ghotw.com have?
A great - and generous - piece. Thank you!
Back to the content drawing board for me then :-)
Good article. All I can add is that once your 101 SEO on page is done its all about link building. Quality links that is.