Aaron Moskowitz - Enterprise SEO Executive on Startup SEO Best Practices

Aaron Moskowitz of SEO Expert - Podcast Transcript

Aaron Moskowitz:	I know people get these phone calls all the time, from some
agencyScott Orn:	We get them all the time, dude. It’s crazy.
Aaron Moskowitz:	Google does not have an SEO partner, just for the record. I know that’s part of the tactic… [music intro]
Scott Orn:	Welcome to Founders & Friends podcast, with Scott Orn at Kruze Consulting, and my very special guest today is Aaron Moskowitz. Welcome Aaron.
Aaron Moskowitz:	Glad to be here, thank you for having me.
Scott Orn:	Of course. Now we are old friends, we went to high school together, that was 20 years ago, in case you were counting, and Aaron and I have kind of reconnected over the last few years and it turns out Aaron is an online marketing whiz, and we both helped each other out in our respective kind of finance and accounting and Aaron with his online marketing expertise, so maybe Aaron give the folks your background.
Aaron Moskowitz:	Well, I kind of started in B2B whole sale wending with some major institutional lenders, went back to school in 2005, to get my MBA, and ever since I’ve gone from like a business planning professional to online marketing professional to pretty much one of the top SEO leaders in the space worked for some of the largest websites, in the world actually, helping with their SEO strategy.
Scott Orn:	And you are a very modest man, so for you to say that it’s the real deal. Aaron knows the stuff and hes definitely helped us at Kruze consulting. We have also introduced a bunch of our clients to Aaron too, so we are very grateful for the advice. So do you want to kind of start off and talk about, maybe create a little bit of a framework here, for the audience and how they should think about SEO and online marketing?
Aaron Moskowitz:	Certainly. So, in terms of SEO, I would say some points of guidance that I could start with would be more related to just authority, you know we use that term a lot, it’s also used a lot in like social media marketing, except in search engine optimization, it’s a little bit more predictable and transparent, because the largest search engine as we all know is still Google, it’s not SnapChat. [laugh]
Scott Orn:	Little company called Google, definitely heard of them.
Aaron Moskowitz:	Yeah. And Google if you watch any of the documentaries about Larry and Sergey, it was based upon backlinks and maybe few other factors, but essentially what they are trying to do is measure the relevance of content and writers and brands, to how people are searching for those entities-
Scott Orn:	And like a backlink is basically like the way that Google initial algorithm started with, correct me if I am wrong, but it was basically a backlink meaning if I link to aaronmoskowitz.com, and say hey check this site out, that’s a vote, that was a signal to the Google algorithm that this is a cool site, this site has some authority. And they basically counted up all the votes, all the backlinks and that’s how they kind of constructed the authority graph for Google. I am greatly simplifying here but, that’s basically it, right?
Aaron Moskowitz:	Yes, that’s basically it, and the foundational kind of criteria of those, it’s a mix of tactics and activities that build that authority, at the core have not really changed over the years, I think what has changed is the interpretations of what a good backlink is or an authority the publication or source, that obviously can be lost in translation when you have small agencies coming from out of nowhere, and saying they have that authority, I think it’s always best just to conduct whatever SEO initiatives you are thinking of, taking on just do them yourself, not really rely on an agency.
Scott Orn:	You are talking about like the we type SEO to Google and you see all these crazy ads, for like we’ll solve your SEO problems, or we’ll do it for you, for free, or for a very nominal fee we’ll make you the number one accountants in the world.
Aaron Moskowitz:	And just for the record, I know people get these phone calls all the time, from some
agencyScott Orn:	We get them all the time, dude, it’s crazy.
Aaron Moskowitz:	Google does not have an SEO partner, just for the record. I know a lot of, that’s part of the tactic of a lot of these scammy.
Scott Orn:	I get one probably every day, someone telling me they can get me on the first page of Google, I mean I hang up so fast now, but it’s like, it’s really, they really do it. They call a lot.
Aaron Moskowitz:	And it’s so confusing, what do you mean the first page of Google, what is the first page of Google, is that just the search page, like I don’t even understand it’s hard for me to even understand what they are saying typically.
