Ahmed Al Kiremli: Hi everyone this is Ahmed Al Kiremli and welcome to Be Efficient Tv. The mission of this web TV show is to boost the efficiency of your business and life through tips and tricks from leading experts. Today I have with me Rand Fishkin, he is the cofounder of Moz and inbound.org. Welcome to the show Rand how are you doing?

Rand Fishkin: Thank you very much for having me I’m well thank you.

Ahmed Al Kiremli: My pleasure so what’s your background before Moz and what are you currently focused on?

Rand Fishkin: Sure actually it turns out that I don’t have much of a background before Moz I dropped out of college in 2001 and basically have been working at the company that eventually became Moz ever since. So Moz is kind of my only professional history, I don’t really have any other jobs in the past. Prior to being in the role that I am now which is essentially I’m a contributor to our product strategy and our marketing a lot of our evangelism I’m also on our Board of Directors and obviously I’m a cofounder but prior to that I was Moz’s CEO and before that even I was an SEO consultant and even before that I did web design and development all of the company that eventually turned into Moz.

Ahmed Al Kiremli: Why did you eventually step down as CEO and contributor what does that mean what exactly did you do?

Rand Fishkin: So individual contributor is just my funny idiosyncratic way of saying I get to do the things that I want to do that I’m good at and I don’t have any people managing responsibilities so there’s basically no one in the organization which reports to me directly with the exception of my executive Nikki and in terms of stepping down as CEO, there were a number of reasons, some of the big ones included I was very deeply unhappy at the time even depressed and didn’t feel confident or capable in leading the organization through a period of change and turmoil I was very disappointed with the product that we had produced up to that point and things of that much much better now and you can see that reflected in our numbers and the quality of the product and all those kinds of things but I was definitely feeling really down about that. I also knew that long-term I did not want to be the CEO of a public company and Moz is on a slow trajectory but on a trajectory to eventually having an IPO on one of the public markets likely the NASDAQ or the New York Stock Exchange so knowing that that was something that wasn’t something I wanted to do long-term or was passionate about it made sense for me to promote our longtime COO and my great friend Sarah Bird to the role of CEO and I think she’s doing a marvelous job in that position and I think she’ll continue to do a great job.

Ahmed Al Kiremli: So is it because you are a bad CEO or it’s less fun when it’s a big company or what is it just like there is a shift in your goals that you want to relax and if you step down, most CEOs when they step down they don’t want to be close to the company and be a contributor or get involved in the decisions so what do you do that?

Rand Fishkin: I definitely took an alternate attack there, I am still very close to a lot of the decision-making process here at my was still very close to the company I certainly have not been relaxing I would say I work as much as I ever did as CEO in this new role just doing different kinds of things and I think the primary reason I don’t know that I was necessarily a bad CEO I think I was not as good a CEO as I could’ve been or should’ve been and I feel some guilt about that. But I think it was more a question of I was not passionate about the things that a bigger company needs from CEOs, those were not the things that inspired me and those are a lot of things about finance and reporting and…

Ahmed Al Kiremli: But you did some of that at the beginning…

Rand Fishkin: I did a lot of that I was responsible for it I did it I think I did an okay job with it I just didn’t love doing it. It wasn’t the kind of thing that got me excited so I really wanted to refocus on the two areas of the company that I care about deeply and that’s the product and engineering world and the marketing. And I think that I can be more effective as a contributor on those things then I could be as a people manager and the builder of process responsible for finance and all that kind of stuff.

Ahmed Al Kiremli: What are the financial problems that your family or you were facing before starting Moz and how did you start Moz?

Rand Fishkin: When I stopped out of college my family is here in the US we would be considered middle-class I guess now there a little bit more than middle-class but my dad was an engineer at Boeing so he worked on planes and my mom ran a small business that was essentially just a small marketing business that made a little bit of money but I think my parents combined income when we were growing up was in the 80s it was in the $30-$40,000 range and maybe in the 90s get a little bit more than that, pretty solidly middle income that my dad was a big saver he save a lot of money so he had a lot when he retired from Boeing which was just a few years ago and in 2001 when I dropped out of college my parents financial situation was fine but my mom had a little bit of debt and her business and unfortunately over the next five years that debt grew tremendously so by 2006 we had almost $500,000 in debt on that business which was really super rough and terrifying to deal with on a day-to-day basis, thankfully we were able to pay it off not entirely but we paid off the credit card companies such that they wrote off the debt so we didn’t know the many more money. That was great to get through that experience but I think it was a pretty rough time.

Ahmed Al Kiremli: What is Moz what are the services that you provide?

