Minutes 0:00 – 5:00

Lily: Thanks everybody for joining this class with Neil Patel. Most of you have already heard about him and read his blog before. I am really excited to have him here. This is his first class, but hoping it will be a fun one so we can get him to come back in the future. Neil has a very long history for a fairly short life. So first off, we’re just going to cover Neil’s history. Do you wanna tell everybody how old you are?

Neil: Well I am 24. I started when I was 16. But, 8 years – who is gonna…

Lily: Wow. So, 24? And you have built an empire. So, these are just some of the brands in your background. I read your about page on your blog and I think you have this really interesting history. Do you want to tell people how you got started in the web space?

Neil: Sure. I’ve always been an entrepreneur. A lot of my background is shady stuff, like some black boxes or whatever I could get my hands on. But doing all the shady stuff isn’t gonna make me a lot of money. So I got on to the web. Looking for a job on the internet, searching for Monster.com. I thought Monster.com was a public company clicked on the stock symbol. I thought, “Wow, millions of dollars a year per quarter in revenue”, right? So maybe I should just get a job website, copy Monster.com and maybe make millions of dollars a year. That was my goal. Didn’t happen but I tried copying Monster.com and that was my first web company.

Lily: [inaudible]…how to program it. How did you get started in that whole thing of saying: “OK. I want to build a company. I want to build an internet company but how did you…”

Neil: Oh. I went on. I think it was those web hosting talk in all those webmaster forums. And I posted a job opening saying: “Hey I want someone to build me job board”. I don’t know how much I spent on it but it was a lot, you know, for a kid. I spent over ten thousand, maybe up to twenty. So I spend a few grand on the design and development.

First of all, it didn’t work out, so I got another one. I got this site up and running… then I figured out that: “Hey if you pop up a site, traffic doesn’t magically end up coming to your website”. So I figured out I gotta rank up highly on Google and get more visitors. So I did a search for “Search Engine Ranking firm”, I didn’t know the term search engine optimization at that time so I tapped in “Search Engine Placement” and “High on Google”, or all those other random terms. Hit a few internet marketing firms, it didn’t work out. Got ripped off, lost a lot of money. And I learned how to do it myself. And sooner or later I got better and started providing the services for the people.

Lily: That’s awesome. That’s awesome. Uh, looks like [?] Nathan… Did we lose Neil? Are the rest of you able to hear Neil? I think we just had some technical difficulties. [laughs]

Neil: Hopefully it’s working now.

Lily: OK. Did you guys hear Neil okay during that whole session? OK. [laughs] I can see Tony’s a good friend of yours Neil.

Neil: He’s a good friend. [laughs]

Lily: So, your background, you are not actually an engineer then? But you’re so able to accomplish building these companies?

Neil: Yeah, I don’t know how to [?]. I think I tried it a few times but I suck at it. I did some shady stuff but I am not good at building applications or anything like that. But yeah, all my companies are always hired outside the [?] and sooner and later when you find some really good developers you just don’t let go of them. I think I’ve had a few developers. Our CTO for probably 3 or 4 years, she’s been on board. I don’t think we’re gonna ever let go of her.

Lily: That’s awesome. So from there, how did you go into building software companies like Crazy Egg and KISSmetrics?

Neil: So, after my job work failed, right? What I ended up doing is SEO ranking. But it didn’t make money because I learned that : “Hey, just because if you have a website, you have traffic, it doesn’t mean it’s gonna make money if you don’t take credit cards online,” and all these other types of things. Which I didn’t do, so..

Minutes 5:01 – 10:00

Neil Patel: “what I ended up figuring out was uh it wasn’t for mean you know I didn’t know how to do the web based stuff..took a nighttime college course because I was trying to graduate college early and gave a speech on how the internet works and how the how google works. And got into by someone hiring me someone saying  “hey do you wanna do seo for my company?” I think the job didn’t pay much but I was in high school its like three thousand maybe three thousand five hundred a month. Um and I started from there and he connected me with you know his friend who owned an ad agency and I got more and more clients and sooner or later I built up this consulting company and made money through that and used a lot of that money to grow software companies like crazyegg and kissmetrics and so forth so on.”

Lily Chiu: “awesome..(clears throat) so you’re kinda well known for…what was it?….doubling techcrunches organic traffic in four weeks or something like that? Can you tell us about that a little bit?”

Neil Patel: “sure, so ooo haha I don’t know the exact stats now but yeah techcrunches pretty did well overall to be honest a lot of it wasn’t me right? So a lot of people are like “oh you did some crazy stuff” or “techcrunch “ and a lot of other bloggers are gawker media or whatever it may be, and in reality it really isn’t me. The first most important thing when it comes into anyone’s head or should when their trying to seo rank really is is you got to have a good website, or a good business or whatever it may be.
Techcrunch did well nice and organically because people are reading their content They like their content whether you hate Mike Wellington or love him no matter what   people still read their content and on top of that people link to them and because people link to them its really easy to get a lot of organic traffic and the whole premises behind  getting more search engine traffic is the more links you have in theory the more traffic you’re supposed to get.  So what I did for techcrunch was they had the links they had the content they had the eyeballs all that had to be modified was their on page coding  to be more search engine friendly fix maybe some tweaks in the on page code like their title tags metal tags um no following certain links that they shouldn’t be passing certain juice to modifying their site architecture just doing things like that and it ended up being where the traffic you know started skyrocketing.”

Lily Chiu: “That’s awesome. Cool. So trying to advance the slides right now.  Ok so given your background I guess how would you suggest somebody get started in this whole effort, so somebody doesn’t know anything about seo or hasn’t started you know their own company, how would you recommend somebody get up to speed?”

