Transcript

Brett Tabke: This is Brett Tabke. We are back here today with Bruce Clay, of Bruce Clay Incorporated, but no longer Bruce Clay LLC that we were so, we got used to seeing everywhere. You made the switch to, what did you switch to an s class?

Bruce Clay: Yeah, no a c class.

Brett Tabke: You went to a full c class. Every entrepreneurs dream is going public someday. is that in your future, or?

Bruce Clay: I hope so. I actually am spending a fair amount of time and energy to actually prep for going there. We are already doing audited financials. We are developing procedures in every area. We are preparing for analysts visits, and things like that. It won't be anytime soon. It will probably three years, maybe four, but in that time frame I expect to be ready one way or another. I think that it makes sense. The market will be ready.

Brett Tabke: Excellent. Excellent. I kind of asked that off the hand. I didn't realize that.

Bruce Clay: Well, remember in the beginning, In 96, if I can just jump into the history of this a little bit, everybody that was doing SEO was working off their dining room table. I nean that is the way it was, so my original view of the company was Bruce Clayclay.com consulting, you now notebook computer, corona, and a beach. It wasn't going to be a large company. It certainly wasn't going to be multi-national, and it has taken on a life of its own. The industry is growing. It's just been a wonderful ride. I've had nothing but fun. It's been great.

[pause]

Bruce Clay: Well we are doing a lot of research. We are not stuffing anything. We are more studying it. I think that social hasn't settled in yet. Now social is, from the, if you've read all the things that are out there, inlcluding the sessions that have been at conferences and things like that, social hasn't settled in. I don't think Google has finished doing what they are doing. I just spent time doing our training course in London, Capetown, and Sydney in the last ten weeks. So I have been on the plane a lot. Outside of the US, universal hasn't hit. They were totally amazed that this thing even existed. They had maybe heard of it, but they had never seen it. So it hasn't yet really been released world wide, which says to me that they are maybe going to let the other shoe fall somewhere in here, and given that what we are doing is studying it. We are going to be doing an entire new layor on our website. For years, Bruceclay.com has been addressing, hi you want to know what it is, we are going to tell you what it is. We are going to give you tools. We are going to help you get going, right, and in the beginning a great many of the people that are SEO's frequented the site a lot, because that was appropriate for them, and they have now become senior, so we are going to put a whole new layer on it for senior. It will be sort of click here and you are in the senior layer, and it is going to be advance stuff. It is going to be a lot of social stuff, tools for social. It is going to be things like that. And social isn't just, you know, MySpace. It is behavioral, it is a lot of very targeted, niche oriented, super expert how do I get in there and how do I do it without being condemned and roasted on the stake. You know there is a lot of stuff involved in that.

Brett Tabke: There is a lot of PR.

Bruce Clay: There is a lot of PR. My larger clients have actually taken my advice. They have developed social teams within their SEO teams, and they are following it, figuring out how they can keep their brand up. One of the big problems, by the way in branding, and why social is so important is that the major brands have been able to protect their brands because they have been on television. Take that as an example, and if you look today at 14, 15, 16, 17 year olds aren't on television, they are on the Internet, and they are in YouTube and they are in MySpace, and they are in all of the new social media. That is where they spend all of their time, and they don't see your branding anymore. So I think that what we are going to start seeing in the area of branding..It is a little bit like the lake. You walk up to it, you pound on the ice, it's solid, but it is melting from the bottom up. In five years from now, all those fourteen year olds are consumers, and the brand will have eroded,and I think that at least what we are doing is we are advising everyone of our clients to play in the social space because it is the only way to protect your brand. The only way. So as long as they do it, we're happy, they're happy. It is a long term project. We are not spamming. We are not stuffing. We are not soliciting a zillion links. We are just commenting, just like regular community members, and so far it is starting to, at least people are learning how to do it. I don't think anybody really knows how to do it. There's a few people that have been successful, but I don't think it is going to last. So hopefully we are going to do something smart.

Brett Tabke: It is almost like the social industry is where search was in 98, 99. There are a lot of baby steps that to be taken there yet.

Bruce Clay: I agree, but I do think it is, for branding purposes you've got to be there.

[pause]

Bruce Clay: Well the definition of SEO I don't think has so much changed. I just think the implementation of it has changed. Search engine optimization has never really been the optimization of search engines. That is for search engine engineers. So we all understand how that works, and we have known it for years, but it is really the optimization of content, in my opinion for people who use search engines. If you are not found, those people can't use your site. So you have to be able to get content in the search. I think that what universal did is redefine the word content. The content is not just the webpage any longer. Granted you got to have a web page, and granted that is where people are going to go as a final destination or to convert, because the video won't convert. News may not convert. A blog may not convert. They are going to go to a site that has the content sufficient for conversion. So search engine optimization is the optimization of all content. Web page, video, news, blog, etc., feeds, um, for people who use search engines. Understanding the Internet, everybody uses a search engine. There is no location to locational, it is all virtual. So if you can get into the search engine in the right spots, that is going to, you know, be beneficial. The thing that changes I think, at a great degree anyhow, the thing that changes is that the results seem to be very sensitive to video and blog and news suddenly appearing in the top ten. It is not like it starts at fifty and works its way up, its just there, and the top five, which used to be the safe spot, area above the fold hopefully, isn't as sacred as it used to be because in many cases there are videos. In many cases there is news. In very many cases there's images. The current hurricane that's running today, suddenly all of a sudden there is images and video of the hurricane and it is news, and people want it. In one case I think that there's other things that are at play in the sacred area. I mean we know that wiki is taking over virtually one to two of the spots above the fold in the first place. You throw in a couple more videos and images and news, the number one ranked site, excluding wiki, the number one ranked site might not even be above the fold, and that doesn't mean it's being pushed down by ads. So is it going to be important, yeah. Where I think it is going to be really important is right now it has increased the awareness in everybodys mind about video. It has increased the awareness of blogs, and it's increased the awareness of news. And the things that can jump into the results, suddenly we are finding our clients are interested in talking about those things because they weren't before, adn these are inherently things that would make sense within a web site. If you were fighting to be number one in the results and you had a website, and my website was exactly the same as yours, but I had video and news and blogs and you didn't, I'm first among equals, and I think that hasn't shown up yet, but I think it will, and it is only a matter of time.