UK WW: First of all, congratulation on your win. Please tell us a little bit about yourself, how long you have been in SEO etc.
Benj: Thank you. My first career was being a Chemist in 1994 but I did not like the 8 hour work in the laboratory and moved on to teaching undergrad Chemistry while I was taking my Master’s Degree in Natural Product Chemistry, but computers from hardware to software to graphics and design was alway a hobby for me and started running a business selling computers way back in 1997 which eventually led to stopping my Chemistry career in 1998.
From having a computer shop and Desktop Publishing (DTP) shop back then, the Internet was relatively new in 1997 in the Philippines and I was a few of the web designers that started making websites then not knowing that the future of my life will move more into this direction and will be closing my computer shop in the future.

1999 was the year I went full time with Web Design and Development. Closed the computer shop and started winning awards in designing. Although I heard about SEO already in 1999 from a book entitled “Net Results” by US Webs, which was the first book I experienced buying on Amazon, it was not really detailed and it really gave no significant information about it. All I knew about back then was stuffing the meta tags and that was it.

My real SEO experience started in 2004 when I moved from the Philippines to the United States and worked in a company in San Diego called Einstein Industries that did websites for Doctors, Dentist and Lawyers all over the US. Although my main job was a coder, making tableless CSS, XHTML validating websites with some design work, we were told to follow certain rules for SEO purposes. Which got me more curious and started learning on my own.
This then led me to forums, blogs and podcast and in my early days of learning, www.WebmasterRadio.fm was my top resource and the main show I listened to was SEO Rockstars with Greg Boser andTodd Freisen. That show used to be an active show and today, they may be less active and there are a lot of other good shows too like The Pulse, Shoemoney Show and others.

My First SEO client was a free client in 2004 just to test if SEO skills will work. My second SEO client was in 2005 and this time it was a paid client that was super cheap, just $200 bucks one time and was on-page only. Then prices just kept increasing then as my clients grew.

I joined several SEO contest in the past and where in every contest I joined, win or lose, I learn something new and is a good way to gauge your skills compared to other competitors.

Today aside from running my own small business, YDS Web Solution, Inc. (YDS Web Solution – We Make the Web Work – Complete website solution from planning to development and marketing of your website.) for small to medium sized SEO clients, I currently work for BusinessOnLine (Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Consulting Firm, Website Usability, Design and Development Services – BusinessOnLine) where I get to handle more larger, popular brand name clients being part of the SEO Team.

UK WW: When did you create your first website, what was it about?
Benj:
In 1996. A personal website, it was basically just some sort of resume, a photo gallery and about my hobbies, BMX and Martial Arts. First corporate website was for a network cabling company in 1997 as part of part-time work with the Web Philippines (www.webphilippines.com) where I worked for them briefly as my first Web Design job.

UK WW: What are you favorite SEO resources?
Benj: I can summarize that into: – Forums – Blogs/Articles – Podcast – Books – Personal Experiments – Face-to-Face conversations or Online IM chats.

UK WW: What are you favorite SEO sites?
Benj: That’s a hard one considering there are so many of them. Well there is SearchEngineLand.com, SERoundtable.com, WebmasterRadio.fm, SEOMoz.com are my favorite comprehensive SEO sites. Now there are tons of SEO bloggers out there that are too many to mention that each person has something good to offer.

UK WW: What SEO tools can you not do without?
Benj: For keyword research, I know everyone has their personal favorites, but I do prefer Keyword Discovery over Wordtracker, Wordze and others. I also created an API tool at BusinessOnLine that uses the Keyword Discovery Enterprise API that makes keyword research faster and more efficient and brings in other metrics from other sources.

For ranking reports. Well I know the majority probably uses WebPosition and there is a large number of IBP users but I am more of a WebCEO fan.

For Analytics, for my personal business clients, I work with Google Analytics and Enquisite. At my job where we work with larger corporate clients we use Omniture (Which bought Visual Sciences that bought HBX in the past) and also our own BusinessOnLine Analytics.

UK WW: There is this popular saying that content is king, do you believe in it?
Benj: Yes. People that think content is not king and they think it’s all about links, well the only way you can get good natural links is still with good content. I am sure many people can debate about this and say they can get 50,000 links over night, but this is still not natural link building.

