Jason Jell Interview

Business Growth Strategies With Podcast Interviews

Jason Jell

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Name: Jason Jell

Industry: Internet Marketing, online marketing

Website: Keyword Elite 2.0

Jason Jell’s Bio: You might not know Jason Jell but I’m sure you know his product – Keyword Elite. Yes, he’s the other half of the Brad Callen dream team. I love the look and feel of all of his products in the Elite range… from the website to the product, there’s a polished professional look often over looked by many other internet marketers. Clearly they take pride in his work.

One of the first products I ever got started with was SEO Elite, a fantastic keyword tool. It was a pioneering product paving the way for many other keyword tools to follow.

With the recent launch of Keyword Elite 2.0 I wanted to find out more about the team behind its development. I got in touch with the man himself Brad Callen and after a little backwards and forwards, Brad line up a call with his right hand man, Jason Jell.

Before this point I hadn’t heard of Jason Jell but after our call I shifted him into my top 10 SEOers of all time… he’s one smart dude. Moreover, what he shared with regards to the way Brad does business, only elevated my perception of what Brad’s built.

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Interview Transcript: Click here to download the PDF transcript.

David Jenyns: Welcome to another call for theseomethod.com. I’m excited to be joined today by one of the main guys who is influential in the Brad Callen’s line of software, the Elite software, like the SEO Elite and Keyword Elite. He’s been in SEO for a Fortune 500 company, does SEO consulting, does a lot of the training for Brad’s products. He really does know SEO extremely well. So I’m very excited to have Jason Jell on the phone.

Are you there Jason?

Jason Jell: Yes, I’m here. Thanks for the nice intro David. It’s a pleasure to be here, and it’s a pleasure to talk to all your people. I hope we can give them some good information.

David Jenyns: I always love talking about SEO with someone who knows what they’re talking about. If we dive straight into it, one of the first things I wanted to talk about was when you’re about to launch a new website, what are the steps and the process you go through for getting that website ranked? I know it’s a pretty broad question so perhaps tackle it however you like.

Jason Jell: I think in just trying to do these types of things when I was coming up and when I tried it and I failed and when I tried it and I actually succeeded, I think the biggest steps for me were coming into it with a well defined keyword plan.

People will create a brand new website and they’ll slap pages up and they never have legitimate keyword targets. They don’t spend the time to look at what kind of search volume, who am I targeting here, what kind of competition am I targeting. They’ll just slap pages up and then six months later they’ll look and they’ll say, I have no traffic. Then they’ll realize either they targeted terms with no traffic or they targeted a term they couldn’t possibly compete in a reasonable amount of time.

For me, when I’m coming into a new site in particular, I will spend twice as much time on keyword development, keyword analysis before I write one bit of content. Then I know when I do get to the point and I start on content generation, I know I have legitimate targets, I have measurable endpoints so I can say, I’m going after this set of terms. This set of terms has x amount of searches, so if I pull a certain amount of rank, then I know I’ll pull this much traffic. If you can’t pull the traffic, you’re never going to get anywhere.

It’s a pretty standard procedure for me across the board. I see consulting is always the biggest thing that people seem to get wrong. They don’t put in the proper amount of time for the keyword research.

David Jenyns: Does it vary depending on the site, if you were going for a sales letter site versus an e commerce style site with lots of different pages? Do you see keyword research vary between those styles of websites?

Jason Jell: Definitely yes. A sales letter site you’re never going to have a lot of keyword targets towards it. I would look at the two and I would say the e commerce site would probably be the easier of the two. If I’m dealing with a thousand pages, I know my chance of getting a lot of traffic’s going to be a lot better. I’m probably going to be pushing for a lot longer tail terms. I’m probably going to be able to rank a lot faster.

If you’re pushing a sales letter you’re talking not nearly as many pages and not nearly as many targets. So you’re either having to go for a bigger target which tends to take longer to rank for and tends to take a little bit more effort, or you’re going to have to look at some free traffic generation methods.

So you start pushing into maybe social media channels, definitely start pushing towards PPC. You do have to expand out quite a bit more when you don’t have as many keyword opportunities.

David Jenyns: With that initial keyword research as well, do you start off picking out, say, ten, fifteen, twenty different keywords you’re going after and then build specific landing pages targeting those particular keywords? How is it that you’re using it? I know you mentioned pay per click. But I suppose from an SEO point of view, how do you structure where you go? I know part of it would also be determined by the resources you’ve got. Some projects you might have more cash to spend on than others, but do you have a guideline there?

Jason Jell: Yes, your second comment really speaks to exactly how I would handle it. It’s very dependent on the client and very dependent on the resources. I’ll give my best case scenario depending on limitless budget, this is the pie in the sky version, then I can give my more realistic version , how most people probably would end up approaching it.

There are two ways to go about it for me. If I don’t have issues with budget, then I will take, and I will generate content against a set of keywords. Say I have fifty keywords that are potentials for me, I’ve already vetted the fact that they have search volume and that they’re not over the limit in terms of competition. When I say that, I’m looking at a term that the leading sites in Google have a lot of links. We’re talking a lot of links, not just a couple of thousand, but 5,000 or 10,000. It’s pretty easy to spot something that you’ll never be competitive with in a reasonable amount of time.