Scott Orn:	I think the people they are selling to don’t understand neither, and so that’s part of the trick, it’s like the Nigerian email scam, if you are dumb enough to kind of fall for the Nigerian, they want it to be kind of signalling down so that only people who aren’t very smart sign up for it kind of thing.
Aaron Moskowitz:	Right, and you and I, we’ve met a lot of people who maybe are at that level where they would take that as some kind of value, but, yeah, there is no partnership between Google and anybody in terms of search.
Scott Orn:	So getting back to the authority, like the trust in authority, can you talk about that?
Aaron Moskowitz:	Yes, so there are few kind of metric scoring platforms/ algorithms out there, that most of the top SEOs use to kind of set their KPIs and monitor the level of authority. Authority can be very closely measured by Moz page authority, and the Moz domain authority, and Moz was a company called SEO Moz back in the day now it’s just called Moz, if you put M-O-Z in your browser, you’ll see they have all kinds of tools, one of them is the site explorer, where you put pretty much for free, you don’t even need an account, and you can see the page authority and domain authority for pretty much any page, or website out there for free, without even having an account.
Scott Orn:	That’s pretty awesome, and what is, and so kind of connecting that to your rank in Google, how does that affect, how does that trust in authority kind of resonate, how does it make itself visible in Google?
Aaron Moskowitz:	So when Google has like a 100 thousand results for a keyword, like bunny rabbits typically the page is on page one, have both a high page authority and a high domain authority, typically, pages on page one of Google have a domain authority at least 30 and that’s the authority for the entire website and typically the page authority may matter may not, really depends on the competing pages, but typically, I see pages on page one that have a page authority of 5 to sometimes even 50, but what’s interesting is that you can raise in page authority, very quickly which is like 2 backlinks, I mean, this is what we discovered at a big portal, the head of SEO for is that it really didn’t take much to get from a page authority of 1 to like 25. Very little, like you could get to 25 with like 2 backlinks from respected publications.
Scott Orn:	So does that mean spending a little bit of money and a little bit of energy on PR or a lot of energy writing some very good blog posts or just kind of articles, is that going to really give you a boost?
Aaron Moskowitz:	Yeah, I mean, if you to write a blog post and cross your fingers, that’s great but what is interesting is that the SEO world is really emulating the offline world now, and it really is starting to come down to relationships, and coming the girth of authorship, kind of the clusters of authors and the relevance of each author and the trustworthyness of authors.
Scott Orn:	Now you are saying this in like a qualitative way, like your reputation kind of in the industry or you are saying it like there is some algorithm that tells us this kind of stuff.
Aaron Moskowitz:	Well, Google is going beyond algorithm, and they actually have manual raters now.
Scott Orn:	Wow, I didn’t know that.
Aaron Moskowitz:	Yeah they are paying them like 15 dollars an hour, and there was actually a document leaked last year, or no actually in 2014 I think, showing kind of the master plan which I think can be summarized or they actually summarized in the document as kind of narrowing in on items that relate to people’s money and their life, so they are trying to first monitor authorship in terms of like should this person be talking about or giving legal advice. Or should this person be giving health advice. And they are kind of slowly and quietly building author rank which I think a lot of people thought they would do when they came out with Google +, but as with most side projects that Google comes out with, Google + did not become what they expected, and when they started featuring author like images, in search, they saw they have a lot of the SEO pros out there were taking advantage, so they took down their original strategy, and implementation, and they slowly started to build author rank, in the backend without saying anything, you won’t see anything from like Mast Cutts or any of these evangelists out there talking about this author rank.
Scott Orn:	But what does that mean practically for the audience, like if you are a founder or an early stage startup employee, like how does this impact the decisions you make and what should you do about it?
Aaron Moskowitz:	I think we’ve seen it, right, very small, like 1 to 5 person startups, we’ve seen like isn’t there a company called a Groove Hq or something like that?
Scott Orn:	Oh yeah, yeah.
