Aaron Wall Interviews Digital Ghost

DigitalGhost is an odd fellow, in a good way. Always a blast to chat with, and a smart guy who gives me lots of good advice. He using old words for findability. As a marketer, what is more important: using old words, or being able to create neologisms? Keep it simple. Know your market and know the language your market uses. Banking on your ability to successfully market a new word isn't a strategy; it's a shot in the dark. Why is linguistics important to SEOs and other internet marketers? Linguistics offers insight into how people think, how they choose words and phrases, word dependencies, syntax, semantics, structure etc. The science is integral in search engine algorithms. Are search engines matching keywords or concepts? What is the difference between the two? How might a shift in this change the SEO process? They're matching keywords. The keyword 'war' is quite simple, the concept of 'war' isn't currently understood by the major engines. I could write an entire site about WWII without mentioning "WWII" and the engines would never rank it for 'war' unless it acquired links with 'war' in anchor text. How might it change the SEO process? SEOs rely on keywords because the algos rely on keywords. What are the most important books you have read about language, thinking, or communication? There aren't any single books that I feel are that important. A single idea, or several, contained within a book may be important but I think it is dangerous to assign too much importance to any one book. I place quite a bit of importance on reading many books and weighing the ideas found within them. I tend to think it is bullshit when someone says, 'that book changed my life'. What other books significantly helped shape you? Now we're getting somewhere. I remember reading Black Beauty by Anna Sewell and hating the kid that pulled wings off flies and threw stones at horses. Old Yeller taught me quite a bit about strength of character. Tom Sawyer and the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn taught me about friendship. Little Women, Little Men, Jo's Boys, all of them had lessons. Call of the Wild, The Sea Wolf, Burning Daylight, more lessons. I think we learn the lessons that shape us the most when we're young. But most importantly, the latent lesson that I learned was, 'love words'. All of those authors taught that lesson, though I never saw it written. What drinks have helped shape you? What is your favorite Tequila? Well, beer has added about twenty pounds of shape. As for tequila, just about any Aejo works. You recently posted about sensationalistic headlines which have nothing to do with the content of the post. As more publishers come online, search engines and efficient ad networks commodify many of them, and more people are fighting for a finite amount of attention, will the web devolve into a series of half thoughts marketed by sensationalistic headlines? Or what publishing business models do you see as sustainable? The web is too large for any single bad practice to ruin it. Most of the web is nothing but half-assed thoughts now and people still find it useful. As the need for better technology grows it will be met. The 'cry wolf' headlines will meet the same fate as the little kid in the story. As long as publishers focus on meeting their users' needs current models are sustainable. As soon as publishers shift the focus to their own needs they may as well quit. I can't count the times a site owner has said, 'I need more traffic'. How come they don't ask, 'What do my users need'? What are your thoughts on tagging and the like? Will it make search any more relevant, or is it an over hyped fad? Tagging hasn't helped relevance a bit that I can see. Self-governing systems typically end up as nothing more than a fuster-cluck. People that insist that the more people that use a self-governing system, the better the system will work, need to have the Pareto Principle etched into those rose colored glasses they're wearing. How can social media and other popularity based metrics promote the creation of quality content while maintaining a reasonable signal to noise ratio? Editing. It would help if people didn't equate 'more' to 'better'. Does Amazon need 600 book reviews for a single book? Does the world need 300 videos of people dropping Mentos into Diet Coke? You can increase the signal to noise ratio by limiting the number of people that can broadcast eh? What is the difference between a horse and a donkey? Which animal is generally more entertaining? A donkey is smaller than a horse and it has longer ears. Cross a mare, (female horse) with a Jack, (male donkey), and you get a Mule. Donkeys are more entertaining. They're like big dogs and they make excellent pets. Nothing in the world sounds like a donkey braying, except for the Jackass Penguin. It seems Google in particular is placing a lot of weight on domain age and link authority related trust at the moment. Many people are leveraging this to spam Google via video hosting sites, social media sites, and attempts at mainstream media to get into consumer generated media. Where do you see Google going next with their algorithms? Semantic search. Nofollow is a bust. They created this huge link mess with their damn green bar and an easily exploited algo, and then they tried to clean it up with something as pathetic as nofollow. You post a lot about word and link relationships. How do people typically mess up internal linking? By creating navigation that looks like a keyword list. By ignoring concepts and focusing on keywords. By thinking in terms of pages instead of thinking about an entire site. By neglecting in-context links. As example, a client told me he had a site about "new and used trucks". According to his navigation text, his site was about truck accessories. Every truck model had 10-30 accessory links. Great text for accessories, poor text for trucks and he was wondering why he wasn't ranking for new/used/ trucks/ city/state. Do you see search engines as moving beyond advertisement based business models? How might they change going forward? No, it's easy, it's passive, and they have the whole world creating content they can slap ads on, why should they change? Do you eventually see search engines as becoming more powerful than governments? No, but I foresee governments using search engines to become more powerful. How long might your current blog last? No clue. Longevity isn't a good metric for quality though. Not that I'm saying I have a quality blog, but it's my blog. I can name some pretty pathetic directories that have been around for a long time. But I won't. Danny just launched What are your favorite SEO Tools? Whiteboards and a proprietary pattern analysis gizmo. Drivl is the only one I can think of at the moment. But I read a lot of online newspapers. Oh, and you can download the N.Y. Times reader now which makes reading the news a lot nicer. Do you see a day when search moves past being primarily weighted on link authority? Yes I do. Search engines like Comments Tag: Furl Bookmark Murdok: Aaron Wall is the author of SEO Book, an ebook offering the latest search engine optimization tips and strategies. From Threadwatch community.