Jordan Kasteler

A friend of mine on Twitter @martinbowling sent me these questions to answer and post on my blog which he is also posting on his blog: Zima

THE QUESTIONS:

1. How long have you been working in and what attracted you to it?

I started off as a web designer/web developer at about the age of 13 or 14. I just really loved it as a hobby and started working as a web designer after high school at an ad agency when I was 18. They were teamed up with this SEO company. This SEO company was called Engine Ready, run by Jason Miller. He taught me a lot of SEO things. That’s how I first got my introduction to SEO. I wasn’t really in love with it at the time. I later worked as a web designer in house for a real estate and mortgage company. They wanted to get their sites ranked. I said, “I know a little bit about it.” They said, “Take two or three weeks, immerse yourself in SEO, and come rank our sites.” So, I did. For those couple weeks, I spent all my time learning all I could. I got their sites ranked and fell in love with SEO. It was a connection ever after that. I went to work for an SEO agency after that, called WI Works. I worked there for about three years and just recently made a shift to Overstock.com as an in house SEO specialist.

2. In your opinion, what’s the measure of a good SEO/PR/Blogging professional?

Passion, knowledge, and experience.

3. Whose Blog do you read the most?

Probably Search Engine Journal. I love @seosmarty‘s posts on there.

4. What’s your best “SEO secret” or blogging tactic?

If I told you I’d have to kill you.

5. Search engine algorithms are getting smarter, and a lot of people predict Organic SEO services will become obsolete. How do you plan to adapt?

Thinks will definitely change. I wrote a more in-depth post called The Future of SEO and it discusses how Internet marketers will need to adapt to future changes. We’re already starting to see that SEOs are realizing that they need to be more about marketing than just search engine ranking professionals.

6. Please Describe the biggest challenge you face in your current job.

Red tape.

7. Do you have any advice for someone who is interested in SEO, but doesn’t have a background in it, on how to get started in this field?

Read your blogs, follow your industry leaders and really read what they have to say. Subscribe to their RSS feeds. Read Sphinn. Read Search Engine Land every single day. Expect to spend an hour and a half to three hours, almost daily, keeping up with that stuff. Really read what’s going on. Then, take all that knowledge that you’ve learned and test it. Test your own theories, as well as other people’s theories, and see what works for you. What works for one site or someone else that they blogged about or that you’ve read about, might not work for you. Go ahead and test things. Have some testing grounds; your own blog, your own website or whatever. You can’t always test things on clients’ websites. You have to apply what you already know to clients’ websites. Another thing is just practice. Keep practicing. Keep going at it. Keep testing new things. Eventually you’re going to be very good in SEO.

8. If you could rank for any keyword phrase you don’t currently rank for, what would it be?

Viagra.

9. Assuming you had never gone into SEO, what would you be doing now professionally?

I’d probably be in jail.

10. Do you have any interest in politics?

Yes, I have a huge vested interest in politics. My interests have lead me to roads to deeper things in the political system that my life would make my life better not knowing at all. Many people joke that I’m a conspiracy theorists. I call it conspiracy facts.

Well that’s the end of our interview. Thank you to @MelaniePhung for writing the questions for everyone. Feel free to follow me on Twitter (@utahseopro) if you’d like!

Video SEO

@almacy Digital Strategy Expert
@melaniephung DC SEO Strategist
@martinbowling Zima lover
@utahseopro Utah SEO Consultant
@fairminder Boston Website Design and SEO

@cyandle Google Adwords Professional
@jackleblond VP of Internet Strategy @djpaisley Digital Communications Strategist
@vinceblackham Utah SEO expert
@melanienathan Edmonton SEO expert @researchgoddess Staffing Social Media Specialist
@monicawright Maine SEO expert

Pubcon 2008 was a blast. There was great networking and content all around. I spoke on “Hosting Issues and SEO” while I was there and have included my slides in this post for anyone who missed it.

A lot of what I covered entailed how to handle server response HTTP codes and leverage them for search engine optimization benefit, choosing between dedicated or shared hosting servers, and how to prepare your servers for large quantities of traffic from “the Digg effect” often seen in social media marketing campaigns.

ExactFactor is an search engine optimization campaign tracking tool to add to your SEO tools collection. They provide a free utility to track your search engine result positioning without having to check your position all the time.

While a tool to automate that process is nice, they’re a dime a dozen. This tool is a bit different because not only do they track your site but they track your competitors and send you email alerts when you’ve moved up/down or a competitor has moved up/down.

Email alerts are very handy because you can get instant notification of SERP fluctuation that you can be aware of. Have you ever had an SEO client calling you complaining of a search result fluctuation you haven’t notice because you haven’t checked it in a couple days? I know I have, it’s nice to be able to know what the situation is before the client calls.

Below is a screen shot of inside ExactFactor’s easy to use interface. It’s not hard to figure out and very intuitive. Can’t complain when it’s free. Check it out for your next Internet marketing campaign at www.exactfactor.com.

ExactFactor-SEO-Tool

I wrote a new post over at my company’s site (Search & Social) on link metrics used for judging a link’s value and worth in SEO. More importantly though, it focuses on link analysis through block-level segmentation patents written by search engines. I’ll include the quick summary below but swing by to read about the most overlooked SEO metric: link placement.

Quick Summary

While a Webpage may have two related outgoing links on it, each link is not given the same value depending upon it’s placement in the page. Always, opt for:

• Naturally written anchor text
• Related surround copy
• A link in the body text of the content area of the page
• Higher in the copy area than lower to try to obtain higher CTR to appease behavioral metrics given to links from search engines including things like BrowseRank.

I recently took a day off my honeymoon that went from Utah to San Diego then up to San Jose to present at Search Engine Strategies. The panel I spoke on was Building a Search Engine Friendly Website moderated by Todd Malicoat.

The main focus of this presentation was SEO friendly multimedia (audio, video, flash, etc) incorporated on a Website. My undergraduate was in multimedia communication as well as my current graduate emphasis so this was a perfect fit for me.

Here is the presentation slides including embedded resources. Feel free to contact me with any questions regarding it.