Brian Ussery (@beussery) is the Director of SEO at Razorfish in Atlanta, Georgia. He is also a Google Product Expert at the Google webmaster help forums. He has been doing SEO since 2000, we are both very old folks in SEO. We both were moderators at the Search Engine Watch Forums back in the day. We joked a bit about the early days of SEO and had a bit of fun there.
He said he never spammed, he studied Google from an academic perspective only. He was always very big into writing better content, even in the early days of links being king. He never took the cheap way of doing SEO, he felt it wouldn’t last so he did it the hard way. He never had a site get penalized that he worked on, which is rare for an SEO vet. He is working at Razorfish, an old company, it was founded in 1995 and still doing amazing.
After Brian kept making me go off script, we then spoke about GoogleBot. He said GoogleBot is very good at getting to content of all forms, but there is still a lot of things that can go wrong. Make sure to do the proper technical things to make sure GoogleBot can find your content through normal HTML links and tried and true technical fundamentals. Just build a great web site and GoogleBot will eat it up.
Optimizing your web site for e-commerce was the next topic we talked. Make sure your product descriptions are not pulled from the manufacturers, make sure you have unique content that your users would like, make sure your images are good and so forth. Think about the users and what they want to see on this product page. He said the reason Amazon ranks so well is because they provide great content, including content from users and your customers.
It was a fun conversation.
You can follow Brian Ussery on Twitter @beussery.
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Forum discussion at YouTube.
