Ten Questions with Brett Tabke
We are
conducting a series of interviews
with some of the main players
in the search industry. First
up, is Brett Tabke, the man
behind the hugely successful Webmasterworld Forum.
In this
interview, Brett openly talks
about the search engines,
the search engine forums
and explains why the true
measure of success should
always involve a pub.
Thanks for
taking the time to talk with
us Brett. Can you tell us a
bit about yourself? What is
your background?
I've worked with
computers since 1979. I've
operated a discussion forum
in one form or another almost
continuously since I put my
first BBS online in 1984. I
made the leap to the web in
96 after working in promotions
for a major corporation.
The
discussion on the boards
centers around
SEM. Do you think SEM is a
long term growth area, or does
SEM just happen to be "flavour
of the month"?
Like most old
school optimizers, I'm not
comfortable with the usage
of Search Engine Marketing
label at all. Marketing is
just laying down your credit
card and buying clicks at Overture
and other search engines. Search
Engine Marketing is just a
fancy name for checkbook SEO.
That's not what I deal with
- it is optimization and promotion
I am concerned with.
Growth? If anything
we are in a major contraction
of the optimization community.
Dozens upon dozens of firms
and top people are gone. They
simply couldn't afford to deal
with the transition to fee
based listings. Those that
are left, have either become
full blown promoters/marketers
or Google experts. They either
learned to live the financial
realities of cost-per-click
traffic, or went back to bricks
and mortar jobs.
Search Engine
Marketing is just one aspect
of the bigger marketing picture.
The challenge now is to find
alternative sources of traffic
that are more cost effective.
In that sense, the long term
growth outlook for web marketing
is bright. People are going
to need traffic from some where.
It is either break out the
checkbook and buy traffic,
or find alternatives.
Those alternatives
take work. Where we once spent
day-in-day-out dreaming up
new approaches to optimization,
we now have to dream up new
approaches to traffic as a
whole. That realization is
freeing to optimizers because
alternative traffic is now
a necessity. You are either
going to have to have the roi
to justify buying traffic,
or find alternatives that work.
Finding those
alternatives is where the major
growth potential of web marketing
is at. It takes a creative
person with the ability to
think outside our traditional
and learned approaches to marketing.
While the big firms and sites
apply their tried and true
by-the-book marketing formulas,
the small independent sites
have an opportunity to get
out front and try some nontraditional
approaches.
Just as search
engine optimization has been
mostly transformed into Search
Engine Marketing, we need to
take the next logical step
and think beyond the search
engines entirely. There are
other sources of traffic out
there. While the big sites
and firms focus their marketing
on the top traffic getters
in the search engines, there
is huge growth potential for
alternative marketing and traffic
acquisition.
Where
do you see SEM in two years
time?
SEM is
just traffic purchasing agents.
Optimizers on the other hand,
are in this process of transforming
themselves in to promotion
experts. As the slice of
free search engine pie shrinks,
free alternatives sources
of traffic to search engines
will become a bigger part
of your overall site traffic.
Since the
day Infoseek was closed, I
have
had a note tapped on my monitor: "Beyond The SE's".
It was clear to me back then
that the quantity of search
engine referrals would continue
to shrink and that alternatives
must be found. It's was either break out the checkbook at Goto, or acquire
traffic from nontraditional means.
Whether you want
to call it optimization, marketing,
or promotion, two years from
now it will be more broad based
than ever before. It used to
be that you would optimize
for the se's and await the
traffic. This transition away
from se's as the sole source
of traffic is going to continue.
There is a diversification
underway that will require
us to learn more than just
the search engine game.
There are
a million and one forums out
there, yet WMW is the forum
every other search engine forum
discusses. Tell us a bit about
the history of WMW. Was your
decision to start WMW made
out of a sense of frustration
with other forums?
I've run bbs's
since late 1984. I started
with a good old Commodore 64
and a 300 baud modem at college.
I ran bbs's on and off for
most of the 80's until doing
it commercially for a major
computer manufacturer in the
early 90's. Running these types
of systems became my foremost
computer passion because of
the communication aspects with
people of similar passions.
Once on the web
in the 90's the ability to
communicate with people all
over the world was fascinating
to me. In 97 I sat in a chat
room with a woman from Northern
Ireland, a guy from Brazil,
one from Sydney Australia,
and a few others scattered
all over the globe. Getting
to know that crowd drove home
that old adage that people
are pretty much the same all
over the word. If you can stay
away from the artificial barriers
we throw up and stick to something
a bit more visceral, you can
talk with anyone from anywhere
at anytime.
Searchengineworld
started as a collection of
email correspondences with
clients. Back then, my main
job was training new corporate
in house webmasters about search
engines and how to acquire
traffic. That led to enormous
amounts of daily email. I threw
it on my freebie isp site in
96 as a place for those guys
to read it. I woke up one morning
to find Altavista had ranked
a page of it #1 under search
engine optimization. The phone
didn't quit ringing for weeks.
Those conversations
led to people wanting to talk
about seo more and more. A
forum system was a natural
outgrowth of that. I had several
false starts with forums in
97 because the software back
then just wasn't suited for
the web yet. Perl was too resource
intensive to run a forum system
on a 300mhz processor in a
shared hosting environment.
After eventually
moving to our own domain, we
grew out of one simple
premise: focus on the members and their concerns. The members and their messages
are the only thing on the site that matters. Even though some people have felt
the software I wrote has contributed to our growth, it is only there to support
the members. We have always focused on community building one member at a time.