Obviously I’m not going to test those and those probably wouldn’t be the best for this test anyway. I can talk about why. So I’ll toss those out. I know I’ll have terms that I can realistically be competitive in within less than six months for SEO. I’ll take those fifty terms, I’ll generate content against it. If it’s e commerce then I’ll just be pushing their product pages. If it’s lead gen or if it’s a sales type of process then I’ll push them towards targeted content around that. In the best case scenario I would test all of those through pay per click before I would SEO anything.

I’m pushing traffic through pay per click, not really spending a ton of money but I want to know that if people come in, if they buy. So there’s an ROI associated with them. If I test those fifty keywords then I see that twenty-five of them have shown maybe over a thousand clicks, that twenty -five of those terms result in a buy. Then those twenty-five I will turn around and I will start dedicating some link building towards them. I will structure my internal linking, I will make sure all my base SEO, my on page stuff is right and then I’ll really start chasing link building.

The other twenty-five I’ll probably dump until I’m in a position where the ones that I know are converting are up and running and making me money. So for people who have a PPC budget, if I could give anybody any advice, I’d probably say that’s the most important and the best step you can take to make sure that you are making money with SEO: testing through pay per click. For people who are intimidated by pay per click I would just say, go out there and give it a shot.

If you spend maybe $200 or $500 on your test, for some it may sound like a lot. For me it sounded like a lot for a very long time. But if you can show that you do make money if you do get traffic for that term, then that money is very, very well spent. That’s my best case scenario. So if I’m in a situation where I’m consulting or I’m working with a larger company, I would definitely push for that.

If I can’t get that, I would probably take the next case scenario where I would just take my longer tail terms and I would build content. I would optimize for those and try to start pulling traffic as soon as possible, then I would start to scale up. I tend to take a very bottom up approach rather than going top down with my keywords.

I’ll chase my least competitive keywords first. I know I can get traffic from those before I can get traffic for anything else. I’ll set my site structure up from the outset: top to bottom. My most competitive term is at the top, highest up in my architecture. My least competitive terms are at the bottom, which is a pretty normal site structure. Then I will SEO the bottom terms. I’ll try some link building for the bottom terms, maybe I’ll do some Article Marketing or whatever types of methods I want to do for that particular site.

I’ll rank those and then I’ll start to push up the pyramid and I’ll start when the bottom row ranks, then I’ll step up to the next row. I’ll start chasing those, and then when that ranks, I’ll step up gradually. As you start to rank your lowest ladder terms, it’s going to be a lot easier for you to rank the next step up because your site’s going to be gaining credibility, gaining links, gaining trust. As your domain gets stronger, then everything gets easier.

David Jenyns: Very good. You talked about building up those pages and putting some relevant content on it. Are we talking just some basic articles or what sort of content are you building and what sort of guideline, even, I know it can vary the number of words on a page, but we’re not talking one paragraph, hundred word paragraphs are we?

Jason Jell: Again it’s very dependent on the content. Generally you’re going to want at least three hundred words I would say at a bare minimum. Even if you’re e commerce or even if you’re pushing some kind of an affiliate product, you’ll probably need at least three hundred words just to make sure you’re giving yourself a legitimate shot at being indexed and sticking.

I tend to really focus more off page. My on page content doesn’t necessarily have to be huge or super in depth. If I’m going through Amazon or if I’m pushing some kind of CPA offer or something like that, I’m just throwing some options out there, then I’ll just pull related content. I’ll have it written. I’ll make sure it’s good enough so that if somebody lands on the page, it’s very on topic, it’s very focused and it’s definitely not rehashed from another page or scraped from another page.

I don’t go crazy on length. I’ve never thought that is helpful for the end user for one. In most cases, most people aren’t going to go through a ton of content just to even read it if it’s there. If anything, they’ll just skim it. So I wouldn’t put a ton of time or resources into generating one thousand word pages or anything like that.

David Jenyns: With that particular content, is it spammy type content or is it good content of value? The user comes there and gets benefit out of it?

Jason Jell: The stuff that I push, if I put up a site, it’s always going to be valued. If I’m working with a client, I’m always going to push value as an end point. There are two potential sources of traffic. I will get traffic from SEO regardless of how good my content is. You can SEO a blank page and get traffic. So your content from that perspective doesn’t matter, but if you want to convert it, it better be quality.

From that standpoint, you really do have to think about your end users. SEO is constantly pitched as just a traffic generation method but SEO as a whole really encompasses user experience too, and conversion.

David Jenyns: What are some of the other factors it looks at as well? People talk about age of the domain name, the PR and I’m interested to get your thoughts on those sort of factors and how you feel they play a part in doing some analysis on keywords.

You mentioned too when talking about some of those keywords that you are targeting and then setting up these pages, hopefully for the high conversion rates, you talked about some of the keywords that you may not pay as much attention to. They are those hyper competitive niches or on the other end of the spectrum, things that people aren’t looking at. When you’re looking at competition and what’s out there, what are some of the factors?

This is going to play for both things, being able to analyze the competition and see what factors make up good ranking. When you go looking for links, and we’ll talk about that in a little bit, and also when you’re deciding whether or not you’re going to go after something, you need to do some sort of competitive analysis. I know there are some good research tools in SEO Elite. There is also Keyword Elite 2.0 which I haven’t fully checked out yet. I think you mentioned there is a market research tool where you can look at the competition. I want to know what sort of factors you think make up good rankings and therefore something you need to do analysis on.