Aaron Moskowitz:	So, we’ve seen it, like that’s kind of what is helping a lot of those blogs, get as big as they are is really the authorship and tech community is amazing, I am sure you would agree in how everybody just really collaborates well, and I think the tech community really kind of drove the whole idea of blogs if you think about it, I mean even in the Facebook, the Network that
movieScott Orn:	Social Network. AaronMoskowitz: The Social Network, yeah. So in The Social Network, remember there is a part where like Zuckerberg posted something on a blog, but maybe more people read that blog article because they knew it was Zuckerberg, and he had raised so much money for Facebook.
Scott Orn:	Oh, interesting, so that’s kind of like the reputation inside of the tech circles and things like that can bring an audience to you. That definitely happens, you know, there is definitely like big bloggers or people, I remember like for my non profit, we did a ton of work with Discourse which is an open source kind of chat or Q&A site.
Aaron Moskowitz:	Oh Right, right.
Scott Orn:	It’s the foundation of Ben’d Friends, now and Jeff Atwood, one of the founders tweeted out this thing that I brought for Ben’s Friends on behalf of Discourse, just promoting Discourse, and because Jeff is so well regarded in the community, I got like 25 retweets and all this kind of stuff and these people have huge following, it’s-
Aaron Moskowitz:	So yeah the primary basis as of right now the only thing that we can see is that Google is using Twitter author bios, and Google + to kind of build up this rank. And actually the author bio component is really very minimal, I’ve seen low page authority articles, get to the top of page one just because the writer had like a 2 sentence bio.
Scott Orn:	Oh my gosh. So that bio is actually important, is that what you are saying.
Aaron Moskowitz:	It’s very important, yeah, so pages that are on blogs and showing author just being like admin, right, if you just setup Wordpress probably you made your account admin and your Wordpress is about to be hacked any day, because every hacker knows how to get in to a Wordpress, and install the admin as username, but yeah, they are missing that authorship and if something is so simple it’s just a set it forget it type of thing.
Scott Orn:	So what you are saying if I can distill this down, or you distill it is getting your name and developing your own voice and developing your own online identity can really help your SEO.
Aaron Moskowitz:	Yes. And it will help even more in the coming years, if you are a doctor or an attorney, but then again, the California state bar and probably many of the others bars throughout the country, are trying to make their own rules in terms of putting the author as an attorney but actually having articles written by outsourced agencies.
Scott Orn:	Oh really, so there is doctors who are employing ghost writers, or something like that?
Aaron Moskowitz:	Oh yeah, for sure, I mean, we all know doctor OZ has been doing it for many years, he is not writing all of those articles on the Huffington post.
Scott Orn:	Oh, interesting. So if you are to kind of distill this first piece of advice here, what would you tell the founder and startup community?
Aaron Moskowitz:	Set up a Google + account, set up a Twitter account, start a blog, and create an author bio on the blog and maybe recruit a few of your friends to also contribute so that you can show your publications not just the perspective of you.
Scott Orn:	Interesting. You know, I hadn’t thought that the Google + part of that aspect, I think we have a Google+ account but I don’t even know if we do.
Aaron Moskowitz:	Yeah, well, it’s pretty much why you see a lot of these really blend accounts out there, they are maybe like author accounts, and they are just posting their articles, maybe that don’t know much about social media, so they are not trying to build relationship with anybody, but it actually worked out in the end for a lot of those people because it’s helping Google create a footprint.
Scott Orn:	Yeah, that makes total sense. They are seeing what is happening across the web.
Aaron Moskowitz:	Yeah, they are kind of monitoring and building the connection.
Scott Orn:	Cool, okay, so get a Twitter account, a Google + account, set up your own blog, make sure you tie that to your own identity, and then have a few friends collaborate with you to show that it’s not just your opinion.
Aaron Moskowitz:	And also guest blog, especially try to guest blog on higher authority publications than yours. And check on the authority using Moz but also, you can also use majestic.com their trust flow score is very closely associated with another score I didn’t bring up yet, this is very interesting, up until about 3 years ago, Google actually had an authority score for every page and every site, and it was called Google page rank, and sites that had the highest page rank were ESPN, Facebook, Twitter, CNN, and it was the score that was just 1 to 10, so it wasn’t out of a 100.
Scott Orn:	Wait, did that go away?
Aaron Moskowitz:	It didn’t go away, but Google just decided they were just going to kind of do it behind the scenes.
