Bill Slawski is known throughout the SEO community as a resource of information. He is very active in the forums and internationally known for his research in search engine pattents.

Name: Bill Slawski
Aliases: bragadocchio
Single or Married: Single
Home Site: SEO by the Sea
Memberships: Cre8asite Forums, Search Engine Watch Correspondent
Contact info: bill@seobythesea.com

How did you get into SEO?

Two of my friends got me into SEO, though they didn’t know it at the time. One had left a job he was unhappy with and was searching for something else to do. Another was practicing law, and had an empty office in a building he was renting. I suggested that they get together and start a business acting as a registered agent for Delaware corporations, and helping people to incorporate in Delaware. They talked about it, and decided that it was a good idea.

I grabbed a book on how to learn html in 2 weeks, and created a site for them. The business just celebrated its tenth anniversary last month, and over that time, I’ve learned a lot about web site promotion. One of the two has a sister who was working for Digital Corp in the early days, selling micro-computers. She sent us an email telling us to take a look at a new site that they had just developed, by the name of Altavista. While I had done a fair amount of content development and link building at that point, submitting the site to Altavista may have been the first time I acted as an SEO.

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

I’ve consulted with folks on content creation, site architecture, analytics and improving web site conversions in addition to the staples of SEO. Since I view SEO as part of the process of increasing relevant traffic to sites instead of just ranking pages for keywords, I see those types of things as part of the whole instead of as complementary services.

Any favorite projects you’d like to share?

I try not to talk about clients projects if I can, so I’ll talk about one that I’m hoping will take off. It’s pretty much just a blog right now, focusing upon my local community. But I would like to see it springboard into a forum for discussion and debate within the community where people can talk together in a setting they feel comfortable within, and maybe find some common ground. While the web does wonders for allowing people to communicate from different continents and countries, it has as much power to let people who might live blocks away and have never met before find a chance to know each other a little better.

What part of SEO drives you nuts?

There are a lot of wonderful ecommerce systems that provide users flexibility, security, and ease in managing sites, but their developers didn’t consider search engines at all during their development. While I actually enjoy working on those sites, and solving issues they may have, I wouldn’t mind if more of them were built with search engines in mind.

What’s your favorite part of SEO?

The parties. OK, there aren’t that many parties, and I’m not a big party-goer, but I really like most of the folks I’ve met in the industry. As for Search Engine Optimization itself, I enjoy going through the whitepapers and patents, and trying to figure out where it will all be heading in the next few years.

When Google had a patent application published about a month ago, enabling businesses to serve coupons and offer discounts to customers through local search, the recent launch of Google Coupons didn’t really come as a surprise. I had already started writing an article for my local business community on how to get their sites into Google local search through the Google Local Business Center, and adding something about being able to issue coupons for free through the service should get a lot of the area merchants excited. I was hoping they would take that step sooner, rather than later.

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

Handheld devices (with cameras) and personalization (kiss ranking reports good bye).

The search engines are exploring a lot of new territory and understanding their visitors (notice I didn’t say users) will make a difference. I’ve been pointing a lot of people at this paper lately, which was co-authored by one of the founders of Firefly - a music recommendation system in the mid 90s - InterestMap: Harvesting Social Network Profiles for Recommendations. Search engines have been looking more and more at how people use search engines, and at some point they are going to try to understand the interests and passions of their visitors better by looking at social profiles and footprints on the web instead of just previous search histories.

Image search using handhelds will enable us to translate text we see in the real world, will provide maps and travel directions based upon our location, will give us information about products we point our phone cameras at, and will enable us to be involved in the physical world around us while interacting with information over the web. Marketing online and marketing offline will merge closer and closer together, and how information is found and used will become more of a role that SEOs can take if they are prepared for this transition.

Any favorite tips or advice?

Look at white papers and patents, attend conferences, get into discussions in forums. Build a network of friends and advisors whom you can trust, and work with. Pay attention to the fundamentals, but anticipate the possibility of changes.

How has SEO benefited you the most?

It’s allowed me to be creative while helping others. That’s something that a career as a lawyer didn’t seem like it would provide.

What industries do you work in?

I’ve worked with a mixture of sites in different industries, and look at the chance to work in different industries as a challenge rather than an impediment. I like learning about an industry, and one of the areas where my law school education helps is in the ability to develop an expertise in an area in a fairly short amount of time.

Do you take jobs or just work privately?

I work with some clients directly, and with some developers and designers and other SEOs on projects, too. I’m also working on some of my own personal projects, and have been starting to do some writing on the side.

What is your SEO Philosophy?

Make it easy for the search engines and visitors to be responsive to your site.