Jason Jell: One of the things I’ve done in the past was we did a membership site. That was a long time ago. This was actually before I started working with Brad. We were providing products to people. We would provide AdSense sites to people. We would build out these little mini content sites and kick out sets of content sites to end users. One of the things I had to do a lot for that was new keyword generation.

For AdSense you would have very specific targets. I used Keyword Elite quite a bit when I did that. I used it more for the automation aspect than anything else. I would look for very specific end points to keep or ditch a term. I never looked at KEI. KEI has been outdated for quite a long time. I would use another measure to quickly keep or dump terms like R/S ratio. Are you familiar with R/S ratio?

David Jenyns: No

Jason Jell: I would always look at R/S ratio as a first pass at a keyword. R/S ratio is, if you’re not familiar with it, is the number of results versus the number of searches. So if you had a term that had a lot of results and not a lot of searches, it wouldn’t really show up as a very good term.

It doesn’t really tell you anything immediately about competition but it does tell you something about market scale. For terms that had a lot of searches and not a lot of results, that would set up an alert up for me to say, maybe this is something I want to look into a little bit further. I would look at that.

There is another thing I would look at. This is something I picked up along the way that I think is a useful thing that people should monitor which maybe they don’t think about when they think about SEO. If you have a tool like Keyword Elite or another tool that generates this kind of data, look at competitive data to see how many clicks a term gets in AdWords.

AdWords is a different kind of animal. Even if you’re not going in to AdWords, it takes a certain type of person to drive through and click those types of ads. You’re working with a small subset of users. If you’re dealing with people like us who’ve been in internet marketing, maybe we’re a little bit more blind to AdWords, but there are a lot of users who aren’t. So they’ll click on ads. When I saw a term that say, had a lot of searches, not a lot of results, and I saw a lot of clicks in AdWords, that term tended to convert very well.

I would keep an eye on how often people would click on an ad in AdWords. Keyword
Elite would pull that data for me. When I’m scaling terms, I look for something that has a very high search to low results ratio and actually was registering quite a few clicks in Google AdWords. Those were my first pass checks before I even started looking at anything on the SEO side.

David Jenyns: Some of the other things like the Market Research Sleuth in Keyword Elite 2.0,

Jason Jell: The Market Research Sleuth tool was originally geared more towards AdWords, number of AdWords clicks. Then it gives you ballpark organic clicks. It’s a ballpark number of how many searches there are. If there are 5,000 searches and you get the number one spot you can expect to carry maybe 70% of that load. It’s just based off market trends in Google.

The one that I do look at quite a bit when it comes to SEO competition is another tool called the Search Engine Dominator. We’ve seen tools where you put a keyword in and it says competitive or not competitive and we spent a lot of time on how that type of data was calculated. You would see terms that would take the number of Google results for a term, the number of in titles for a term or the number of in anchor results for a term. We’d ballpark that and it would say competitive or non competitive.

As an SEO, Brad and I and others in this team all thought that wasn’t necessarily telling of true SEO competition. There are a lot of factors in true SEO. Really these days off page drives a lot of that. You’re talking about number of back links to a domain, number of back links to a site, PR, site age, allinanchor position. These were, if you’re looking at the top ten sites that rank for any keyword, those are some of the main factors that determine where those sites fall in that list.

Rather than taking a single term and saying this term is competitive or not competitive based on some extraneous data, we actually polled from the top ten of Google and we polled and we analyzed and we set up this algorithm on SEO competitive factors that people legitimately use. We basically set up a ranking factor to say this is a very competitive term. We vetted this tool over hundreds of keywords. What we would do is, we would take a keyword; we put in, say, weight loss. That’s super competitive and we’d see how it would score.

I don’t know exactly what the scoring falls out on, I can’t remember, but we did set ranges where we said this is super competitive, this is competitive but you can make rank and you could rank in a reasonable amount of time and the other ones would fall under long tail. We would go in, we would test the tool against a bunch of keywords and then we would go back and we would cross check them manually, looking at all those factors ourselves.

So we would look at page back links, we would look at site back links, we would look at page PR, site PR. We would look at the anchor text percentage used in the back links, we would look at allinanchor position. We looked at so many different factors and we tweaked this tool until we got it to a point where it would basically give us the same answer that we got when we manually checked what was happening in Google’s top ten. I’m especially proud of that one. That was a couple of months of toying back and forth until we got that one ready.

David Jenyns: I suppose the brilliant thing now is it makes it easier, especially when you’re doing that first analysis you were talking about of the fifty terms when you’re first going off and doing some testing. It would really help you see straight away, is this something I’m going to have a shot at, before you load it into for PPC testing. If it shoots out the other end after the PPC testing you can go, oh, this is also a converting term and worthwhile going after. You’ve got a really good shot of doing it.

There’s a lot of information in the SEO Method and my guys are familiar with the on page basics, making sure you’ve got the keyword in the right places, the title tags, the meta descriptions a few times throughout. You also made reference before, saying on page optimization, you can get a blank page ranked. The lion’s share of rankings in search engines comes from off page factors.

Once you’ve got the on page factors right, let’s say you are working with a company as a consultant or you’re actually doing the work for them, what’s the next stage? You’ve built up these pages, you’ve got the terms. Do you have a system that you follow step by step, such as, I’ll first go and get x number of articles done, I’ll publish them here and here? What sort of things do you do off site?