Scott Orn:	Oh my god, I didn’t know that, that’s crazy.
Aaron Moskowitz:	Yeah. They used to give an API “coin” to allow people to kind of check using the API what the score is estimated to be, and then they just stopped kind of supporting that API, I think in 2014.
Scott Orn:	So what took its place?
Aaron Moskowitz:	Well, the closest thing to page rank that I found based on all kinds of case studies etc is majestic’s trust flow. And the calculation is very similar, from what I hear to how Google came up with their score, except trust flow is out of 100.
Scott Orn:	And what you are looking for you’ve told me this before, is you want your website should have as high trust flow as possible, and the way you get that is by getting link from the high trusts worthy websites, effectively?
Aaron Moskowitz:	Well, it gets even more complicated than that, you actually want to find individual pages that have trust flow, because what I found, a lot of sites will have a trust flow of 30 on the homepage, but articles have even aged within that site, for like six months will have a trust flow zero.
Scott Orn:	So only if you get that link form that homepage with the high trust flow is what actually matters.
Aaron Moskowitz:	Yeah, so if you are trying to do anything, I won’t call it manipulate your trust flow or anything, but if you are trying to kind of plan out if I do this, could I get this kind of result, in terms of trust flow, you may want to see how other maybe older articles how they ended up, in terms of their trust flow, within that site.
Scott Orn:	That makes total sense. So what’s the next step after that?
Aaron Moskowitz:	Just keep doing it.
Scott Orn:	[laugh] Over and over again.
Aaron Moskowitz:	Over and over again, I mean, after you’ve gotten your initial trust flow, which Google will show you the results almost right away, it’s so transparent it’s not even funny, but after that, you are pretty much just in competition for more links, with more authority. And that’s just the only way to climb, there is no real way around, there are some tactics and maybe some of them, you know, they are considered like black hat, we call a lot of these tactics black hat because they are temporarily breaking what is assumed to be the rules of search, what is ethical.
Scott Orn:	And, sometimes Google penalizes you if they figure out you are doing black hat stuff.
Aaron Moskowitz:	Yeah, but just by having content of value that refers back to your site at a minimal level, a natural level, is never going to get you penalized, that’s Google appreciates that. But, all these tactics that go around anything ethical or natural, eventually, somebody is going to be penalized.
Scott Orn:	And you hear about these stories of like big online networks like Content networks just going from like millions and millions and millions a page views to zero, or nothing, because they are doing something black hat and Google figured it out, and then they penalized them.
Aaron Moskowitz:	Yeah, there was a case I remember, like speaking of big companies I think it was like JCPenney where they just had a bunch of links from fake blogs, so blogs that had their admin as the author, so there were just so many, we are talking about like millions of backlinks, which is kind of funny, because I don’t know personally too many people who shop for anything, online, from JCPenney, but maybe who knows.
Scott Orn:	That’s why, they had to get higher up in the search rank so they could get more customers.
Aaron Moskowitz:	[laugh] they need to see what would happen.
Scott Orn:	So that high trust flow doing a lot of guest blogging from not just sites, but pages that have a high trust flow is a critical part of that.
Aaron Moskowitz:	Everything that has to do with SEO beyond common, public belief it has to do with pages, like Google index’s pages, Google, they have something in their algorithm that is comparable to the Moz domain authority, but ultimately, the way that pages are indexed, has to do with individual pages.
Scott Orn:	Got it. The one of the things I like about SEO is that it rewards you for putting in a lot of effort in writing high quality content. Like, there is something we try to do quite a bit, we try to answer people’s questions all over the place, across the web, and what we found is, we are still pretty low on this and the Kruze Consulting website is pretty new, but I like it, it’s like you put the effort in working and you get rewarded, versus like having more money to spend than somebody else, you know. We are never going to outspend anybody, but if we invest our time and energy, we get rewarded, I think that’s really cool.
Aaron Moskowitz:	Yeah, and that’s the whole idea. And, if you are really good at what you do, then you are capable of adding more value.
Scott Orn:	Yeah, it’s that rewarding the effort and dedication, and you are like, people do, they ask questions like what is the best payroll solution, and we answer that question and it helps a lot, it helps a lot of people that people were never even going to talk to, but it makes me feel good and I know it makes Vanessa feel good that we are helping people out, it’s really cool.
