He’s arguably the most well-known poster at WebmasterWorld.com. He’s cited by some of the most reputable SEO minds in the industry. He has likely influenced hundreds, if not thousands, of enterprising webmasters.
Who is this veritable titan of SEO that I speak of? Why, Tedster, of course.
I know, I know. Many of you are probably asking yourselves, “Who the heck is Tedster? I’ve never read his blog. I’ve never visited his website. Why should I care about this guy?”
Well, if numbers impress you, then consider this: Tedster is an administrator at WebmasterWorld who has contributed a mind-boggling 18,864 posts to what many consider the web’s most comprehensive and informative SEO forum. Are landmark discoveries your thing? Tedster was credited with discovering the possible cause of the Google’s 950 penalty. He’s been making similar discoveries and assertions for years.
However, unlike most thought leaders in the SEO space, Tedster has chosen to stay under the radar for the most part – focusing on his work and on contributing to WebmasterWorld. I’ve been a fan of Tedster for years, so I figured it was time to help shed some blogosphere light on the man, the myth, the legend.
Ok, so maybe that last sentence was a little over the top. Let’s just start with some basics.
“Tedster” is actually short for Ted Ulle, a web strategist who began working with The MEWS Group in the mid 90s. As his first venture into a web design business, he joined with some friends to create a web design and marketing company that could serve small business needs. Today he still consults there for select clients. However, most of his work is now done through Converseon.com and GlazerEnterprises.com, two internet marketing companies where he functions as the lead SEO analyst.
Ted was gracious enough to answer some questions for me, so without further adieu, here’s a look inside the life and mind of “Tedster”:
How did you get into the SEO field?
I started building web pages in the early 90s, but I came from a background in retail marketing. So I needed to understand how to get traffic to the sites I built, and most of all, the RIGHT traffic. Poking around online I found a bunch of SEO pioneers and made some connections. We traded information and things took off from there.
In your opinion, what’s the most important thing an enterprising SEO should learn to do?
When you work on your own sites, master the ways your server technology interacts with the engines. Almost every site I consult for has some foundation issue or other that can make a significant improvement in ranking when fixed. I see the same thing at the site clinics we offer at PubCon. Getting the basics nailed down can be 90% of the battle, and that’s enough to take you a long way in most online markets. When you work for other businesses, and especially for major enterprises, the most important factors are the human ones – how to educate the client and how to get your expertise used by the client’s team. The goals are similar, but implementation faces those human, social challenges that come with large team interactions and levels of management.
What is the most common SEO-related question you come across on WMW?
How to maintain your rankings while changing the urls, or even the domain name. And the first answer is that cool urls don’t change, so avoid the change if at all possible. The challenges come when a new CMS is going to be used, or a company gets purchased and re-branding is essential — things like that. I’m not a fan of throwing around thousands of 301 redirects in these situations. My approach is more surgical – doing a study to identify the critical urls, then redirecting only the ones with a lot of search traffic or backlinks. I get good results by letting the search engines sort out the 404s as they crawl the new site. That’s something they can do fast and they do it well. But 301 redirects can be the devil’s playground – trust issue come up and so on – so it takes a good bit longer, in some cases, for your site to regain its footing. Also important is having a development or test environment. I’ve never seen a re-worked site without initial problems, and those need to be worked out before you give the site over to the engines. It’s also good when changing urls to have a war chest set aside for an emergency PPC spend, just in case an extended problem develops with organic search.
What’s the most common non-SEO-related question you come across on WMW?
That’s got to be fixing cross-browser troubles. And the missing step is almost always making sure the mark-up validates first. Once you know the code is not tripping a browser’s error-recovery routine, most display problems are relatively easy to fix. One other key is to develop in a standards compliant browser first, and then tweak for IE. Even though IE has the greater market share, if you develop in IE first, then you’ve probably built in some idiosyncrasies. It can take a lot more time to fix those for standards than it does to tweak a standards-compliant page for IE.
What’s the most outlandish SEO thread/theory you’ve ever come across on WMW?
With the adventurous nature of today’s algorithms it’s not wise to rule out any idea too fast. To me, some ideas that once made sense (keyword density, for instance) now are starting to sound quite outlandish. Currently there seems to be a lot of concern around search engine spiders asking for too many 404s on your domain. But how could that be a ranking factor, unless those bad urls were coming from your own pages in the first place?
Seriously, how is it that you seem to know everything and anything related to search and the internet in general?
LOL – I’m so aware of my limitations. But what I have learned is the result of an insatiable curiosity. I’ve never been happy with a simple “this works” answer, I always want to understand WHY it works. So I like to pull back the covers and dig a little deeper in almost any area that comes to my attention.
How come you don’t blog?
I do have a couple domains that I bought with blogging in mind – but then I asked myself why. I don’t feel any impulse to “grow my own brand”, and to blog well requires a serious time investment. Between my client work and WebmasterWorld, I’m nearly flat-out as it is. So rather than short-change my clients or the forums, I decided to focus on those commitments I’ve already made and do the best job I possibly can.
You’re preaching to the choir as far as I’m concerned, but for the sake of anyone out there who is not aware, can you explain the value of signing up for the “Webmaster World Supporters Forum?”
The first value is the actual support you give back to WebmasterWorld, acknowledging the very real help that the free forums have already offered you. That’s why we call it “Supporters Area” rather than using a term like subscriber. Member support keeps us alive and well. The Supporters Area tends to have a much better signal to noise ratio than the public forums, and more free wheeling discussions as well. We even have an area where our Supporters can offer each other open site reviews. That’s something we would not attempt in the public sections.