Rand Fishkin: Moz is primarily almost exclusively of software company so we make software for professional web marketers to be able to mostly help them with their Seo efforts and a little bit with their content marketing social media marketing in some aspects of outreach and PR and online visibility but very centered around Seo. That’s a personal passion of mine so it’s an area I’m really glad that we can help people with.

Ahmed Al Kiremli: So it’s just like analytics software and brings data from social media replacing let’s say more data than Google analytics, what is it exactly?

Rand Fishkin: So Google analytics would be visitor analytics they show you people who visit your website what those people do on your side where they came from, Moz is really about showing your data from external sources like where you getting your links from, who’s talking about you on the web and what are they saying, how do you compare against your competition, when you see data around your rankings what other competitors are in those ranking positions, we do a crawl your website and show you certain errors and missed opportunities, things that you should be working on all that kind of stuff so it’s a little more prescriptive than just analytics I call it there are a lot of raw analytics data but it’s not the same kind you can get from Google analytics and then there’s a lot of insights and suggestions inside there too.

Ahmed Al Kiremli: So if I’m a Moz Pro member does that mean I should not use any other software in terms of analytics?

Rand Fishkin: Definitely not that, Moz actually has a partnership with Google analytics and we integrate Google’s visitor data inside our platform and we actually recommend lots of other software so depending on who you are and what you’re doing you might think about using something like a minx panel in addition to Moz which will give you detailed customer data around your product usage you might consider an analytics package like a sum all which will collect all together all sorts of things and put together, you might consider another product like a has offers or attune both of which are around mobile analytics data for app developers so there is tons of analytics products that I would recommend out there Moz is certainly not an everything in one it’s really designed to help you with Seo and kind of the channels around Seo, a little bit of social a lot of content that sort of thing.

Ahmed Al Kiremli: You have your own crawl Which is called Mozscape what does that mean?

Rand Fishkin: Moz scape is like us trying to replicate the backend of Google’s web infrastructure essentially we’re trying to crawl the Internet or most of it and show us where all of the links from pages are pointing to, who’s pointing to what what’s more important than what and then we try to build a lot of metrics on top of that to say how trustworthy are these sites how trustworthy are these pages how spammy are these sites, what are some metrics that correlate well with how sites and pages perform in Google’s rankings and that’s what we call domain authority and page authority so that’s kind of our goal with Moz scape to build a web index based on links.

Ahmed Al Kiremli: Do you think that will develop into a search engine?

Rand Fishkin: Probably not in the reason I say probably not is because the search engine does have a lot more technical hurdles to cross other than just the ones we built today but also a search engine that no one uses is particularly valuable and I don’t think we would ever try to compete in the consumer world of getting people to use our search engine instead of Google’s, I really think that our data is designed to help people understand how they perform in Google and how they can improve their performance in Google as well as Yahoo and Bing to the extent that those players have some market shares as well.

Ahmed Al Kiremli: Back to the title of contributor does that mean you don’t want to have pressure all the time and you are the spokesman of the company doing the interviews doing the media having the credibility of like you found of the company regardless of what’s going to happen because it’s kind of double thing that you are kind of representing the company but again you are not responsible fully of the performance of the company.

Rand Fishkin: It’s funny that you say that I actually haven’t completely divorced myself from responsibility for the performance of the company.

Ahmed Al Kiremli: What is going on inside you when you see something wrong when you see something you don’t like, what is going on inside you?

Rand Fishkin: I mean I still get insanely frustrated, Moz is very much still my baby and even though Sarah and I will occasionally disagree I think ninety-nine times out of 100 when something is wrong or something is broken I don’t feel it’s any less of my responsibility to try to go help that happen, what is the case is that I don’t have the way that my involvement works, it’s no longer I have people reporting to me who have people reporting to them who are directly responsible for this and I sort of grade their performance and I work with them to improve it and those kinds of things it’s really more that I try to chip in or I can be helpful I try to identify problems and point them out to people identify opportunities and solutions and then I let people run on their own and it’s also the case that I would say that I do certainly do a lot of external evangelism to your point but I certainly still have a lot of pressure on me both internally and externally because while I may not be the CEO of Moz I think most of the world who knows Moz still thinks that if Rand is doing well Moz is going to do well and if Moz is doing poorly than Rand is going to do poorly.

Ahmed Al Kiremli: Even the number of interviews that you do comparing with the CEO… You can’t just call the CEO and tell her that change this or like they consult you and these things or like you just see the things happen and then you give your opinion? Are you just a consultant?

Rand Fishkin: I’m a little bit more of a consultant presents but a permanent consulting presents I’m more like a like an investor from a Board of Directors perspective and more like a what I would say is a trusted voice inside the company but a trusted voice not a manager.