Jason Jell: There are two ways that I generally approach it. There’s SEO and then there’s traffic. It depends on the situation again of course of how I go about it. If I’m looking at traffic, then I will have a tendency to lean a little bit more social media. Some of the social media sites will drive traffic and not necessarily be as SEO focused as some of the other methods I’d use.

In terms of SEO, by and large, directories are pretty much out these days. I’ll probably still use Yahoo. I’ll submit to Dmoz and then cross my fingers. Maybe I’ll use Best of the Web. I’ll tend to stay away from large directories at this point in time. It hasn’t really shown the return that it did. Even a year ago it hasn’t shown the return that it did.

If I’m doing directories, then I tend to fall back on niche specific directories. I do actually use one of Brad’s tools for that as well. In Keyword Elite one of my favourite tools, and this is one of my favourite tools to help me gauge how I’m going to approach link building, is I believe it is Project 7, finding authority websites. What it does is if you go in and say, for the top thirty sites recognize cross linkages that are happening within these top thirty sites that rank for a keyword.

It will go through and say for all the top thirty sites, eighty percent of them are linking to this website. Then I will look at that website and sometimes it’s a niche directory. So I can dig out some niche specific places to link to very quickly using that tool. For a lot of markets there are some very good niche specific directories that tend to be really easy links. Maybe they’re paid, maybe they’re $20-$30 but they tend to be very strong links because they’re heavily cross linked across the niche.

If you’re talking a heavily weighted link, those tend to be very easy ones to get that do push quite a bit of rank. I’ll look for those.

David Jenyns: I do love the way you talk about, especially with these analysis tools, is the reverse engineering. It really is the smart way to go for looking at what the competition is doing. You’re identifying, here is where I need to strike and here’s what I need to do. It is a lot more precise, and it will take a lot of the hard work out and you can see the rankings very quickly. It’s a smart way to do SEO.

Jason Jell: I actually have a science background before I was in web. I was a scientist actually. Those types of approaches make sense. In SEO as a whole always came to me like that. I always think of it as a very scientific approach. There really isn’t a lot of mystery to it. There isn’t a situation where you can’t give me a keyword and I can’t tell you why this guy ranked over everybody else under him. There isn’t a mystery behind that.

There are metrics, there are numbers, you can pinpoint exactly why one person’s doing better than everybody else. It’s not necessarily deconstructing Google’s algorithm but ninety percent of the time it is pretty straightforward.

This guy has more links and more of those links have the right keyword anchor text. Find me a niche where allinanchor doesn’t line up with rank. It almost doesn’t happen.

David Jenyns: I suppose the key thing then is, you talked about identifying what keywords you’re going after from a competition point of view. Then you say, is it worth my time and the resources it’s going to cost me to get to that, how big is my back end and what is the pay off for that keyword to then determine whether or not it is something you want to go for.

I also like the way you talked about first going for those lower hanging fruit keywords first. That all helps to build momentum to funnel that page rank and Google love, whatever you like to call it, up to your primary keyword that you’re going after. I think you mentioned one of the first areas you go for is your directories. Apart from niche specific directories, where do you go to from there?

Jason Jell: I will take a similar tack looking at if there are any other methods outside of that I can easily identify that competitors are doing. Most of the time, it is not really straightforward. You’ll see some obvious link purchases which maybe you can do, maybe you can’t. You’ll see some obvious relationships that have been established. So you’ll find, this guy is associated with this guy and they cross link and that is a heavy link that you’ll probably not get.

You also see some situations where the end user is obviously creating rank themselves. They’re building other portals that are pushing or funneling rank in. Those are all things that help you identify how they got to where they are. But that doesn’t necessarily guide my direction as much as it gives me an idea of what I’m up against. The end goal is still going to be, I need x amount of links that carry more weight than this guy’s got and then I’ll outrank him.

I still do tend to fall on content marketing and when I say content marketing, it does encompass things like Article Marketing. I do still like Article Marketing. I don’t necessarily go as wide as a lot of people tend to do. So I won’t go and submit to every single place that I find. I’ll stick to the big ones, Ezine articles, GoArticles. I think Article City is one I haven’t manually done in a while to be honest with you. I’ll stick to maybe the top three or four depending on the client that I’m working with. I probably will still submit through ISnare which spreads it around but I don’t tend to get a big push from it.

I think there are two things that tend to really push Article Marketing over the top. The first one is not necessarily just dumping it out there and leaving it in these directories. These article directories are largely pits for this type of content. Maybe it gets picked up, maybe you get a little bit of rank from the actual directory itself.

Where we get the bigger pushes, is really in relationship building and getting people to actually republish your content just really through getting out there, getting the word out, contacting people who have the type of content that is in your niche. So if you have a blog or you have another person that runs a site it’s in a niche that you’re not competing with.

Google’s definition of a niche is wider than I think a lot of people give it credit for. If I’m selling camping gear and there’s a website about traveling to the national parks, there’s going to be an overlap there which would be a really great link, and I’m not necessarily competing directly with that person. That person may be willing to republish my content if I give it to them for free.

Rather than just putting it in an article directory hoping they pick it up, I’m going to be a lot more proactive and I’m going to go these web masters and I’m going to say, I have this content, would you be willing to republish it on your site? In return, leave my link there. So I control the anchor text of course, I control the message and that person gets fresh content.

