Pierre Far is the creator of ekstreme.com - a site with a ton of geat SEO tools including the very popular Socializer that helps tag web pages accross more than 40 social bookmarking sites!

Name: Pierre Far
Aliases: eKstreme
Home Site: ekstreme.com
Memberships: I post in Cre8asite Forums, SEO Refugee, DP, and I am subscribed to and read Search Engine Watch, SEOmoz, SEO by the Sea, SEO Scoop, Syndk8, and about 100 blogs in total!
Contact info: http://ekstreme.com/contact.php

How did you get into SEO?

For a long time, my site was not getting much traffic, ever so slowly increasing in the number of visitors, but nothing too exciting. While researching the reasons, I discovered Search Engine Roundtable. I followed a link to Cre8asiteForums and read a few posts. The quality was (and remains) the best I’ve ever seen. I joined, introduced myself, and started learning. That was back in September 05.

Any favorite projects you’d like to share?

Oh, I can’t choose a favorite that easily! I think the coolest two projects I’m involved in are the AJAX Link Tracker which I ported into PHP, and What the Buzz? which helps me keep my finger on the pulse of emerging trends.

What part of SEO drives you nuts?

The lack of transparency by the search engines, especially Google. I don’t want to rant too much, but is it really that bad for Google to have mediocre search operators? Things like limited results using the link:, the lack of a linkdomain: search, and the finicky API with its routine 502 errors.

The other thing that drives me nuts is the amount of misinformation out there. Whenever I read something online, even something written by a top-class SEO, I always have a skeptical filter in my head. Everything needs to be assessed in a critical fashion, tested, and retested. Eventually, you start trusting some people a lot more than others, but for beginners, this can be a serious trap.

What’s your favorite part of SEO?

The success stories, whether mine or those of others. It’s great to watch the joy that overcomes people when months of hard work are rewarded. It makes sitting in front of the computer fighting IE bugs, PHP errors, WordPress plugins, and hosting issues seem all worthwhile.

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

There are a few things I see (or wish to see) happening in the next few years. I’ll share two of my favorite ideas.

Firstly, I see the SEO moving more towards "site traffic optimization", where we focus on getting the right kind of visitor to a website – hopefully we’ll drop the SEO acronym altogether! This is a continuation of the trends we’re already witnessing: We used to install hit counters, but now install analytics packages; we used to be happy to get any visitors, but now we want to get potential customers or repeat visitors; we can use PPC to acquire customers. It doesn’t matter where the visitors come from, as long as we want them! This will penetrate every kind of website, even noncommercial ones: we are witnessing the rise of the "social web", with things like social bookmarking, blogs and comments, and other community-based sites. The objective then would be to convert a visitor into a member that shares bookmarks, that actively engages in blog conversations, etc. Peter Da Vonzo summed it up nicely.

The second prediction has to do with SERPs. Ever since search engines started, the only area that has not seen any serious innovation is how the search results are presented. So far, the only way is to dump a list of links with some bolded words onto the screen. This is just begging to be improved.

Again, we’re seeing some movement here: Windows Live Search is experimenting with new ways to present the results. Snap and krugle are others I’ve seen and liked. However, they are all still list-based, and experimenting with how the user interacts with the lists.

One idea I have that may or may not work is to present the results using a mind maps type of presentation. Mind maps are a way to depict related concepts and ideas. If we apply this method to SERPs, we can have the results presented as inter-related themes, with each theme linking to several pages. Needless to say, such radical changes in SERP presentation will hit the SEO world deeply. The very essence of the concept of "rankings" will change.

Any favorite tips or advice?

Choose one programming language and learn it well. Experiment with it. Benchmark it. Read related white papers. This is probably the most useful skill of an SEO, although some would argue it’s not essential.

A related tip is to learn the APIs: Google’s, Yahoo!’s, Technorati’s, etc. These will allow you to get hold of important data very quickly.

How has SEO benefited you the most?

It’s been a learning experience. Sure my site gained in rankings, my AdSense revenue increased, my page views quadrupled; that’s all good. The real benefit from SEO is that I learned a lot more beyond the technical stuff. I learned about marketing, I learned how mathematical concepts I already knew applied elsewhere, such as long tails of search, and much more. It’s a fast-moving field with lots innovation from many people. It’s very exciting!