Ahmed Al Kiremli: You are not salaried you’re just a partner?

Rand Fishkin: I am salaried as well yes I have a very nice salary from Moz in fact I thought it was very kind that when I step down from the CEO role the board decided that they didn’t want to change my salary so I still have a very nice salary.

Ahmed Al Kiremli: With no pressure or less pressure. And how much do you own of the company?

Rand Fishkin: My wife and I together own just about 24% of it.

Ahmed Al Kiremli: How did you raise capital for the company from 1.1 million in 2007 up to 18 million in 2012 and is there another plan now the next step is IPL what is the next up?

Rand Fishkin: In 2007 we raise 1.1 million from a couple investors but that process was actually the opposite of most venture capital processes, Michelle Goldberg and Kelly Smith actually pitched me they sat down and took me out to lunch a lot of times, Rand we think you can build something special would love to fund this and they convinced me to take money which is really weird but doesn’t usually happen. In our subsequent rounds we tried to raise money a few more times in 2009 2010 2011 and we actually failed at that but in 2012 I started talking to some investors early in the year and one of the people I reached out to hoping to get introductions to investors will actually Brad Feldt, for some reason I thought the foundry only did early-stage deals so I figured they were the match for us because we were trying to raise between twenty and 25 million at that point and Brad it turned out once we get on the call he said I can introduce you to some great people but let me tell you why should take money for me instead which again was one of those just really positive moments and I think it was a week after that phone call that it was only five or six days after that phone call we basically had a handshake deal on the agreement so it was just a wonderful process with the foundry I love those guys, Brad is a tremendous investor and has become a great friend also. And I would say for the future Moz is at some point in the long-term looking to do a public offering I would guess that will be in the next three years but it will be in the next five or six years and to do that I think Sarah is pretty passionate about trying to raise one more round of funding mostly to support some growth efforts and to give her some capital to be flexible and potentially try some acquisitions we did have some nice success with a few of our acquisitions.

Ahmed Al Kiremli: But you are like in the positive in terms of profits, why do you do that is the point to increase the value of the company and maybe dilute more from give the investors back some more money?

Rand Fishkin: Probably not we probably wouldn’t do around where investors take money off the table I think that would be unlikely but we would do around for primarily the reason that we can accelerate the growth rate and we can do things before our competitors can do them or before the market tolerates them from a financial standpoint and we can kind of grow ahead of our budget so we’re on the cusp of profitability I think we are cash flow positive but still losing a little bit of money from an accounting perspective but pretty close to break even but that being said there’s a lot of things that we wish we could invest and I think in particular that Sarah wishes she could invest in that we can do so there’s some small start up out there that we really like rethink their supercool maybe it costs us to million dollars to acquire that company and bring the team and board we don’t really have that $2 million to go spend right now. We could but it would be very very risky if we put another thirty or $40 million in the bank then we can do that. Then we can make those investments, another really big one is we would like to grow our web index in our data substantially that requires a big investment of servers and we’ve made a few of those big investments would like to make even more before we have the income to support it because we think that the market will reward us if we can make those investments so I’d love to go spend six or $7 million next year on new hardware, that would be pretty risky at our current cash situation so those of the reasons we would raise money.

Ahmed Al Kiremli: So content creation versus Seo is it like 80/20 % relation focus or how do you put it?

Rand Fishkin: Well you can do Seo without content, there is no ability to rank unless you actually have content to back up those rankings however that being said what I would say is that there’s a lot of folks who invest in content creation that are not thinking strategically or even tactically about Seo when they do it and I think that’s a missed opportunity a lot of the time. If you are investing in content creation what I would urge marketers and small businesses and start of all kinds to do is to think about think very carefully about who am I trying to reach with this content and why am I trying to reach them, is this content made for early stages of my final am I just trying to build brand awareness in my trying to make people aware of my product and my company, trying to get people to convert and depending on those you probably have different sources of traffic that you’re trying to send to them and search engines are almost always in that equation no matter where in the funnel we’re talking about. So I really urge people to mix their content creation strategy with Seo to have a deep understanding of Seo to understand what works and what doesn’t and what factors go into that and apply that to your content because otherwise you’re missing out on a huge opportunity to drive traffic.

Ahmed Al Kiremli: But the problem of Seo always like there is a change always like even when you hire a different company each company has a different strategy so you don’t really know you have to test like for my website currently I’m working with more than two or three companies to test each one what will do and then measure the results so if someone starts a blog today and ran it for two years, a blog on a daily basis another one is doing the same blog or something similar but with Seo, how long will it take the one who is just doing nothing to have some of the pages or the blog posts ranked on the first page of Google comparing with the other one who is doing Seo, how much is the period of time?