A lot of times you’d be surprised, it is a lot easier than you might think to do. I think a lot of people are actually intimidated by the fact that earlier I’ve got to go and chase this person down and he’s not going to want to talk to me. Web masters value their end users, they value their content, and to be honest with you, this is a really good example. You contacted Brad because you saw Brad had something that your end users would value. In return, we’re coming, we’re giving you content and in return for us giving you content, you’ll link back to us.

Your users will get benefit from it and we’ll get benefits from it. So it’s a win win. So that’s one of the most overlooked and one of the most beneficial strategies, is really just chasing the link rather than waiting for it to happen.

When you have content, and you have good content, this is where literally good content comes into play. You’re not going to be able to get a web master to pick up your $5 article So either be prepared to pay for better content or be prepared to step up and write better content that is going to set that web master apart from other people that he’s competing with and help him stand out and help him get more out of it.

David Jenyns: Are they the two main streams of content marketing that you go after, Article Marketing and relationship building?

Jason Jell: Yes, and then even apart from that, these day especially, I tend to push that content to social media as well. So I will push that to Squidoo, Hub Pages or one of those other major networks where I can create links for myself. One of the greatest things about being web master, or being in SEO these days is the explosion of social media and the power of social media. The fact that these sites do continue to grow, and the fact that these sites allow you to step in, add content, and grow outside of your own domain.

Maybe a couple of years ago you would have people creating a PR pumper site, so to speak, where they would funnel tons of content and then they’d no follow everything except for the links to their site. That was what they were trying to do. Now you’re in a position where social media sites have got so big. Something like the Hub Pages go in and you can put your content on there, you can create something that has a lot of value, and you can piggy back off a ton of domain weight that Hub Pages has.

You can send that to your site without having to chase anybody down. Social media gives you hundreds of link outlets that are just sitting there waiting for your content. There’s nothing that’s stopping you from going out and getting those links. The only thing that’s stopping you is you going out there and putting your content out there and putting the link back.

David Jenyns: When you’re first going after these keywords, and let’s say you’re working with a particular client and you can see what the competition is up to, do you go down so granular to say, here are the number of links I need to get to these pages to get these keywords?

You talked about a few of the different ways you then go out to get those links and the quality of links you do need. Then you just say, here’s what I need and then I’m going to spread it across these different methods? Or do you just say, I’m going to get, depending on the competition it’s going to vary, but you might just say I’m going to need roughly ten articles submitted through GoArticles, Ezine Articles and ISnare. Let’s go and get a minimum of twenty links with this relationship building and I want to build be it Lens or Hub Page or whatever. I’m going to get x number of social media pages and then obviously it’s a good idea as well to promote those pages.

I’m just thinking more of a strategy, how do you pull it all together? We talked about the different methods, but how do you know how you go for implementation?

Jason Jell: It’s a good question. It’s a hard question to answer because it’s totally dependent upon the niche. If you do step into weight loss for instance, you’ll see some of the top sites. A spammer will have 30,000 links and maybe the number one site has 5,000. It would take his 30,000 links to outweigh the number one guy’s 5,000. So there’s a lot about link quality which is hard to assess. There isn’t necessarily a tool out there that can give you a gut reaction of how much quality is there and how much of that quality is pushing towards that keyword. At least I haven’t seen anything.

You can do back link analysis and you can look at how many of those links are using the anchor text for that keyword. But even that’s probably not a good way of saying how valuable their links are that contribute to that keyword. Even the ones that don’t have the anchor text are contributing domain values. The domain is really going to garner how much power that site has and you have to overcome that as well as overcome whatever level of anchor text or whatever level of keyword strength they have. It’s definitely going to be a very straightforward type of situation.

What I tend to do rather than actually setting some kind of priority like that where I need to do x, y and z, I will just begin with whatever I can start with. If I have content to market, if I have ten articles, I’m going to put my ten articles out there in as many places as I can get them. I’ll put them out through the networks and then I’ll try to share whatever I didn’t syndicate through the networks. I’ll spread them out as much as possible to prevent any kind of duplication because I don’t want to run in to that.

Obviously I wouldn’t want to approach a web master and say, I wrote this content for you, would you put it on your site? He finds it on Ezine Articles ten minutes later, that’s not going to look very good for me. But I do tend to begin with as much as I can to start with. So if I have a resource available to me to help me with content generation, then I’ll have them write it.

Then when I get the content I’ll say, I know if I have relationships I can leverage, I’ll go to those first and I’ll pitch the content to them. I know that those links are going to be more valuable. If I don’t have a relationship to leverage, I’ll split between Article Marketing and I’ll split between social media because I know those are easy link outlets. I know the social media is going to give me a link, especially if I have some kind of existing page there. It’s going to give me a link that will stick and will have some value to it.

I also will probably hit the Article Marketing networks if I can, if I have enough content. What I tend to do is just monitor my own anchor position. So if I’m starting on week one and I submit ten articles and I hit five social media sites or whatever and my on anchor position went from fifty to twenty-five, then I know that I have a better idea of how much or how fast I need to scale to move up that ladder. If I do the same exact process and my on anchor went from fifty to forty-nine, I know my work is cut out for me.