Aaron Moskowitz:	And, I think with this like helpful types of content, what is interesting is that you can’t always plan out how well it’s going to do, because at least 20% of every search that is conducted every day, is brand new.
Scott Orn:	Wow, are you kidding me?
Aaron Moskowitz:	No.
Scott Orn:	So, humans are continually inventing new searches basically?
Aaron Moskowitz:	Yeah, and Google came out with something called rank brain, that’s supposed to dynamically take a brand new search and figure out how it’s relevant, you know, within their algorithm.
Scott Orn:	Wow, that’s cool. What are some other tips or tactics people can do to just kind of improve, it’s not just about SEO but improve their presence online?
Aaron Moskowitz:	Well, you know, I’ve read and heard a lot about the phenomenon of what we call in SEO “the ping pong effect” and that’s when somebody goes and searches for a term and clicks through some listing that they see. And then, they go to the page and maybe or maybe not they don’t like what they saw and they hit the back button. And they go right back, without engaging-
Scott Orn:	It’s like a bounce.
Aaron Moskowitz:	It’s like a bounce, yeah, which even a bounce is pretty vague in our world there is no definition out there of what a bounce is in Google’s eyes, people say oh it’s 30 seconds, and some people say it’s 15 seconds, and no engagement and you know, this all kinds of fear is out there. But essentially, somebody going to your page and going back to Google, is a really bad thing.
Scott Orn:	Oh man, like instantly going back?
Aaron Moskowitz:	Yes.
Scott Orn:	I guess that’s telling Google that Google made a mistake and shouldn’t rank you that high.
Aaron Moskowitz:	Actually, it doesn’t even have to be instant, it’s so vague, we don’t really know, it could be two minutes later.
Scott Orn:	So what do you do to combat that, is there anything you could do?
Aaron Moskowitz:	Well, there are all kinds of scripts out there that will analyze exit intent in real time, of the visitor, and maybe they will put like a pop up that it’s kind of like please don’t go, [laugh]
Scott Orn:	Oh, this is like bounce exchange or something.
Aaron Moskowitz:	And that’s why they call it bounce exchange because essentially, it creates what Google could perceive as engagement, because it could set off a pixel, that exit intent event could be setting off a pixel which Google really wouldn’t be able to tell if that was them clicking through to like maybe an on page, like maybe like an onpage box, what we call like a modal box, or voting on something, they can’t really tell, that’s where Google gets confused. So, by having some kind of action, I’ve even seen some websites create a Javascript action based on somebody just scrolling down their page.
Scott Orn:	Interesting, that sounds like it’s illegal or against Google’s rules.
Aaron Moskowitz:	Well, you know, so Google is a precarious position, where either they are against the idea of the use of Javascript, or they embrace it. And, they seem to have over time embraced it, and not embracing Javascript is a scary thing because Javascript runs most of those advertising containers.
Scott Orn:	So they have to kind of embrace that. So the Google we have a hard time knowing whether you are clicking on a bounce exchange kind of pop up, or if you actually just genuinely interacting with the site, basically.
Aaron Moskowitz:	Yes, but, Google did recently show their true colours and their thoughts, towards these pop ups.
Scott Orn:	What was the true colours, you say that almost like Dart Vader music playing there.
Aaron Moskowitz:	Exactly, yeah, so what happened was, I want to say this is like a month, a month and a half ago, interestingly enough, and I feel like I am the Google whisperer sometimes, Google came out with some kind of vague policy that would punish mobile only pages that utilize this tactics. And they said it was because of user experience, but it is interesting because I mean, a plug in called bounce exchange, so it’s going to take care of what like, maybe as much as 60% of search, in terms of these pop ups, and a lot of these sites, they want to set it up for the site whether it’s being downloaded, on mobile or desktop, like they don’t want to rely on it just showing on one or the other, you know. It’s kind of all or nothing. So, it seems to me like that had something to do with their inability to track this stuff.