What industries do you work in? Do you take jobs or just work privately?

Mostly private web- and science-related websites, but I like to partner with other webmasters on revenue-generating projects. I’m always open for ideas.

What is your SEO Philosophy?

Forget the search engines! Instead of SERP spotting, write new content, find new links, and do all the things people generally do to get more traffic without depending on the search engines. Build a clean site that people will love, and the search engine rankings will follow. I don’t worry as much as some people about what the search engines think about my sites.

Pierre, you seem to be more rounded when it comes to web development than most SEOs including the ability to program and create tools. How has this set you apart? Where do you get your ideas?

I don’t think it sets me apart, per se, but it does make me see the big picture for a website more easily. There are downsides to this jack-of-all-trades-master-of-some approach, but it’s great fun.

Getting ideas is easy, but getting good ideas is hard. We already have a PageRank tool, and anchor text analysis tool, and many more. We need new ideas.

Ever since my early SEO-learning days, what kind of tools I write reflect what I am learning about and interested in at that moment. My very first tool, the Page Structure Analyzer was about discerning the headings structure of a website; i.e., on-page optimization, which was what I was reading about back then. As I learned more, I wrote tools to help me extract keywords, analyze backlinks, and many more. This nicely created a portfolio of tools on my site that brings in traffic.

The other big sources of ideas are the forums I frequent, particularly Cre8asite forums, SEO Refugee and the Digital Point Forums. I’m always on the look out for posts that ask "is there a tool that does this?" or "wouldn’t it be cool if…". If enough people ask similar requests, then there is a genuine need which I could fill.

One of your most popular tools is the Socializer which takes advantage of social bookmarking. How do you see social bookmarking in the role of SEO?

First a bit about the Socializer for those that don’t know: it is a service that creates links to the popular social bookmarking sites on the web (about 40 at last count!) You just feed it the URL and the page’s title, which makes it easy to add to content management systems such as Wordpress, MoveableType and others.

As for the idea of social bookmarking, people sometimes forget that it’s useful for users who do want to keep some or all of their bookmarks online. Back in the 90s, people used to create custom start pages with their favorite links and login and search forms, and host them on Geocities or Tripod.

The novel addition to this old idea is ease of sharing. In SEO terms, the basic utility and the ease of sharing links are a potent combination for creating and measuring popularity of a website. The more buzz a website generates, the easier it is for it to gain links, traffic, and even more buzz.

The other major aspect of social bookmarking is tagging, which is simply associating keywords with links. This is the essential function of search engines (think about it!), and so no doubt SEs will start harnessing that power. Yahoo! is best positioned to lead in this area since they own del.icio.us and MyWeb. Recently, Yahoo! took a step towards this goal by hiring a "social search" guru

Finally, SEO practitioners - including spammers! - can exploit the power of social bookmarking. Firstly, websites should allow visitors to easily bookmark sites. Secondly, since social bookmarking services sometimes suggest tags, a cunning strategy would be to be the first to bookmark your own links using your favorite tags: these may be suggested to the first bookmarkers, nudging your buzz towards your goal keywords. Sometimes, the APIs are a big help!

I’m curious about your science background. How did you get into that? Has it helped you with your web development? How do they compliment your SEO efforts? It seems the logic would play a role in programming…

I’ve always liked the ‘hard’ sciences in general, but ending up doing a PhD in genetics started back in the 7th grade. My then biology teacher drew a Punnett square on the board and explained how it simply depicted the fundamentals of genetics. I was hooked!

Programming is just another technical area I like. It’s like a big logic problem trying to get a chunk of metal to do something useful. That’s what motivates me to write programs.

As how to that fits into SEO, I write tools that attract traffic and backlinks, code websites, and make money. As a scientist, you’re trained hard to solve problems in a methodical way. This is an important in any field. Also, the thrill of research is achieved in the lab as well as figuring out Google or Yahoo!’s algorithms.

A science background also helps with creating unique content. I have a Blog of Science that explains the latest science news in layman’s terms. I have another project in the works,