For me Good Content gives you: – Good link baits – Better conversions, whether it is a sale or lead – Better viral spreading on social media – More return back visitors

UK WW: Who are your SEO gurus?
Benj: It depends during the stages of my SEO learning. When I was starting out, I liked listening a lot to Greg Boser and Todd Freisen. I liked Aaron Wall’s SEO Book. As time passed by, my main teacher was trial and error, keen observation and just keep on experimenting. Then I learn a few new lessons here and there from forums and various blog, but I have no main guru I listen to. I listen to everyone and I learn a little bit of something from everyone. And everything I read and hear, even if said by a popular SEO personality, I do not believe in it right away, unless I have experienced it myself so I like testing what other people say just to verify if they are true.

UK WW: Do you have a message for the other participant in the contest you won?
Benj: Winning a prize in an SEO contest is not important. Learning more in SEO after participating in the contest makes you a winner already. In an SEO contest, although you get to learn how to rank higher for a competitive keyword, real life SEO for clients may not be exactly the same. I may have won several contest, but that does not mean all my clients are always number 1. And SEO professionals that do not join contest does not mean they are not good. It just means they did not feel like joining.

UK WW: What was you thoughest challenge in the contest you won?
Benj: Not having control of people that wish to help me. I really appreciate the concern many of my online friends have although I sometimes wish they ad consulted me first before helping me because some of their methods are kind of against my own SEO philosophy.

UK WW: What are you going to do with your winnings?
Benj: I really don’t know. I just mixed it up with my Paypal money and I no longer know where it went since my Paypal money just goes in from various sources and goes out to pay various suppliers. So I just mixed it all up with my company funds and just treat it like any other company earnings.

UK WW: Will you participate on SEOContest2008 2.0 ?
Benj: Why not? Although I believe it will be hard with more people might be watching every step I make. I plan to concentrate more on coaching some friends of mine than trying to win the contest. But if ever I still win something then that will still be good for me.

UK WW: Do you have any suggestions for the organizers?
Benj: – Have a little break before doing the next contest. – I’d like it have really large prize and just make it annual, then keep on running new contest all the time with smaller prizes. – Do not use an SEO related keyword. Do something on social awareness talking worldwide problems. Epidemics, Famine, Global Warming, Oil Crisis, Stop War, Stem Cell Research, Alternative Energy, Stop Poverty, Solar Power, Wind Power, Geothermal Power, Hydro Electrical Power, World Peace, Animal Conservation etc. I’m tired of talking about SEO in an SEO Contest. – 2nd, 3rd and 4th prize had only a small prize. Maybe having an incremental drop of prizes from 1st to 4th would be better. And maybe a small consolation prize for 5th to 10th place. – Do not show the names of the owners of the site in the contest ranking page until the contest is done, although everyone is still required to register with their complete names. You will just no display the names as the contest is on going. – I find it hard “policing” sites doing blackhat stuff, that I even find it hard to police my own site since some people want to help me in ways that are not allowed. Since blackhat stuff exist in real life SEO competitors why not just allow it. I was attacked with a user-agent cloaked duplicate content but I did not want to talk about it that much and I am not totally mad at the person that did it to me. But if you just allow this instead of not allowing it, then in the next contest I will fight back with my own duplicate content machines. Just have it an anything goes contest.

UK WW: Thank you for taking the time take part in this interview.
Benj: Thank you too and more power to UK Webmaster World.

I would like to talk about the recent changes in the biggest Search Engine in the World. I am not sure if this happens for Internation websites or other regional websites ( UK based or Canada based ) but I do know for sure that it is happening in Romania, for www.google.ro

Recently there are a lot of changes in the result pages generated by google Romania. I can see SERP updates even once at 5 ( five ) minutes and that is not what I would call normal. The natural way of updating the SERPs for Google Romania was once or twice a week. So this makes me ask my self: What is happening ?
I decided to do some test on the romanian market and it is quite simple, you can also test this your self. Just pick 4-5 word you would like to play with and search the romanian Google ( google dot ro ) as often as your time allows . Pick a site to play with and see its positioning when you search. Also, do not forget to check the number of generated results. You will see sites moving arround like crazy, 5th position, after an hour check again and you will see it on the 9th position, after check again and you will see it first. That is not natural, indeed.