Rand Fishkin: That’s actually a funny question because it’s possible that without doing Seo you could rank better than the person who is doing Seo depending on how you’re doing and what you’re doing and the reason that exists is because some bloggers inherently are really good at describing their content in the same way that the search engines are and it gains a lot of influence and amplification lots of links lots of social shares lots of on-site engagement lots of people talking about them and that’s what the engines care deeply about so sometimes you have those unintentional success stories from the blogosphere in particular but that being said if you are doing Seo and you’re doing really smart strategic Seo then part of that SCO should be all of those good things how do we get amplification how do we create content that people want to share, how do we get the press interested how do we make ourselves and links how do we choose the right keyword targets and title our blog posts in a way that is going to try and search traffic but also be very compelling for people who might share it in other places and doesn’t sound spammy or manipulative so if you combine up those things I think you are going to beat anyone who is doing content creation but not Seo.

Ahmed Al Kiremli: So let’s start with home page Seo what to do in terms of headings and links how many links should it be, some people say that if you put so many links that will reduce the juice of the Seo work, meta-tags tell us more about all of these details what should we do on the homepage?

Rand Fishkin: So actually there’s a blog post that I would urge you and your readers to go check out and that’s called, it’s basically my illustrated guide to on page acquisition and I go through a very detailed think all through these elements and there’s lots of them that used to be true that no longer are so you bring up for example the dilution of link juice or link equity through having too many links on your site and back in the days when page rank was the primary scoring system that Google used, the old-school original 1998 page rank yeah that stuff actually mattered but ten years later which is now six years ago it didn’t matter almost at all and today it’s virtually completely useless the way I think about links on the page or how long should a page be or how many images should I use how much of my video be is what’s right for the user, what’s right for your audience did they want really long videos to they want lots of images are only a few do they want lots of links to external content or do they only want a couple what’s going to be most helpful for them because the best thing that you can do for your Seo is really about improving your engagement and your ability to earn amplification. So it’s become much less about the technical well I put this keyword in my meta-keyword site the engines don’t even use meta-keyword tags anymore or I position this term at the front of my title tag instead of as the third word in the title tag, that stuff really doesn’t compare to the value that you’re getting from hey I increase the engagement so that people are now spending on average 2 ½ minutes instead of two minutes on my page and people are now sharing it at a rate of one in 1000 instead of one in 10,000 people sharing it, those things will have huge impact on your Seo compared to kind of the little nitty-gritty of where to place a keyword or how long to make content.

Ahmed Al Kiremli: Like just one point regarding that, the links like on interviews and be efficient, we have a section where we are putting maybe ten links of the websites of the guests plus the social media, some Seo experts advise to keep it some experts said no so now the point is it helping the users to have a better experience than keep it.

Rand Fishkin: Perfectly nailed it right so the value from an Seo perspective and Google is looking at a page or being or Yahoo whatever they are going to analyze and they are going to say hey is this helpful to users and they are going to look at a lot of other things, off-site signals, external things they will probably look directly at your Google analytics and say how long do people spend on this page but that’s a great leading indicator of all the things the engines do look at so as you improve that you’re going to improve your Seo so I would urge you to think like a should we link to every one of Rand Fishkin’s social profiles well maybe not but let’s link to the three where he is most active, should we link to every site on the web he’s ever contributed on? That probably doesn’t help anybody but let’s link to the two or three where people are really going to find value from it, that’s was going to help you the most because that’s what’s going to help your users the most.

Ahmed Al Kiremli: How about the meta-tags what do you use like should we use Yost or certain plug-ins to do the meta-tags, how to deal with that? I like the Yost plug-in for WordPress I think it can lead you in the right direction to get some of that those last few details of Seo right so I’m a fan, I would say that if you well one of the problems I’ve seen as many bloggers many websites that use WordPress install that and then they don’t pay any attention to it and think because I’ve installed that I’m now doing good Seo but that’s not true at all, you have to go do the work that the plug-in is suggesting so if you are running a title tag and you can see hey this is a word I want to target well you should make sure that the pages really are on that topic in the meta-description has a compelling description of not just the page content but also why it’s applicable to a searcher who is just search for that phrase. The same thing is true in your title the same thing is true all across the board, I think my life just went out…

Ahmed Al Kiremli: No problem how about the slug and URL how to do it do you put the title of the post copy paste how long should it be?

