Eric Wu is an SEO who has been doing some pretty intense SEO since 2000. He fell into doing SEO for the City of San Diego when the San Diego Fire Department had a porn site outranking them on Google. It was not easy to outrank a porn site back then.
We can also blame Eric for Google releasing the Panda algorithm. He worked at Demand Media, specifically eHow.com and LiveStrong.com and that was a key site that got hit. He also said query not provided is also partially his fault because of they would look at query data to figure out demand on what the company should write about.
How To Get Developers To Listen To SEOs
We spoke about how SEOs can help get developers to do the tasks they need. He said it is important to make friends with them and talk their language. He said he sometimes would bring up the Chrome inspector tool, and not an SEO tool - use their tools, not SEO tools in front of them. He said never tell them what to do, but rather, give them the business case and give them the Google doc. Buttering them up doesn’t always work so well he said.
SEO Beyond Content & Links
He felt Google Panda was one of the first machine learning/AI based algorithms Google has released. He said user experience is so much more important today than it was. If you fit the machine model for what Google expects your content to be, and if you fit the machine model for what it expects the links to behave and the user to behave - you can rank number one even without the best links or best content. This is because you are creating the user behavior that Google expects. He feels Google looks at its own search stream, but Google does not use Google Chrome or Google Analytics data. It is all about solving the user intent with your web site.
You can follow Eric Wu on Twitter @eywu and online at growthgauge.com.
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