David Jenyns: I like that because it is almost like a litmus test. With some of those things you mentioned, with the Article Marketing and social media, are you outsourcing that? I think the relationship building itself is harder to outsource. How much of this process, especially when you’re working with clients, are you doing yourself, or that you have systems in place to help this come together?

Jason Jell: The social media stuff you can definitely outsource because it tends to be pretty straightforward. Just as much as you can outsource Article Marketing, you can create a bulleted list of, these are the places that I want you to go to. Take this content, use this link, use this anchor text, that kind of stuff can be fairly easily outsourced. But I would tend to agree, the relationship building, if you want it to count, then, you better put a face, you better put a brand, you better put everything you can behind that to really make it stick.

That relationship, and those one, two, three or however many links that you can pull on a personal level, probably are going to outweigh the twenty or thirty articles that you submitted over the past month. I’ll weight that, and I’ll weight it very heavily because I know how much clout a niche specific authority site can pull for me.

David Jenyns: We touched on those three pillars there for content marketing. You also alluded to earlier, at least looking at the competition, someone may be out there building 30,000 pages through some sort of spam network or something like that. I know you’re more of a white hat person. Do you build quality supporting sites to help build up your own network to rank an individual page, or do you focus more on using those social media? You said initially that’s why a lot of people were setting up those networks, was to get the same benefit you can now get from the social media sites.

Jason Jell: There are a couple of different schools of thought and I think I fall under one versus the other. Some of them will create massive networks. They’ll heavily interlink those networks even and create, some people call them link wheels. Are you familiar with link wheels?

David Jenyns: Yes.

Jason Jell: A lot of people I think are really hot on that right now. I almost think it’s not necessary. It’s interesting to me when I look at it. I see them and people spend so much time making sure that A links to B but not to C and this and that. I’m looking at it and I don’t necessarily think that there is a benefit there.

I think to be honest with you, it’s a flag. Google’s not stupid, and Google’s identified something very easy over the past couple of years. You are creating cross linking and you are creating a footprint no matter how much people think this isn’t your site. It funnels into your site eventually, and I think just creating that funnel is a lot different than just going out and saying, I’m going to create my Squidoo page or my Hub Page or my YouTube video, they’re all going to funnel, into my site but I’m not going to cross link them.

I think the value you get isn’t lost by not cross linking them. So I won’t do that but I do think that I’m still building my external network and I am still funneling in PR by doing that. A portion of PR from each one of those sites that I create is going to funnel in and it’s going to help me. I don’t think it’s going to be bigger by cross linking and creating that wheel like people talk about.

The benefits that I do see with that type of thing, and one of the things that I am glad to see coming out these days, are people talking about promoting their promotions. I think that’s where a lot of people tend to drop the ball and things like link wheels are bringing that type of idea to light. If you say you create this mini network in order to make your little mini network work for you, then you have to build links to that so it gets indexed and Google finds that.

That type of idea is one that I think a lot of people should really grab hold of. So one of things I really do like to press is if I’m going out and I am creating an article or I’m creating a Lens or I’m creating a Hub Page, every single url I create, I log. I know where every single one of those is.

However outdated people might think this is I still ping them, every single one that I create. Every single link that I create in the internet, I make sure Google knows about. Every single RSS feed on every site that I create is submitted to RSS Submit. Every chance that I get, I will push article content to market my Squidoo, Lens or I will push article content to push my Hub Page or my YouTube video just as much as I will push it to promote my own site.

The links that I do create outside my site that I’m controlling I will add value to them so that they do push more value for me.

David Jenyns: I feel like the modern day pinging method that a lot of people talk about is using book marking. You’re still using pinging and I know that works; we use that as well. What are your thoughts on comparisons between using Pingoat or something like that versus social book marking to get things indexed? It sounds like the reason you do that is for indexing, not necessarily for building links.

Jason Jell: It’s to get my links to stick, yes. There are a lot of situations where I will do both. There are a lot of tools that automate the process of social book marking. If I have the resources available I’ll say ping these urls, book mark these urls, and that’s just another check box for me. I just make sure it’s done and then I move on to the next thing.

Daivd: A couple of key things came out of what you talked about there. One, logging the urls that you are submitting out there so then you can promote the promoting pages. I think that is really key, just making sure that you do have that logged. The other thing was, it really doesn’t sound as if you get caught up in these new ideas. It’s easy to get caught up in things like different linking strategies and building networks.

I know when I first got started with SEO, I got all involved with trying to set up different hosting accounts and making sure they were on different class C IP blocks, making sure I had the domains registered in my Mum’s maiden name because I didn’t want the surname to be the same and a different address. It even went to the extent of popping down to the local library to check my Google Analytics stats because I didn’t want them to log the same IP address. I took it to a stupid level.

In hindsight, I sit there and think how much more bang for my buck would I have got for effort to reward just by, instead of doing all that, just putting out more content, putting out a good article, building a relationship with someone, posting something on a social media site? You get so much more bang for your buck. Just as a side note, that whole network that I built up did get taken down anyway because Google linked it all together and then they banned my Google AdSense account and all of it was for nothing.

I look back on that now, and I see the real key is having almost like a system in place that you can repeat. Stop trying to game the search engines, just follow the good fundamentals that you talk about. This leads me to, I know the importance of getting a variety of links. But let’s just say you had to pick one, for argument’s sake. Where do you think you get the best bang for your buck for links? What would you say the best bang for the buck is for time, ROI?