Rand Fishkin: I like URLs that are of a readable length so basically I think it’s fine to use the title as the slug but what I really want to see is number one can you try to get the keyword in there if you can’t that’s okay but I would suggest try to get the keyword in there and the second thing in there is try to make the URL legible so when someone sees it in the search result they go aha! I know exactly what that’s about. Yes that matches against the title and the description and what I’m trying to accomplish, you’re really trying to create that information sent so that when a visitor when a searcher types and their keyword and they see your result they go yes that’s the one I most want to click. I think about it more as an ad for clicking on your page than for anything else.

Ahmed Al Kiremli: How about tags and categories like how to use it, shall we display the tags live on the site put it in the back end, shall we have lots of categories and tags in the backend, was strategy to use?

Rand Fishkin: Most of the time I personally prefer categories over tags but I think reasonable people can disagree, again it really goes back to what’s valuable for your user so when people are visiting your site are they going to want content via tags are they going to want it via categories or subcategories how do they find the navigation to be most useful and that’s why target with your stuff so depending on how broader topics are and how your organizing things and how much content you have you might consider one the other both but it’s not a huge deal for Seo specifically as much as it is for Seo indirectly through user engagement and user happiness on the site.

Ahmed Al Kiremli: And how about if the category is like directing like each post is within let’s say six categories that will not affect the Seo if it’s helping if it’s under those…

Rand Fishkin: If that’s accurate if that’s really where people should find no problem at all I think when people start to get spammy and they try to put every post in every category so it maximizes the link exposure you are playing the old page ranking game from the late 90s early 2000 and that’s not going to work at all and you’re diluting people’s ability to find good content when they do click on the categories, that’s going to harm your Seo more than it will help.

Ahmed Al Kiremli:, The headings like headings one, two, three should we use it in each post or how to use that and what else in terms of homepage do we have to do other than the things that we spoke about?

Rand Fishkin: Yeah for the detailed level like this tag that tag I might check out that post on illustrated guide to page acquisition but for the heading in particular I like VH1 tag or the heading tag you can use H2 or age 3 if for some reason your WordPress install is using some different CSS classes that’s fine but for that having the one that appears at the top I try to make that match the title tag of the page and what the surgery just clicked on because you don’t want them to click on something and get to the page and the headline is different from the title element they just clicked, that creates a dissonance that’s going to make a lot of people click the back button and you really don’t want that, one of the big things that will positively impact your Seo is when people click from the search results on to your page if they stay on that page and they have a positive experience there and they browse across the rest of your website that tells Google this was a great answer to that query. If they click the back button and they choose another result that tells Google you didn’t answer the query so almost everything you going to do on the page with your content you tags or headlines your titles is all about serving that searcher and making sure they’re going to be happy so they don’t choose back into somebody else.

Ahmed Al Kiremli: How about the comment system like some people use social media they look into Facebook others use discuss or other plug-ins for the comment system, what do you like what do you not like?

Rand Fishkin: I’m biased to discuss, I think they’ve done a really strong solid job unless you have an audience that is very engaged on one of the social channels so if you know for example hey a lot of my readers are using Google plus and I see application of my blog through Google plus a good example of that is a lot of people in the photography world are very heavily on Google plus so there’s a lot of photo blogs with a bias Google plus comments I think that’s actually very smart same story with Facebook if you know that your audience is hugely into Facebook, a lot of mom and dad, parental blogs are like this, their audience is heavily on Facebook that’s where the sharing happens I think using Facebook’s commenting system for those blogs can make great sense too. It’s about choosing which matches your audience best.

Ahmed Al Kiremli: Let’s jump into the keyword search like how should we do the keyword search should we use general terms or keywords for each blog post that we do, which tools do you use to choose those keywords?

Rand Fishkin: So I like every quarter every six months or even every year depending on how often you’re doing it going through and doing a big keyword research process saying here’s all the terms it raises that I really wish could be at the top of Google for creating that list, using ad words using search suggest or a tool like keyword tool.io to broaden out that list, doing some research and other sites what are people searching for on YouTube what kinds of content is being created around this topic by using a tool like buzz sumo and then aggregating all of that together and Google Docs or itself saying here’s my big list, which one do I want to write about this year? What I would do is I really like saying hey I’m going to pick twenty or thirty or forty of these keywords that are really important and I’m going to truly target them and the rest of this list is going to be nice to have, it’s going to be hey if I’m passionate about this topic if I feel there’s something really unique and new to say great all right a lot of if not I’m going to let my own creativity and imagination drive my titles drive my content because I think a lot of bloggers get very limited when they think only in terms of Seo keywords and they lose out on the potential of driving a bigger audience through content that’s really exciting and unique and doesn’t necessarily targeted keyword. I think it’s smart to half like hey these are the keywords are really chasing these are the ones that are nice to have but I’m not going to let this keyword universe limit what I can write about, I’m going to be as creative and imaginative and I’m going to work to the passions of my audience.