That’s short for defining business objectives and understanding potential audiences first before doing any writing of html or creation of images. A site should be easy for a search engine to spider, have content that visitors find interesting and informative and engaging, and click-paths that are easy for those visitors to follow, to meet the goals of a site owner. The site should be well organized, and use html in a semantically correct manner, while also using words on the pages and in the links between pages that the targeted audiences of the site expect to see. You can be successful without doing all of those things, but the easier you can make it for someone to find your site and use it, the more likely it is that they will.

Bill, you are well known for your knowledge of search engine patents. How has this specialty helped your SEO process?

There are a number of areas where I believe that it has helped.

One is that it provides a perspective from the point of view of people who work on search engines. Thinking about how the web works from solely a marketing stance doesn’t provide as rich a view or as deep an understanding as trying to consider some of the challenges faced by the folks who are trying to index the web, and provide positive user experiences to their searchers.

It can help to try to break down a patent into parts like this:

1. What problem are they trying to solve with the patent?
2. What is the present state of the issues involved?
3. What benefit do they potentially see if the processes involved are developed?
4. What does it mean to a marketer or web site owner if those processes are made part of what a search engine does?
5. How likely is it that the methods described will be implemented?
6. What might need to happen first?
7. When might those things happen?
8. Is there anything in the patent that might help me perform SEO better?
9. Who are the people who are listed as inventors, and what else have they done, including whitepapers that may make it easier to understand what the patent may mean?
10. How does the patent fit in with other patents and research from this search engine, and does it mirror something that their competitors are doing?

What advice would you give new SEOs about reading patents?

I’ve partially begun to answer this question with my last one, but I have a little more to add:

1. Search for more information about the listed inventors first. They may have written something about the topic described in the patent. Many times you can find a white paper that explains the processes involved without all of the patent’s legalese.
2. Look at the pictures before diving into the text. Sometimes an image captures the ideas much better than the text does, even when it comes to flow charts.
3. Try to remove as much legalese as you can before reading through the whole patent and giving yourself a headache. I like to copy a patent into a text file and go line by line, translating the language used into English. Sometimes you have to skip parts while doing this, and them come back to them. But if you can put what a patent says into your own words, you can get a lot more out of it than trying to skim it. Also, one or two sentences in a patent can sometimes have larger implications than the whole rest of the document.

For example, a recent patent from Google on Visual Gap Segmentation discussed how a page might be looked at in a visual manner to try to understand how different parts of the page might apply to different businesses, and could be used to help a search engine understand how a geographical location and a business may be tied together. When I got to this next part of the patent application, I realized that the process described potentially had a much broader use:

Although the segmentation process described with reference to FIGS. 4-7 was described as segmenting a document based on geographic signals that correspond to business listings, the general hierarchical segmentation technique could more generally be applied to any type of signal in a document. For example, instead of using geographic signals that correspond to business listings, images in a document may be used (image signals). The segmentation process may then be applied to help determine what text is relevant to what image. Alternatively, the segmentation process described with reference to acts 403 and 404 may be performed on a document without partitioning the document based on a signal. The identified hierarchical segments may then be used to guide classifiers that identify portions of documents which are more or less relevant to the document (e.g., navigational boilerplate is usually less relevant than the central content of a page).

I translated that into:

This process has other uses. Text within a segmented area may be helpful in describing a picture in that same area (so make sure that a picture has a caption using an appropriate description and keywords, and that both image and text are encased in html that might create a little whitespace around them). And, breaking down a page into segments may help the search engine understand what each of the different segments does on a page, such as being a navigational area or main body content. The main content could be used when classifying the page for advertising purposes or for indexing in organic results.

I know you were a law student. How has your legal background helped your SEO
efforts?

The focus of law school isn’t on teaching students the laws as much as it is on teaching them to think like lawyers. Laws change over time and distance, but a good set of analytic mental tools are useful regardless of whether you are practicing law or trying to figure out how best to make a web site perform better with search engines and visitors.

You can see some of that in my approach to patents above. Instead of asking myself, "what the heck does this mean," I have a series of questions about the patent that tries to probe its purpose, the framework around it, and its possible implications. When I look at a web site, I do something of the same thing. Here’s an abbreviated list:

1. What is the purpose of the site?
2. Who is it intended for?
3. What problems might it have that may make a search engine not want to crawl its pages?
4. What issues might arise when the search engine attempts to index, or to serve those pages?
5. What are competitors doing?
6. What can be added to the site to make it more effective?
7. What should be removed from the site to make it more effective.

Like the laws, sites change based upon their purpose and their intended audience, but a good set of questions and tools can make it easier to understand how to make a site more effective when it comes to meeting the goals for its pages.