Scott Orn:	What is the whole mobile thing where Google saying that if your mobile site isn’t optimized for mobile, we actually want to show you as high, can you explain that, that kind of, I mean, we built our site and it’s not the greatest, it’s good, but that always worries me that like we don’t have like a super amazing mobile interface.
Aaron Moskowitz:	So, Google like when everything was desktop, all they needed to worry about was the content. Now, if a site doesn’t load quickly for mobile, or just makes no sense to the visitor when they click through, on mobile, I think that Google is looking at the failure of the mobile side of the website as kind of their own failure. It effects their brand.
Scott Orn:	Oh, interesting. That tells the Google user that, Google sent you to the wrong site.
Aaron Moskowitz:	Because I went to the Google, and Google ranked this page, it’s their fault that it doesn’t show well through mobile.
Scott Orn:	Yeah. So Google basically create like a new policy trying to fix this, right?
Aaron Moskowitz:	Yeah, they even went step further, they created a mobile server that is kind of comparable to the iPhone app flipboard.
Scott Orn:	Oh I didn’t know that.
Aaron Moskowitz:	Yeah, it’s called AMP Accelerated Mobile Pages.
Scott Orn:	I have heard that, so wait, are they serving my mobile web page?
Aaron Moskowitz:	Yeah, they are serving it, they want the developers to create the pages with the word acronym AMP within the URL and some other schema tags, or just code added to this pages to communicate with their server and it will recognize if the user is on mobile, and deliver this real supposably very fast AMP page and the top 3 I guess ranked pages in Google typically have a little thumbnail in Google to further serve the publisher. My experience is, I mean, I don’t know if they ask you to clickthrough or anything, but I think only the larger publishers will benefit from that.
Scott Orn:	Probably because it’s hard for little guys to l=know how to do this whole AMP thing, I don’t know how to do that.
Aaron Moskowitz:	Also, you are going to have to rank in the top 3 because most people don’t know to scroll sideways, because it’s like in a widget.
Scott Orn:	Oh, I know what you are talking about.
Aaron Moskowitz:	Yeah, the images are in a widget, so it’s only really beneficial to the three articles that are going to show in the AMP widget.
Scott Orn:	Got it. So what do I need to do, I need to get my developer to basically create a different kind of the page?
Aaron Moskowitz:	Yeah, it’s hard to validate that unless you are a big publisher. I can tell you I was at one of the largest publishers in the country and we went through the development for over ten thousand pages, and Google made all kinds of promises of how this is going to help us and even in the near term and I think after four months of doing that we’d seen like 200 referrals.
Scott Orn:	So like it wasn’t really helping you.
Aaron Moskowitz:	It was nothing, yeah.
Scott Orn:	Yeah that sucks.
Aaron Moskowitz:	Oh, another Google side project, god no. [laugh] Speaking of Google side projects, tanking I just read an article the other day that YouTube, which is owned by
GoogleScott Orn:	I’ve heard of it.
Aaron Moskowitz:	Yeah, so that’s a second largest search engine, it makes me very excited, so they try to take the Netflix and Amazon route of creating content with their quote unquote influencers, and it’s called YouTube Red. And they have never promoted anything more than this channel, or this portal anyways. The whole You Tube Rat brand only has like 1,5 million subscribers.
Scott Orn:	You know, I think they tried to get me, they showed me like a pop up all the time about that, trying to get me a subscribe.
Aaron Moskowitz:	[laugh] Yeah, they want an Emi Scott, they want the Emi, they want what Amazon has.
Scott Orn:	[laugh] The funny thing about it is, that feels like, I mean You Tube is amazing, and it is one of the largest sites and it really kind of democratized the world because anyone can get a video up, but that does feel like the Netflix business model, even Spotify business model, I think they are both kind of squeezing YouTube from different sides, because I think a lot of people listen to music on YouTube but Spotify has made it so easy.
Aaron Moskowitz:	You know what’s a big marque on YouTube in terms of search, is public domain children songs.
Scott Orn:	Interesting.
Aaron Moskowitz:	Yeah. If you look up like Mary Had A Little Lamb, you’ll see tons of accounts that nobody has ever heard of with like 70 million page plays.
Scott Orn:	Oh my god. Is there anything startup should do for the YouTube channel or things to optimize their video presence?
