Badi Jones has been a web master for over 8 years. He has his MSIE and specializes in developing SEO tools through his site SEO Logs.

Name: Badi Jones
Aliases: jadibones
Home Site: SEO Logs
Memberships: SEO Refugee
Contact info: contact@seologs.com

How did you get into SEO?

First I have to tell how I got into making websites. Back in 1997 a friend of mine had published a web site on AOL. I thought it was just the coolest thing in the world, and I just had to do my own. I was in a band at the time, so I got my own AOL account and made a website for us. It was pretty bad and I’m sure hardly anyone saw it, but that was my start.

In the summer of 1999 (after working at another web firm, and a local magazine doing html work), I got hired at an arts and entertainment newspaper to build and maintain their website. That was when I got into SEO (or web promotion as I knew it). It was competition that got me interested. Trying to beat another newspaper’s website in the SERPs. At that time, my knowledge of SEO techniques was limited to keyword stuffing. Black text links with a black background. I eventually switched to more conventional techniques. I got rid of
the hidden text and links and stuffed the meta tags instead. :) I maintained that website until 2004.

What other areas do you specialize in? How do they compliment your SEO efforts?

It took me a while to decide what career path I wanted to follow. I was pretty close to going to pharmacy school, but fortunately, I decided on doing programming and web development. I went to grad school for a degree in Internet Engineering. I learned to program Java there and build websites on Java web frameworks like Struts and Spring. Learned PostgreSQL and MySQL. I also learned to use XML and XSL. Since then I have gravitated to PHP, mainly because it’s free, and pretty much any host offers it for cheap. More recently, with the rise in popularity of Ajax, I have started to explore Javascript and DOM scripting a lot more.

SEO Logs offers a wide range if SEO tools.

Any favorite projects you’d like to share?

Well, working on new tools for SEOlogs.com is really fun, and definitely my favorite, but one project that I am really excited about right now is breakmap.com. It is a dynamic map of world wide surf breaks that’s made with Google Maps API, PHP, and MySQL.

What part of SEO drives you nuts?

The Sandbox.

What’s your favorite part of SEO?

My favorite part of SEO is SEO tools.

Where do you see SEO going over the next 5 years?

Well, I have been making websites since 1997. That’s around 9 years now. I have been aware of SEO for about 5 or 6 years, and things have changed a lot since then. To be more specific, the search engines have changed a lot since then. They are much smarter than
they were. We can’t get to the number 1 spot by keyword stuffing, using doorway pages, or manipulating keyword density anymore. SEO is now all about gaining links, age, trust, and authority.

When you think about it, spam and black hat SEO is actually what has shaped, and what is going to shape the future of SEO. Black hat SEOs are always going to find some way to slip through the cracks and get traffic via the search engines, and the search engines are going to constantly tighten their algorithms to keep spam out of their results. This is what will shape the future of SEO. It’s just going to get tougher and tougher for the search engines as well as the SEOs.

Any favorite tips or advice?

Stay away from competitive keywords.

How has SEO benefited you the most?

SEO is awesome. It’s a free resource that allows small time entrepreneurs to get their share of the huge amount of money being spent online by consumers with relatively no monetary investment. I think that’s great.

What industries do you work in?

I work for a travel website as my main job. I also work on a few personal projects, but mainly SEOlogs.com.

Do you take jobs or just work privately?

I tried working freelance making websites for people, but it really wasn’t by cup of tea. So I don’t take any private jobs, but I am always willing to give advice or help out where I can.

What is your SEO Philosophy?

There is definitely a lot of money to be made on the web, but I think the low hanging fruit is pretty much all gone. You can’t just optimize a website for any old keywords and expect to see results.

You really have to work hard on keyword selection. Unless you have a really established website, stay away from the really competitive keywords. It is virtually impossible to get a new website to rank for a term like "homes", "loans", or "hotels". If you want to see results, you need to target more obscure keywords. Start small.

Another valuable lesson that I learned is that the more pages with unique content you put out there, the more chances you have to get traffic.

Badi, are you still a student? When will you graduate? Is SEO your career or just something you are doing for fun?

I am finished with school.

SEO Logs offers some of the coolest tools out there and it’s been great watching you improve in design and technique. Most SEOs can’t program or create stuff like this, how has it helped your SEO efforts?

Thanks. I started SEOlogs.com with 4 tools that I found for free on the web just over 1 year ago, but as I got better at programming, I started making my own tools. My first was the Alternate Google BL, PR, DIR Tool, (which actually doesn’t work anymore since Google quit returning the Current Pagerank value) and have since made over 16 tools of my own. The latest is the Adsense Profit Calculator.

Having free tools are definitely a big advantage for getting links, and that’s good for me, because I really hate manual link building.

You also seem to be one of the early adopters for social bookmarking, would you like to comment on this?

As far as social bookmarking goes, I don’t really know if there is any huge value there for SEO. I’m just addicted to the sites. Especially Digg.com. I find that after regularly reading Digg, other sources of news, like the CBS evening news, and newspapers are pretty much old news by the time I see them.