Gideon:    Welcome to the next call that I’m doing today. I’m talking to Dave Jenyns. He’s all the way from Melbourne in Australia.

I met Dave at an event with Ed Dale and had a pretty interesting chat with him and got to know him a little bit, but not enough to really understand what he’s doing, so after the event I got in touch with Dave and figured out that he’s a real guru with SEO stuff.

Since I didn’t know much about SEO I thought I’d better get this guy online and ask him a few questions, pick his brains so to speak, about SEO and specifically how that applies to blogging because that’s what I do.

I love blogging and especially video blogging and we’re going to see if Dave can help us with some SEO tips specifically for blogging, but also in a more general sense so that we can get our heads around this whole SEO concept.

Dave, thank you very much for joining us today. How are you doing?

Dave:    Very well, thanks. It’s a pleasure to be here and thanks for the intro.

Gideon:    Dave, you’ve got a pretty interesting background. Maybe to put things into perspective for people, maybe give us a quick rundown of where you’ve come from and the stuff you’ve done and we’ll get straight into the SEO stuff.

Dave:    I first got interested in the stock market when I first left school, and then I went and did one of those weekend courses where you pay $5,000 and you end up being a super trader by Monday, or at least that’s the plan after you do two days worth of training, and found it was actually a little bit more difficult than that.

After I’d started to build up a little bit of my trading flow, I’d really realized to make the whole stock market thing work, you did need a quite a sizeable amount of cash.

That’s when I went down the wealth creation avenue. I’ve always been interested in that sort of thing, so a business partner and I created a few products in the stock market education niche.

We had these really good products and we knew that the demand was there for the product, it was just a matter of getting the word out, because you can have the best product under the sun but unless anyone knows that that product exists then the product isn’t worth anything at all. That’s when I got interested in a lot of old school direct mail stuff.

I started to study some of the greats, which are Gary Halbert, Jay Abraham, here in Australia, Mel Emry, he was one of the first guys that I got interested in. Who else was there? There’s Peter Sun and a whole host of these guys. This was a good 10 years ago or more.

Then I think I just evolved into doing a lot of online marketing.  I think it was the natural evolution. You saw a lot of that old school direct mail stuff started to shift online and some of the early adopters started to pop their head up, like Cory Rudl and even Yanik Silver, who was there quite early, John Reese when he first got started, and Jonathan Mizel. Some of these names, very early on in the piece, really started to set the stage for online marketing.

I got interested in that and did a lot of my own study as well, my own testing. There were a few little entrepreneurial avenues along the way that I followed, not just to do with the stock market niche, but everything from selling pieces of the MCG to setting up a clothing retail store, both in the real physical world and also we had an online presence as well – quite a varied and well-rounded expertise in online marketing.

Probably just recently in the last three to four months, with a lot of people contacting us for what I do in the stock market niche, a few people, friends, colleagues were asking, “Hey, what is it that you’re doing to generate so much traffic to your website and getting buzz?”

People are saying, “Whenever we type in anything to do with Meta Stock, your name always comes up position number one,” and all these sort of variations.

That’s when we launched a recent business, which was all about SEO and talking about how we do SEO, and that I suppose brings you up to speed with where I am now.

Gideon:    That’s awesome. I always look at some internet marketers that are kind of self-proclaimed gurus. You try and look at their background, and a lot of times it seems that they’re making money from teaching people how to make money online. There doesn’t seem to be much background with showing any evidence of results in other niches before they started doing that.

That’s what I really like about you, Dave. You’ve gone through another avenue to look at another business other than internet marketing, and used internet marketing, specifically SEO, to help you get these results. I really like that, and I think that really adds a lot to the credibility.

A lot of my audience, including me, we don’t really know much about SEO. We do the blogging thing. We create content like crazy and we sometimes hope for the best that the search engines will pick us up, but perhaps it would be a good idea at this stage to give us a quick overview of what SEO, search engine optimization, is and why that’s important for us.

Dave:    SEO is just one of those things where I think it can play a real major part in your business because it’s the ability to drive ‘free’ targeted leads to your website.

I say ‘free’ in inverted commas because everything has its price, and the good thing about SEO is you really can do it on a budget if you don’t have much money. A lot of the work can be done manually by yourself.

You are trading time for dollars and that’s where that cost comes into it, but there’s the ability to take advantage of the search engines and drive a lot of that traffic on a budget, as opposed to having to go down the paid route through any sort of PPC stuff and drive traffic and having to pay for that traffic.

I think that’s where SEO really comes into play. I’ll bring it up on the screen here. If we just type in this particular term, trading systems, I’m quite proud of the ranking we’ve got because it’s quite a competitive term in my niche. You can see we’re position number one.

When we’re having a look at the results here, if you have a look at the rest of the page, when they do eye-tracking studies to see where people’s eyes go when they hit this page, it appears first of all in the top left hand corner here.

A lot of people will skip over the sponsored links if they know it’s sponsored links. It’s probably your everyday Joe when they look up here, even though it says Sponsored Links at the top here, they don’t really know that, so a lot of people click that, these sponsored links at the top here.

You’ll see those sponsored links in more competitive niches, but on less competitive niches where those aren’t there, all you’ll really have are these sponsored links over on the right hand side here.

These will get a lot less clicks because your eye is automatically drawn to this area on the website. For the people who do know, there’s that feeling that natural organic search results are somehow more authoritative or more important because they’re not just paying for that spot.

It’s like Google is saying, “Yes, this is the most relevant information for you.” I think that’s a reason to focus in on SEO.

You’re also able to really meet the person. I think this is to do with anything online when you’re targeting specific keywords. You can meet the individual at a point at where they’re typing this keyword into the search engine and you know exactly what it is that they’re thinking about, so you can speak straight to that person.

Some of this comes to on-page optimization, which we can talk a little bit more about, but when you write your title tags and your descriptions, that’s going to appear in the organic search here. Someone typing in trading systems, I’m speaking directly to them by saying, “Download your free trading systems here.”

Obviously someone typing in trading systems, that really speaks to that individual because that’s what they want. Underneath here, “Looking for free trading systems.” That really speaks to the right person.

I think what we’re trying to do here in SEO, a lot of SEO is all about making sure that we’re targeting the right keywords to come up in the natural organic search results.

We know the qualified lead or client that clicks that link is probably going to be a lot better than any other source, and we know what conversation is going on in their mind based on the keywords that they are typing in so we can serve up the most persuasive [inaudible] ultimately land on our landing page.

We can talk on-page optimization and off-page optimization, but what we’re trying to do is build up enough attention. You know this as a blogger, it’s all about putting out that excellent content, and that will ultimately help you in the long run with your SEO campaign.

Once you reach a certain size or critical mass, SEO starts to happen naturally. As long as you do the basics, like make sure your on-page optimization is correct, but once you’re putting out this good content, naturally people start linking to you and naturally people start to embed your videos. All those elements really start to play a major part in your rankings online.

The way I use SEO when I’m working for myself or for clients is we just use it to build up enough of a groundswell to get to a certain size, and then we often find that SEO takes over at that point in time and happens naturally.

Part 2 continued in next post…