Ahmed Al Kiremli: Longtail short keywords matter more or rank faster which one do you like more to start with?

Rand Fishkin: All that passionate stuff that you write about is going to be in the longtail it’s invisible you don’t really see how much the keyword volume is but it can work tremendously well and usually the competition is a lot lighter so rankings are much easier they just don’t send as much traffic per term and often times you can get a lot of links inventions and engagement and amplification all of which can help your entire website because of those positive signals that these posts are earning. In terms of the head of the demand curve, that’s where competition gets really heavy, I love being able to bring for those terms but I think it’s folly to think hey I’m going to target keyword XYZ really hard really challenging to get to and if that post doesn’t succeed and it doesn’t break for it well I failed and going to give up I’m going to move onto the next thing.

Rand Fishkin: I think it can be really smart actually to say I know it’s going to be hard to target this keyword and I’m willing to invest multiple posts, try to produce something on a regular basis that’s targeting that, see what sticks see what resonates with people it’s okay to have multiple pieces of content target a missing keyword or keyword phrase so long as there’s individual unique value from this posts and those are real posts that are going to resonate with people.

Ahmed Al Kiremli: So now we’re talking about producing more relevant content regarding specific keywords how about off page like what should we do where to put a listing, local listings, other stuff what should we do in terms of off page?

Rand Fishkin: I like I do think there’s a few places where you can go out and sort of build or acquire links directly so I think it’s great to go after blog rolls think it’s fine to go after local or industry niche sorts of resource pages I think it’s dangerous to chase link directories, most directories are going to get you into more trouble than they will help you and there’s a huge amount of risk around link spamming Google these days the same is true for any sort of manipulative system so a blog carnival a private blog network, anything where you buy links on Fiver to get listed in all these places, submit yourself to 500 directories and search engines, that type of stuff is super dangerous. It used to be the case that Google would just ignore those things but nowadays they will penalize you actively penalize you maybe even been your site from Google for engaging in this kind of liking practices so I would shy away from them. What I do think works really well in terms of off-site and earning links is getting exposure to the right kinds of people who might link to you. And a lot of times that means social media Twitter Facebook LinkedIn Google plus Pinterest maybe Instagram what have you and a lot of times it also means reaching out over email to expose your content to the right people if you know that hey this writer at this particular website often talks about this kind of thing I got what I think is a great piece of content on it I want to share it with them maybe they want to it maybe they won’t maybe the shared on Twitter maybe they won’t I don’t care I just want them to see it, send them an email, build a relationship, starting a relationship on the web or in person. I’m is a great way to eventually get the links in the signals that you need to rank well.

Ahmed Al Kiremli: How about like some Seo companies doing kind of a blog post but they are not as quality high-quality as the blog posts that you publish on the main site and they put it on certain sites out there with the link direct to your website?

Rand Fishkin: That’s dangerous territory, there’s a few times there are cases where a guest post will occasionally make sense someone from a blog you really admire and respect invites you to take a post that you created and published it on their site and a link back to your, that makes sense that audience is someone who would like this posted a link back call or they invite you to write something for their site, awesome but if it’s one of those things where it’s like hey here’s a guest blog directory or here’s an article posting service or I’m an Seo guy and then kind of shady I’m going to go out and get you fifty links by putting your post on fifty different sites that I know will take any old crap that you give them, that’s no barrier to entry and that stuff occasionally works for a short period of time for a few weeks or a few months but then you get penalized to get there and I may have to rebuild your blog from scratch or disavow your links and that shady Seo person who did it for you there just can go on to the next client, they don’t owe you anything they can just walk away but you are stuck with the pain and heartache of having those links hurting you.

Ahmed Al Kiremli: So how to rank a specific keyword like most Seo companies when you work with them they put a list of certain keywords and they start doing some of these off page strategies and sometimes they link them indirectly like four times or five times between different sites then to your site to try to trick Google I don’t know. How can you really rank quickly for certain keywords is it only based on what you post on your site internally in terms of your content homepage?

Rand Fishkin: So really if you are trying to rank very quickly and you don’t care about ranking for very long then go ahead engage in that manipulative staff, I don’t work in that world but black hat Seo folks specialize in that stuff, ranking quickly but for only a few days or a few weeks before a penalty hits on the site never ranks again. If you are trying to rank in the long term what you need to do is build a website and a brand that Google is going to love and Google is only going to love things that people love. Specifically people who influence what gets shared and talked about and written about on the web so your job really becomes doing PR and brand amplification for your site and earning the credibility across the industry niche space and many other adjacent industries and wishes and once you have that once you have a website that’s a real brand, that people know and love in return to that has lots of good links the gets lots of shares they gets lots of mentions, ranking gets easier and easier and easier because everything you publish people start reading and sharing even before you done any work. As soon as you hit the publish button people are coming in checking it out they follow you on twitter they check out your Facebook feed the subscribed to your RSS they look at what you published on LinkedIn, they direct navigate to your site to see what you’ve written, that’s awesome. That gives you the power to be able to rank for almost anything just by hitting the publish button. The problem is it takes a long time to build that up.