I first though this is another dance for a big update or something similar. After it crossed by mind that maybe Google is trying to implement a new algo. Now I have got to the conclusion that I do not know exactly what is happening, I can only have oppinions and I must test further to get to a conclusion. One other possibility would be that Google is returning on the same computer, at 5 minutes time between a search and another one, for the same keyword, results from different Data Centers. I have seen the case, one DC for Timisoara and another one for Iasi, but I have never though of it like this.

Now to go further, let us play a bit with the results from a romanian keyword.I have searched for tipografie ( it means print house ) on google dot ro and first I get over one million results and at the second search five minutes later I get under a million.
Rezultatele 1 – 10 din aproximativ 997.000 pentru tipografie. (0,08 secunde)

Another case was that for a keyword that used to generate arround 60.000 results, I got now over 400.000 results. One hour later I got arround 87.000 results. That, again, is not normal. And all these things cause problems. There is no way you can offer a client a good aproximation of what their website will be in 3 months time if Google keeps on playing with the results like that.
For some of the sites I am working on I get really bad results, the number of visitors coming from Google dropping quite much, while for other websites I got a higher number of visitors, but this only in certain days.

And now, the question is : why does google generates the result pages different for each browser ? A client noticed this while searching using IE. I ran the test in that moment and he was right. Now I can not get a similar result, but if the case will repeat, I will sure take a screenshot.

UK Webmaster World first attempt at running and SEO contest kicks of today. The contest, title seocontest2008 started at 12 midnight today, the 1st of February 2008.
Webmasters and SEO consultants from all over the English speaking world are competing, not just for the cash Prize of $1,000 but the recognition of being crowed winner.
You can find out more about the contest at SEO Contest pages . You can join the discussion about the contest at SEO contest discussion thread.

Over the last few years social networking has been steadily gaining popularity among Internet users. With hundreds of thousands of registered users and new networking sites created daily if used properly social networking can be very powerful source of traffic to your site. Even though traffic from social networking sites may be not the best quality and may not get you many conversions but it’s free and may have positive effect.

I will describe on the example of StumbleUpon since it’s one of the most popular networks how you can take advantage of social bookmarking sites.

One of important steps is creating a “name” for yourself. By “name” I mean not login or screen name. You want to earn respect from other members.
All websites you bookmark or vote for will be listed in your profile, so bookmarking junk will not help your reputation. From this point of view you need to be careful participating in stumble exchanges like it is very popular on Digital Point forums. Always check if site you are voting for worth recommending, same way as would you place link to it on your own website. Try to stay active and submit something new at least once a week.

Second step is creating network of “friends”. More virtual friends you have – better success you can expect from your website marketing efforts.
Every time you submit new site or vote for someone else’s – your vote will show up on your mutual friends pages. If your friend like the resource you have submitted he will likely to vote or comment on it. Instantly your submission will appear on his or hers friends pages. In other words it’s a pyramid effect at it’s best. If your submission is good and gets enough votes to make it to the front page – you better hope that your server can handle amount of traffic you are going to receive…
Join groups and try to find friends with similar interests – this will increase chances that they will agree to be your friends and vote for your submissions.
Don’t spam your virtual friends with some unsolicited offers or constant requests to vote for your submissions – you risk to lose them!

When submitting new resource try to write relevant title and detailed descriptions. First it will work as a link bait inviting users to visit your site for more information. Second – you will get back link to your site with relevant content and key phrase as an anchor. In addition to sending extra traffic to your site these bookmarks on social networking sites will have positive effect on your website SERPs.

One more time I suggest to be careful with participating in vote exchanges or purchasing votes – most of the time it’s useless since these “paid” visitors are not interested in the content of your site and most likely don’t have many virtual friends who would trust theirs recommendations. If you decided to try one of those exchanges I would suggest to check other peoples threads instead of starting your own. This way you can chose who are you voting for and than ask to return the favor (better by PM).

This is basically it. There are some differences between social networking sites but principle is the same – submit new resources and rate resources submitted by other users. I have been using social networking technique to promote many different sites and result was always the same – increased traffic.