Jason Jell: You’re going to laugh, because it’s one a lot of people probably slap around. I think in terms of bang for your buck is going to be blog commenting still. I think blog commenting is still strong and I think a lot of people tend to devalue that quite a bit, probably more than necessary. There are still quite a few blogs out there that are no follow. There are still quite a bit of PR you can get just from a simple comment. It’s free, except for time. There is a lot of that out there. Ask the spammers, they know.

I would say the same case for forums. There are a lot of places where you can jump into forums, you can be a voice, and you can get a link back. There are so many free sources these days: Ask and Answer sites. Yahoo Answers isn’t probably the best model because you really have to build a rep before you get that link. One that I use a lot is Yedda, Ehouse, sites like that. You could go on.

I go into some of these Ask and Answer sites and I’ll just answer questions for half an hour and I’ll get five links. Those five links will stick. In terms of time and energy that’s a great deal less than it’s going to take me to generate new content. There are so many free linking sources that bang for your buck is really high these days.

David Jenyns: Some of the things you were talking about, and you talked about Article Marketing and you mentioned you haven’t done that manually in a really long time. Some of the things you’re automating, and some of the things you’re doing yourself, even the comments you mentioned. I’m curious when you’re working with different clients and that sort of thing, are you particularly focusing on one client at one point in time? So your time and energy is focused into that? How does it work for how you are managing it from a day to day business?

Jason Jell: I’ve done it both ways. I’ve done it where I work with another guy and we manage twenty clients at any point in time. Obviously it was very hands off except for checking rank, checking that links were growing, checking that allinanchor was moving. If those things weren’t moving, then that would be flagged for us.

When it’s just me and whatever resources I have, then I tend to be more involved. Then if it is one client, then I know where all the links came from, I know how much they’ve grown and I know specifically how they’ve grown, what the rate is, what the anchor text that’s being used. I’m keeping a very close eye on it. In a lot of cases I still do manually do some of this stuff. It just depends on the situation and depends on the needs. My hands got dirty for a long time and a lot of times if you sit through eight hours of meetings in a day then you’re totally happy to be in there doing the dirt.

David Jenyns: Yes. It sounds like having worked with those clients as well you’ve gone after both big niches and little niches. Do you have a preference? How do you carve out your foothold about where you’re going to go after?

Jason Jell: That also very much depends on the client. You’ll walk into some situations and you’ll have somebody that has a website that went up in the mid nineties. Regardless of what they’ve targeted and how they’ve targeted it, I could punch in and I could do on page only, I can make sure inter site linking is good, I can make sure we’re using the same anchor text. When we do link for proper pages, I’ll nail on page and I’ll rank within the period of a couple of weeks to a month without link building.

David Jenyns: What are you thoughts on that? Why?

Jason Jell: Domain strength. Domain strength carries way over a lot of factors we can even control. The best advice I can give anybody is if you’re starting a new site, buy an aged domain. Buy something that’s got some weight behind it. You’ll save yourself some hassle. There’s a lot to say for the strength of a domain that you can’t overcome with link building in a reasonable amount of time.

David Jenyns: When you say strength as well, we’re talking about age as opposed to number of links. Obviously when you buy some aged domains a lot of them are going to have links as well. Are you talking about one of those key factors really being how long that domain name has been around?

Jason Jell: That’s not as much part of it as it is the links. The links are definitely the bigger part. Even if you’re buying a domain that has x amount of links and the anchor text isn’t exactly what you wanted it to be, a link profile doesn’t have to be exactly what you want it to be. In most cases it never will be, which is fine. If you make a link profile fit exactly the mould that you want it to fit, then you’re raising every flag that you could raise.

If you’re going in there and you have dozens of links that point to something totally unrelated, they’re still good links. That’s the other thing that people need to realize. No matter how much people say it better be on topic, it better be same theme, at the end of the day, links are links, PR is PR, link popularity is link popularity. These are still going to push value to your site.

So if I have 100,000 links and those 100,000 links have nothing to do with my site, if I chase one page on my site and I want that one page to rank for a specific topic, it’s going to be much easier for me to rank that because I’m pulling all that weight behind me.

David Jenyns: Yes. We interwove how SEO Elite and Keyword Elite can help identify those characteristics especially when you’re looking at the competition which was under the Search Engine Dominator in Keyword Elite and there were those different factors. What are the other things you use from a tools point of view when you’re doing your SEO work for yourself or for a client?

Initially you’ll start off and you’ll do your keyword research, you’ll do some competition analysis. Then it sounds as like as well you’re monitoring the rankings that you are getting so you can also get a bit of a litmus test as well talking about submitting a certain number of articles or doing something to see how many of those links are going to stick. I’m wondering. do you have tools for these things or are they manual? I know the first couple I mentioned definitely, the Elite software series. Is that what you call it, the Elite series?

Jason Jell: Yes, that’s what Brad calls it.

David Jenyns: The Elite series of software can do a lot of that. Things like monitoring where you’re at, that’s also in SEO Elite. Are there any other tools you use?

Jason Jell: A big one for me, and I touched on this earlier I’d look at allinanchor and look at how you’re gaining allinanchor. There’s a toll built in to go through and check allinanchor and monitor allinanchor. That’s a big one for me. I will look at position, but not nearly as much as I used to. I tend to look at traffic.