Ahmed Al Kiremli: How long?

Rand Fishkin: And if you aren’t willing to put in network then your only way to rank quickly is to do manipulative stuff that is going to hurt your site or fail or only last a few weeks.

Ahmed Al Kiremli: How long does it take a long as a long time?

Rand Fishkin: I’ve seen people do it in as little as a year or two but for the vast majority of folks were talking about a 2 to 5 year commitment to build up a site where you really have that brand strength and power. This is not an overnight process but it is a competitive advantage.

Ahmed Al Kiremli: If there is a very good blog with daily or every two or three days a blog post very high quality what is the traffic per month, the healthy traffic per month that you would expect to that over one year or two years?

Rand Fishkin: It totally depends on the topic if you are in a space that’s really hot say you’re writing about travel which is a hot space lots of people searching for lots of people checking it out, you can expect in your first year you might be able to do a quarter million or a half 1 million visits and years later 1 million or 2 million visits but if you’re writing about plumbing in Western Virginia 1000 2000 or 3000 you be lucky because you talking about a very local area a small nation a lot of people pay attention to it so it totally depends on your area of focus and I wouldn’t try to compare yourself against the big blogs out there that are hugely successful, I try to compare yourself against the sites that are in your space that specifically are talking about the same things you are.

Ahmed Al Kiremli: Which social media platform is the most important to Google, is a Google plus or Facebook or twitter or Pinterest?

Rand Fishkin: If you’re talking about directly important to Google in terms of will it help you is most likely to help you rankings it’s probably Google plus, if you’re talking about broadest reach that can expose your content of most people that still Facebook in most areas and occasionally it’s twitter and very rarely for some professional niche its LinkedIn. If you are planning to only be able to invest in say one or two maybe three social networks I would usually think about Facebook and Google plus and then I would think about where else is my audience are they on Pinterest or LinkedIn or twitter and then I would go after that third one.

Ahmed Al Kiremli: How about if I have ten pages and then using hot suite or buffer to publish the same content at different times using the software’s is that like is it okay to do that or does it have to be different content for each page, what do you think?

Rand Fishkin: I think it can be okay I would just make sure it’s very dependent on are you being empathetic to your followers, if your followers are like hey I’m on Pinterest and I basically want to see the same immature the same tax but someone on Facebook wants to see and that’s pretty much the same thing someone on twitter or Google plus wants to see and you could post all fiber those in whatever times you want with the same content that’s fine. However if you know a lot of people are on Facebook the same once you have on Pinterest you should change it up a little and go ahead and do that it’s really about what’s right with sympathetic for your users how much crossover you have, which networks what timing, there’s some consideration there.

Ahmed Al Kiremli: Is there any platform or software for distribution like distributing content that you can recommend?

Rand Fishkin: I like the ones that you’ve talked about, I’m a fan of buffer in particular and I know plenty of folk really like hot suite.

Ahmed Al Kiremli: I’m asking you in terms of your content on the blog not the social media platforms for distribution.

Rand Fishkin: There are some paid content what I call content remarketing platforms places that you can go, tabula, out brain, the Google ad network, Facebook, places you can promote and push your content to reach more folks by paying and I think that’s just fine again I would go and look at those services those websites, where they delivering content who is their audience, is a great geographically is a right topic wise is the cost structure working for you and then I test, you might say hey I’m going to have $100 budget on each of these networks and then I’m going to test how far and wide I can reach on tabula versus out brain versus Zemanta versus the Google ad network versus retargeting platforms maybe I’m going to use one of those and I’m going to try Facebook social ads in some twitter ads, awesome. Go do it. Now take the data you get back and say how many people did I reach, how many of them were the right people for me how far did it go how much did it cost me which one of my going to keep investing in based on the data?

Ahmed Al Kiremli: What to do to speed up a WordPress site because it matters in terms of Seo like which hosting to use is it like WP engine is the best or like some people still have speedy websites on Go Daddy or blue host what do you think?

Rand Fishkin: I would say that’s actually an area where I don’t have a ton of expertise because I haven’t done a lot of speed testing across hosts, I have been very impressed by WP engine I think they’re great they are a little expensive but the quality is extremely high the speed is extremely fast, Heather Berner is the CEO there and very impressed with her I like them a lot.

