Hattiesburg, MS (PRWEB) July 15, 2004 -- Today we bring you 4th in a series of interviews conducted by Robin's business partner John Alexander, who is looking up some of Robin's very earliest online students and asking them about their recollections of what it was like building SEO skills way back in 1998 and how far they've come in SEO industry since then.

John Alexander: "Welcome Susan O'Neil, I'd really like to thank you for taking time to speak with us today. Susan, you had some background in marketing before you started into search engine marketing industry.Could you tell us a little about your background and how you first got thinking about search engine marketing?"

Susan O'Neil: "I began my career in marketing in 1975 as Director of Public Relations with a symphony orchestra. From there I went to Wall Street where I was National Advertising Manager for Paine Webber. When I moved to New Hampshire, I opened a public relations agency, which is where I first got involved with Internet when a client company launched an e-mail service."

John Alexander: "Could you take us back and share some memories of early days? How did you first find Robin Nobles online courses in beginning?"

Susan O'Neil: "I was helping a few of my PR clients with text for their websites and began experimenting with Meta tags and content alterations. The more I learned about power of optimization, more I realized that I didn't know it all. That's when I searched for an online SEO course and found Robin Nobles. Her expertise and her passion for her work inspired me then and it still inspires me now."

John Alexander: "That's very nice and I know exactly what you mean. Could you tell us how long after your initial training was it, before you began realizing your true SEO skills and begin helping people with their Web visibility challenges?"

Susan O'Neil: "I had a good deal of early success back them by just applying basics that I'd picked up through trial and error. This was easy to do in mid to late 90's. However, once I finished Robin's course in 1998, I was able to implement a more aggressive program that could better serve most competitive types of e-commerce sites. Also, through Robin and her students, I found a forum that allowed me to share and learn from peers -- so important in then-emerging industry. Previous to that, doing SEO was a pretty lonely job since few realized this field of marketing even existed."

John Alexander: "That is very interesting to see how far this goes back. Robin's vision for a forum has always been to create an ideal place where people can share information safely together and she has always been so good at bringing very best talents out in people. I should mention just for our readers sake, that her newest efforts in this regard just recently has been to fashion an excellent networking community called World Resource Center at http://www.sew-wrc.com."

John Alexander: "Susan, I was reading a copy of your book which you co-authored with Robin Nobles and noted that in preface, it says that you two actually wrote "Maximize Web site Traffic" without ever actually meeting in person. Can you tell us how this came about?"

Susan O'Neil: "As I helped more and more of my PR clients move onto Web through optimized websites, I realized that there was a need for a corporate, comprehensive approach to providing professional SEO services to America's companies. I decided to create such a company and, in 1998, closed my PR agency and launched @Web Site Publicity. In order to give my new company quick credibility and exposure, I decided to write a book on SEO - a "how to" book. Knowing how time-consuming writing would be, I asked Robin to share endeavor with me."

John Alexander: "And this was beginning of this new book?"

Susan O'Neil: "Yes, she agreed to idea, so we divvied up chapters and started writing. We didn't meet until it was time to do final edit. Robin flew up from Mississippi to a ski chalet in Vermont where we typed and talked non-stop for a week. Robin brought a great depth of specific SEO experience which mixed beautifully with my years of marketing experience and result was a book that, outdated as it is, still brings us fan mail!"

For clarification on these type of issues, let's start by explaining some simple ground rules looking beyond jargon and terminology.

Do Search Engines Hate Doorway/Gateway Pages?

To answer this we'll examine it in two steps.

Let's understand:

1. What it is that Search Engines "HATE"?

and then...

2. What type of pages search engines "LOVE"?

With this approach it will help us gain some understanding of criteria that is most important.

1. What Search Engines HATE:

a) To put it simply, search engines despise low quality doorway pages that contain little or no useful content. A few years ago these type of low quality doorway pages were rampantly produced as a means to try and trick search engines. Looking at it from search engines point of view, why even publish a page if all it contains is a couple of lines of text and an "enter store" link. Pages with VERY LITTLE VALUE to reader, do not belong in a search engine's index.

b) Search engines also despise any kind of duplication or use of mirror pages. Again, little or no content (often just garbled text or keyword rich paragraphs that have no real value) were reproduced over and over and cluttered up search engines. These pages were supposedly going to bring great traffic but bottom line is that they were and still are all labeled by engines as Spam.

c) Search engines hate any attempt made by Webmasters to manipulate pages optimized with content unrelated to actual Web site. Some Webmasters were guilty of all types of trickery to try and attract clicks regardless of site content.

Understanding these issues, clearly you could NEVER blame search engines for their war on Spam and low value doorway pages which contained no useful content or information.

Next let's talk about

2. What pages Search Engines LOVE:

a) Search engines love pages that far "information rich" and contain useful, original content that will actually make valued reading to online visitors.

b) Instead of doorway pages (or pages with no value or little useful content), term "information rich" can be used to describe a page loaded with useful, quality information. Search engines love pages that are content rich and able to stand on it's own merit. A quality information page is also part of overall Web site allowing visitors to obtain more relevant and useful information having easy navigation through Web site.

Instead of lightweight pages with no content, today's pages need to contains high quality information, which is relevant to online audience. The information rich page is 100% quality, put together with research, relevance, thought and care. No tricks are ever needed.

Next Question is..... What kind of information goes into creating an information rich high performance page?

Invariably this question often comes up when I am teaching one of our live hands-on workshops. People need to understand that this is wide open to all discoveries you make while researching your target audiences behavior. How you can meet audience's needs exactly, is only limited to "your imagination" and most effective way to present information you know they are looking for, back too them. You want to give them what they "really want" as opposed to what you "think" they want and do this right up front.

The focus is on creating genuinely "useful content" for your ideal target audience of "potential customers" who happen to be already out there searching for you.

Not only is this what your visitors want, it's also key to success for search engine acceptance. You will never run in to trouble with search engines by offering lots of original, quality content that is interesting, useful and of high value, to your online readers.