Neil Patel: “Are you talking about how someone should get started in SEO? Or in a business?”

Lily Chiu “Uh let’s say Seo, or ok, business, or or both”

Neil Patel “So, for business I would say if you really want to get started no one can tell you how to start a business right? I get a lot of people asking me hey how do I start a business? Well, that’s just something, and I know this is gonna sound bad or like a copout move,  you gotta really figure it out on your own, right. Do the research, figure out how to get the corporation, figure out, you know, what you’re going to do to start it. Figure out who you’re going to serve, figure out if its actually a valid business idea or if its not a valid business idea . It’s just going out there and learning how to do it. Right, when I started my first business, and literally ninety nine percent of the people that I know that started their businesses no one told them “Hey, this is how you start a business.” You have to have the drive to start some sort of business if you’re really passionate about it, and then you actually got to figure out if people will like your idea. Cuz as the founder, as someone who has thought of an idea you can be really biased, and be like, “oh, this is the coolest and greatest thing” and yeah you may find it usefull or you may like it, but millions of people out there who may be your customers may not like it., and in the end, that’s all that matters.

And going on to the next one on how to start in the SEO space, the best way is, first, when your working on your business or your website, build a really good website or business. It doesn’t have to be perfect, doesn’t have to be the prettiest website out there, Make sure when a user comes to your site, they’re actually getting some sort of benefit from it. If you’re providing a service that promises  xy and z make sure you deliver x y and z, right? Just don’t give them x and y and you know not give them z when you told them you would. Um, as for content , if you’re providing and writing content, make sure the content’s really good and its different than all your other competitors. So once you got that platform down having something that’s actually noteworthy then with the SEO then you gotta start working on getting more people to link to your site, which you can either do through bizda deals or hitting up website owners or the bloggers, trying to get them to write on it. And then the other thing you have to do, is just make sure your code is search engine friendly, so you could read the SEO ”

Minutes 25:01 – 30:00

Neil: So what can and what can’t SEO do for you?  SEO can get you a lot of traffic, as long as you do it right.  Creating good product, creating good content, getting a lot of links – you can get a shit load of traffic.  It’s not necessarily going to make you rich.  So a lot of people believe that if you’re ranked really highly, it’s going to make you a ton of money.  That’s not always the case.  A lot of keywords out there don’t make much money at all.  They may drive a lot of traffic, but they don’t make much money.  So what it can’t do for you is it can’t necessarily guarantee you’re going to make money.  What you have to really do is figure out what industries are lucrative, what keywords can make you money.  Do conversion testing.  You know, modify your website, design to make sure your traffic is converting.  The SEO is not a magic bullet.  It’s not going to get you up there organically in a day or two.  Sometimes it can happen in a week.  Sometimes it can happen in a month.  Sometimes it takes a year or two years, right?  It’s hard to rank for terms like cell phones on Google.  So, you know at the end of the day, what you really have to do is just figure out your overall goals and plan your SEO strategies around your overall goals.

…

Neil: So, it is complicated.  You can’t hire me, but it is complicated.  What I recommend doing is, at first you shouldn’t pay an agency.  I really recommend going to conferences, like, Search Marketing Expo, Search Engine Strategies, OEat Retreat, Pub Comm, you know Pub Comm is I think just around the corner in November.  And you know learning about SEO .  Read books.  If you don’t have money to go to conferences, read books, you can read the beginner’s guide that was linked to in the chast.  You can buy SEO for dummies; don’t take everything they say there for granted and just copy what they are saying.  But you need a good background and really understand how it works before you try to hire someone or do it yourself.  And once you understand it, then you’ll understand the fundamentals.  There ‘s wo main parts.  Code, and the second part is links.  You want to make sure your code is search engine friendly so a search engine can crawl it. And two, you want to make sure that people are linking to you so your chance of your ranking high on Google is, you know, up there.  As for the code an example of this is if you had a flash based website, don’t expect to rank.  Although search engines claim they can crawl flash-based websites.  You don’t see too many flash-based websites ranking on page one of Google when you type in a query, right?  When was the last time you typed in something and flash websites popped.  It’s very rare, unless it’s like a movie name or something like that.  But if you type in Iphone, you will never usually see Flash based websites.

Lily: I think we’ve gotten some really good tips. And I think we’ll just keep going, so these are just some of the thing that I think we’ll hear about.

Neil:  SO URL structures, right?  And with the secret sauce, going back to that, like we’ll get into it, but a lot of this just revolves around links. So there’s better on-page SEOs than me.  Like Eric Wall is really good, Ryan Fishman is really good.   But what I did really well, and this is my forte in SEO, and there’s a lot of specialty in SEO, is I am really good at link building.  And I used to kill it at that, and to some extent I still do when I try to do it.  But yeah, for me it has always been the secret sauce.  It’s building links quicker than other people.

Neil: So now going into a few of these aspects.  URL structures.  So, with your website, you don’t want to have too many categories. You don’t want to have xyz.com/category 1/category 3/category4 so forth so on /page1.html.  The shorter the URL the better.  If the URL actually has keywords in it, so if your domain name is… if you’re trying to rank for diamonds and your domain name is diamonds.com, you’re much more likely to rank for diamonds because it’s an exact match.

In your URL structure you don’t want to use extraneous characters such as, you know, the exclamation mark, pound sign – well pounds alright. But ideally you don’t want to use it.  You don’t want to use percentage sign.  You don’t want to use and sign, equals, plusses.  And when it comes to dashes and underscores, you want to use dashes over underscores.  Matt Cuts actually even wrote a blog post on – he’s a Google engineer – you shouldn’t even use dashes over underscores.

Neil: So going into tags, talked about this briefly.  Title tag, you know keep it short and to the point…