Aaron Moskowitz:	Yeah, so the first thing that I would do is I would access a tool called SEM rush and there is another tool called vidIQ but I don’t really know how to use vidIQ to my benefit. Small tactic that I took on back in the day was I would, and I still do this, different sites and tactics, I would search for the top keywords that youtube.com like the whole website is indexing for. There is like millions of keywords and you can actually export a csv like the top 25 thousand keywords and you will see, you can sort these keywords by estimated traffic, by ranking etc etc, and you may even want to filter down to a keyword related to wherever you are trying to be indexed, and you can kind of craft, where you would end up if you created a video like not just in YouTube, but they are checking like where these videos or these pages index in search, so not like video search, but Google search. Which I think that’s incredible opportunity and there are typically like how to videos, I think video that refers the most traffic from organic search to YouTube is how to tie a tie.
Scott Orn:	[laugh] Of course, because every guy is looking for that.
Aaron Moskowitz:	Yes, and I know a lot of people are listening that sell ties, so.
Scott Orn:	So maybe like in your profession if you create a couple of how to videos, that’s actually a great way to get, now does that, I can understand how this gets you video traffic, does that reflect well on kind of your website and in your online presence?
Aaron Moskowitz:	Yes. So, what I think is a big factor in SEO is kind of this activation factor, that I call traffic signal. So, traffic signal has nothing to do with your SEO or anything, it could be traffic from anywhere. And that I would say is at least 7% of the total algorithm that Google is considering to rank in your page.
Scott Orn:	Interesting. So should you be, just to clarify, should I be embedding that video on my web page or is it just having it on You Tube is enough?
Aaron Moskowitz:	Well, in terms of YouTube SEO, I think there is like two or three main factors, one of them actually is embeds on other sites, because it’s kind of like a scratch our back we’ll scratch yours type thing, and where YouTube wants to get more advertising out there so they will reward those that embed the YouTube player elsewhere.
Scott Orn:	That makes total sense.
Aaron Moskowitz:	Get their player embedded elsewhere. And then, another factor which recently changed actually, is minutes watched.
Scott Orn:	Oh, that’s smart.
Aaron Moskowitz:	Yeah, so the really smart YouTube channels or creators, they have really engaging in relevant playlists, which is a really good idea because playlists there is autoplay and the more times people are watching them the higher those videos are
beingScott Orn:	It cycles you from one video to another which is included in your playlist.
Aaron Moskowitz:	By the way, YouTube is really big in the autoplay over the last few years, for some reason, I don’t know what it is, but. Yeah, more commercials. Cool, well that’s a really good tip, so to kind of wrap it up here, do you want to summarize your kind of core tips and we can have you back for another session because this stuff is really helpful.
Scott Orn:
Aaron Moskowitz:	Yeah, I mean, I haven’t really counted but I would say a main tip is just number 1, build your trust flow, for each page on your site. Number 2, I guess related to that search is not about just the authority of your entire website, but each page on your site. Number 3, I would say traffic is important, and number 4, do whatever you can to make sure that people don’t go back and forth from your site back to Google.
Scott Orn:	And, invest the time and energy and write great content and it will pay off.
Aaron Moskowitz:	Yeah, thanks Scott, that’s number 5. make important content, don’t just write a title of a page and 400 words.
Scott Orn:	Make something in depth.
Aaron Moskowitz:	Yeah. Something that people see a value
Scott Orn:	Awesome. Well Aaron, thank you so much for coming on Founders&Friends, I really appreciate it. can you tell the audience where they can find you?
Aaron Moskowitz:	Sure, my email is aaron@aaronmoskowitz.net or .com, and I know that’s really hard to spell, I’m on Facebook, Twitter, Aaron Moskowitz, and Pinterest as well.
Scott Orn:	So if anyone have any questions they should shoot you an email and I’m sure you’ll answer.
Aaron Moskowitz:	Certainly.
Scott Orn:	Awesome, thanks for coming on man, I really appreciate it.
Aaron Moskowitz:	Thanks for having me Scott. Have a good day.

Aaron Moskowitz - Enterprise SEO Executive on Startup SEO Best Practices

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