If I have keywords that I’m focusing on then I will monitor how they’re moving. But there comes a point where you have your targets and you chase your targets and you know what your traffic is and you’re trying to influence your traffic.

There are probably going to be a lot of situations where I’ll set my goals and I’ll set my targets and I’ll want to make sure I’m hitting those goals but I’m not going to be monitoring where I was this week versus where I was last week. Maybe I’ll be checking monthly or something to that degree but there definitely isn’t daily scanning for me. Even looking at traffic, I’m not going to be daily scanning. If I’m going to be scanning anything daily it’s going to be revenue. If there’s some kind of a revenue flag, that’s when I start digging a lot deeper.

David Jenyns: There are two things you mentioned there that triggered a question I want to get your comments on. You talked about allinanchor and you kind of alluded to this throughout, that the single biggest ranking factor you see is, it’s all to do with getting those inbound links off page factors. Do you look at varying those inbound links using different keywords and that sort of thing or how do you handle the actual inbound links?

Obviously you’re going to get certain keywords targeted sent into the individual page with the keyword you’re trying to rank for but then within that do you vary it at all? How do you work that?

Jason Jell: Generally most of my pages will have my one target that is my go to. I want to rank for this term on this page and I’ll have enough variation in that term that I could come in with, a lower hanging fruit that’s directly related to that term. I can’t easily create another page for that term. Maybe I have shoes as my big term and my secondary is sneakers. I don’t have content that I can make that separate shoes and sneakers. Maybe that’s a secondary that if I do enough mixing with my anchor text then maybe within a year’s time I’m ranking for shoes. I’m starting to also rank for sneakers.

So I’ll set secondary targets for most of my pages and maybe even tertiary targets if there are enough keywords to justify it. That’s a part of what I do in the initial process in vetting out my keywords. I’ll set up, here’s my architecture, here’s page one, here are my keywords that I’m going to target for that. I’m ranking those keywords one, two, three or whatever. When I build my links, you vary the anchor text, especially if you’re driving it all through channels that you influence and it’s not happening naturally.

You’ll get the slap. I believe the number is something in the neighbourhood of 70%, which is easier to hit than a lot of people think.

David Jenyns: You’ve tested lots of different things obviously in the creation of the software and also just through your own consulting as well. When new SEO people are starting out, where do you see people going wrong?

Jason Jell: Not sticking with it. Obviously everybody, myself included, got into this because we wanted to make a lot of money and not do what we were currently doing. I think a lot of people think it’s easy and a lot of people think it doesn’t take a lot of time and it doesn’t take a lot of effort. But it’s a job like any other job and it’s going to take a lot of effort, and it’s going to take a lot of time.

With SEO I think one of the thing’s that’s great about it, I don’t want to devalue this at all because I love SEO, but it doesn’t take a lot of thinking once you’ve established your keywords and your targets. It takes a lot of action. A lot of people will just submit and get ten links and then they’ll turn around and they’ll ask a hundred people why they’re not ranking. They could have turned around and got fifty more links in that same amount of time.

A lot of people focus on the prize and stop the actual resources and effort necessary to get to that point. I’d say 90% of the people I’ve dealt with and I’ve trained and I’ve worked with, fall into that bucket. They’ll do 10% of the work and they’ll expect to get 100% of the return and it doesn’t work like that. It’s more you’ve climbed up this hill for seven hours and you’re at the top of the hill now and you can roll down now because you’ve put in all the time and the effort in.

David Jenyns: Obviously you do a lot of testing on your own as well. When it comes to looking at other people in the industry of SEO is there anyone you look to for insights or people you keep your finger on the pulse of? Obviously Brad is definitely one you’d watch out for. Are there any other guys you keep an eye on?

Jason Jell: I read a lot of blogs. I tend to read Search Engine Land, I tend to read SEOmoz quite a bit. I like them, I like the writing styles. I’m a big unsubscriber, so I don’t follow a lot of stuff just because I tend to get a lot of noise and I’m trying to filter the noise out and just stay focused. Jerry West is a big one. I like a lot of what he writes and I like a lot of what he says. He’s definitely somebody who knows his stuff. Marc Lindsay, I know he’s a great guy. He knows his stuff very well too. It’s kind of a wash for me beyond that.

I really try to stay focused on what I’m working on and staying as close to my goals as possible.

David Jenyns: Very good. I hope I didn’t take you too far off track with this call. I really appreciate your time. You’ve got such a really good solid understanding of SEO and I just love to chat about it and hear some of your insights as well. If people want to find out more about SEO Elite and the Elite brand of software, they can definitely Google SEO Elite or Keyword Elite or Brad Callen. Through Brad Callen’s website, you can just about find all of this stuff. Or they can check out theseomethod.com/elite and they’ll get there as well.

Let’s say people want to find out more about you Jason. I know you fly pretty much under the radar. Is there any way people can get in touch with you or are you happy to stay under the radar?

Jason Jell: I’m totally happy to be under the radar. I’ve got a couple of pretty good things going so, no blog, no website, no nothing. I’ll pitch it all to Brad at bradcallen.com.

David Jenyns: If anyone wants to find out mere they’ll just have to keep tuning into these calls and I’ll see if I can line up another call with Jason. Thanks again for your time Jason.

Jason Jell: Thank you very much.

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