Ahmed Al Kiremli: Best Seo plug-ins?

Rand Fishkin: Best Seo plug-ins…

Ahmed Al Kiremli: For WordPress.

Rand Fishkin: We talked about Yost I like that a lot, I also I’ve been kind of impressed with I’m not sure it’s public yet but Full Contact has done something quite cool I might check those guys out, I like some of the plug-ins from Zemanta in terms of being able to recommend other content and be able to recommend your own content in the footer and build a network of course that’s pretty cool, trying to think of other ones that I might check out… I think those might be the few for right now, there probably are a couple others but I haven’t deeply enough research to in the last few months to give you a few but I will check some out.

Ahmed Al Kiremli: Is having a footer on your site or sidebars very important for Seo or not?

Rand Fishkin: It’s not very important for Seo I think it can be very important for web standards people are accustomed to be able to scroll to the bottom of the page to see your contact info or get to your most important pages from there to see her social accounts get your address or phone number so I like having a footer I think it helps to make it clear whether the page ends and to provide that information but I wouldn’t worry about too much from an Seo perspective in fact I would recommend against shoving bunch of links for Seo into your footer I’ve actually seen that penalize people’s websites pretty directly.

Ahmed Al Kiremli: Is the transcription will it at a great value let’s say if you transcribe your videos in terms of Seo or not?

Rand Fishkin: I have seen very positive effects and not just for Seo but also for user engagement and here’s the reason why, you and I were chatting about Seo plug-ins or about content remarketing networks and somebody might say hey I wonder if when Ahmed and Rand were chatting they talked at all about you know Zemanta, there you go you can do a quick search find it right in the copy you can see where it was in the conversation you confess for to that point in the video view really want to watch it is just a great service to users and it does help the engines also know what you’ve written about so if someone searches for podcast plus Moz plus Zemanta they can find this podcast specifically if it’s only in the video it may be harder for them to know so you can improve your longtail traffic.

Ahmed Al Kiremli: How about if I have two languages on my site or three languages how should I do the meta-tags for the same post and other details?

Rand Fishkin: I think you do have options right in Google to basically set some folders or some domains as different languages on a website through Google Webmaster tools that certainly one way to go and you can also do different versions in the subfolder structure so you basically say this is Moz.com/EN which is English/blog post and here is Moz.com/BG which is Bulgarian and then here’s the blog post and Bulgarian and I’m going to link between the two of them to say that, you can specify if you’d like you can specify language in the headers it’s not absolutely essential but I think it can be friendly for crawlers and engines.

Ahmed Al Kiremli: Any Seo companies that you recommend expensive or affordable like three here, three here, two here, two here, or people to work like membership sites in terms of Seo?

Rand Fishkin: If you search for recommended Seo’s or recommended Seo lists Moz is the top result for that and I’ve got a big list of companies that we recommend so you can check that are run on the web.

Ahmed Al Kiremli: What is inbound.org?

Rand Fishkin: Inbound.org is a project that Darna Shaw and myself created, hotspot now owns it and they sort of run it but I still participate in there and help out and the idea is people submit great content from around the world of inbound marketing stuff that marketers can deeply about you know statistics and blog posts and new reports and news and then there’s good discussion around this topics as well so it’s a good place to go if you want to keep up-to-date on what the industry is thinking about.

Ahmed Al Kiremli: What is your strategy to create content efficiently?

Rand Fishkin: For me it really starts with saying I’m going to limit the quantity of content that I create and focus really and quality and in addition to that I try to limit myself to saying I only want to cover areas of content where I think no one else has done a great job or no one else has talked about in the same way I have which is different from what a lot of other content marketers will do. The other thing that’s been a great tactic for me is to write about things online were I’ve had great off-line conversations as a catalyst for those. I really pride myself on saying hey if the conversation resonates in person if someone’s eyes light up they get really into it that’s probably a great topic for a post and if you start talking about something and they think it sounds boring or they don’t care then it probably is a crappy topic for a post. So that’s what helped me keep efficient.

Ahmed Al Kiremli: Share with us some of the tools or software that you use that makes you really efficient, more efficient.

Rand Fishkin: Sure, I’m passionate about two tools for the social Web, one of them is follow or walk which is now a Moz tool, I use that a lot for searching bios for analyzing my account for looking at other people’s accounts and seeing who they follow or what they care about and the other tool that I totally love right now is Buzz sumo which lets the research content that has gone hot on the social web, what types of content people care about what worked and what hasn’t. Who’s shared content, those are both great and I’m actually a big fan of Twitter’s new analytic