That focus on
the community and its members
- bringing people together
- was never more apparent that
our recent conference in London.
275 people from 21 countries
got together to discuss search
engines for an afternoon. When
it was my turn to talk, I came
about as close to losing my
composure in public as I ever
have. Having that many people
take time out of their busy
lives to fly half way around
the world for an afternoon
in a Pub? Ya, WebmasterWorld
has become a success beyond
my wildest imagination.
WMW
is a tightly run ship. Did
you have a clear idea in
your mind about the what
the tone of the forum should
be?
A professional
site for professional webmasters.
Given that we focus mainly
on promotion for promoters,
we had to set a tone that we
would help people run their
sites more effectively. We
are there to assist them with
their business, but not to
actually *do* business.
The SEM world
exists in a strange place where
the relationship between the
search engine and the SEM is
not clearly defined. How do
you think the search engines
feel about those who practice
SEM and do you ever see a point
in time where both sides will
see eye to eye?
The search engines
realize they need a business
model that works. That model
has to include the promotion
community that represent so
many sites. They have certainly
softened their stance towards
optimizers in recent years
and reached out to the community
like never before.
At the same time,
webmasters have realized that
the search engines have to
make money some how. We need
the traffic they can send and
need to understand their positions
on subjects we rarely talked
about before.
To facilitate
that dialog, we invited the
search engines into WebmasterWorld
two years ago. Fast, Google,
Inktomi, Yahoo, and services
such as Position Tech took
us up on that invitation and
become involved in posting
the last few years. That dialog
is going to continue to grow
and benefit webmasters as well
as the search engines. It solves
many problems before they even
become problems.
There has
always been numerous, hotly
debated theories on which optimisation
technique works best and which
don't. What is your advice
to the new webmaster? Given
various viewpoints, how do
they tell fact from fiction?
Do the traditional
search engine and directory
submission within their terms
of service. After that, go
back to focusing on doing something
with the traffic as you get
it. There are few sites on
the web that are designed strictly
on the one-time-one-visitor
model. It takes repeat traffic
to build a website. If you
service the needs of that first
time visitor, they become long
term visitors. That's where
the long term growth of your
site is at, not the search
engines. The roi from those
repeat visitors is multiplicably
higher than the one-hit-wonder
from search engine traffic.
Think beyond the search engines.
Search engine
referrals are addictive. The
first few times are free, and
then you spend more and more
time to trying to reacquire
the same level of traffic.
Instead of focusing strictly
on the search engines, spread
the work around in to methods
that generate repeat usage.
You can only do that by building
a quality site that people
will bookmark and return to
on their own.
The
dot.com crash has hit hard
those web sites which were
built mainly on IPO fantasy,
rather than on a solid business
plan. Do you think the online
world is a harder place for
the web professional than
it was, say, three years
ago?
We now have more
quality systems and tools to
work with. For me, there is
rarely a time when software
and hardware are a barrier.
Back in early 95-98 days, everything
we wanted to do was somehow
limited by the available hardware
or software. Today, that has
never been less of an issue.
The technical
aspects have taken a back seat
to the real issue of finding
long term models that work.
We are finding that many of
the old school business that
preached traditional business
models were actually right.
What issues
do you see as being the most
important for Webmasters over
the coming year?
Site
usability. There is the growing
use of
CSS, DHTML and other presentation
gimmicks that are making the
web a very user hostile place.
Web Rage and frustration levels
with sites is growing. I feel
it is having a mass negative
effect on the web. Sites that
were once easy and obvious
to use, have become visual
noise factories that require
visitors to "figure them
out" before using them.
The problem is
that many young webmasters
are putting this stuff on their
site with no experience in
using it. Notice that there
are very few large sites using
any of this stuff. The reason
is that it doesn't work for
a large portion of the users
on the web. Users are confused
by some of the DHTML stuff
and a high percentage of CSS
based sites are using fonts
too small for a large portion
of their audience to read comfortably.
There is a shake
out going on because of it.
It is the same process we saw
in the early days of the web
and graphics. Many sites went
over board with heavy graphics
usage and later with heavy
Flash/Shockwave usage. Most
of those sites are all gone
now.
There will be
another cleansing of that nature
over the next 12 months. Those
sites that are now abusing
the leading edge technologies
will be gone. Those that can
afford to do log file research
and visitor studies will be
able to figure out that the
gimmicks don't work. Content
maybe the queen, but even the
best content can't overcome
bad decisions in site interface
and design.
What
are your plans for the future?
Where do see WMW heading?
We just had our
first million page view week.
Handling these explosive growth
patterns in a cost effective
manner is a technological challenge.
Although all the hardware and
software is ready, creating
the overall system glue that
bolts it together has been
a challenge. A load shared
dynamic system with content
updated on-the-fly is still
a rare site today. Systems
are not all that evolved to
effectively manage it.
We will
continue to expand our forum
offerings to address the
needs of the community. We
have such a broad base of
webmaster members, that it
requires many topics to address
their needs. Our vision is
that of a full service site
that supports all those needs
of webmasters from the day
they decide to build the
site, to running it more
effectively. As we expand
into new areas, search engine
promotion will still be the
main topic at hand.
<end>
Thanks a million
Brett. A gentleman and a scholar.
In the next few
weeks, we'll feature interviews
with Cindy McCaffrey@Google,
Ralph Tegtmeier@Fantomaster
and Danny Sullivan@Calafia,
amongst others.
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