SEO Experts: Craig Dawber Interview

A couple of weeks ago I outlined my intentions for the future of this blog and one of them was to conduct more interviews.

UK internet marketer, blogger and SEO expert Craig Dawber is currently in the pre-launch period for his new product, Google Supremacy, so I thought it would be the ideal opportunity to interview him and get some tips out of him for free!

SEO is a subject which is very close to my heart because when I was involved in other niches I had no idea about marketing, but I knew how to do search engine optimization and that’s how I drove traffic to my websites.

I know SEO is not the sexiest of topic matter but it can have a huge impact on your online business so I hope you enjoy and benefit from the interview I did with Craig:

SEO Experts: Craig Dawber Interview Transcript

David: Hey everyone. It’s David Walker here from DavidWalker.tv and today I want to welcome a friend and fellow marketer from the UK to the call, Craig Dawber. Hi Craig.

Craig: Hi David. Thanks for inviting me on this call. It’s a pleasure to be here and I’ll do my best to answer your questions.

David: Great. Thank you so much for agreeing to jump onto the call today. The main focus of today’s call is all about search engine optimization or SEO. I think I’ve just heard a few groans in the background; it’s always a subject that people try to avoid.

It is a subject that is very close to my own heart because the free traffic I generated as a result of doing SEO was how I made a lot of money online before I got into internet marketing. So I’m really pleased to be able to interview an SEO expert like Craig.

First of all Craig can you tell us a bit more about yourself? When and where you got started?

Craig: I can start off by telling you I live in a small village in Lancashire in the UK. Originally, before I started I was an engineer. I was very unsatisfied, I was looking for a way to earn better money and get a better lifestyle for myself. I then started looking into the direct mail business and selling business opportunities and DVD through mail order.

This went quite well for a while and then the expenses got too much and I ended up in a little bit of debt. So then I thought there must be another way of doing it and started looking at the online side of things. Digital sales. To me the digital sales business is a perfect business model. And that’s why I decided to go from there.

David: That’s interesting you mentioned the DVD side of things because when I still lived with my parents I think I must have been on every single business opportunity home business seeker list going. There’s a good chance I got a mailing off you. So when you decided to make that switch from the DVD side of things over to the digital sales side of things, how did you first get started doing SEO?

Craig: I started by accident. I was reading the Warrior Forum about people making money off review sites. I thought that sounds doable and easy enough to do. So I did a bit more research and started finding out that those are really easy to set up and the search engines seem to rank them higher than the normal html sites. So I thought what the heck. See how it turns out. The first one was dog training, think it was dogproblems.com and I set it up and started driving traffic to it and started making sales. Then it worked out well and it started making me some money.

David: Was that when you decided that SEO was a profitable and worthwhile activity?

Craig: It was a bit further on from that. I started making money through submitting articles and driving traffic that way. I thought if I can get it to the top of the search engines, some good keywords I’m bound to make some more money. And that was when I started looking into SEO and what the factors were. I was right, in eight months the keywords were at the top of the search engines. Sales coming in everyday. That site still makes me money today which is great.

David: Excellent. Can you share some of your other SEO success stories? Give us some sort of indication of what niches you were in. Perhaps some of the traffic levels and earnings you achieved.

Craig: OK. Another great little side to have is the registry repair software niche that’s another review blog. Once I got that to the page one of Google it started making sales everyday. To this day it earns me between $20 and $200 a day. The real success was when I started getting some really good money after Clickbank decided to start having recurring products to the marketplace. The bodybuilding niche was very popular. Niche for membership sites and recurring billing. I have two or three review blogs in the bodybuilding niche. It does well. Imagine getting sales here and there every day. You can get these one off sales and there’s recurring on the back end. Your income mounts up and you end up with quite a nice income.

David: By promoting these recurring billing products via the SEO techniques as every month progresses, in theory your income should just increase because you’re making all those initial sales but your also getting those recurring sales on top of things as well.

Craig: You’re doing the same amount of work but you’re getting a lot more money for it because not everyone stays in the memberships. Say you want to get 30%, that’s recurring plus your daily sales.

David: Sounds like a good plan. Like me, you’re a huge fan of SEO but realistically can anybody do SEO because it seems to be a lot of “SEO experts” out there and there is a lot of conflicting information?

Craig: I truly believe that anyone can do it. It’s really not that hard when you start doing it. That’s where the myth comes into it that it’s hard to do and it costs a lot of money. Many of the so called experts out there say that content is king. And I don’t believe that. For me back-linking is king. For example if you were to build a site using content from articles and you back-link like crazy to that blog, you probably wouldn’t end up at the top of the search engines.

But if you were to, say, put four pages of unique content on the site and then start back-linking to that site I guarantee you end up at the top of the search engines which is great because other people are doing half the work for you. They’ve already produced the content and all you’re doing is creating four new articles and when you’re back-linking to your site you want to back-link to the unique content then Google will find it. That’s why I don’t think content is king, back-linking is.

David: That’s a really interesting viewpoint because a lot of people say that duplicate content doesn’t get indexed or you may even get some sort of penalty from the search engines if you use duplicate content but that doesn’t seem to be the case in your experience?

Craig: Not in mine, not at all. Lately I’ve started looking into auto blogs and I know people do very well and auto blogging is just duplicate content off the sites out there. So, if that was the case nobody would make money using duplicate content. For me, auto blogs are another avenue. If I was to go into auto blogging I’d also add quite a few pages of unique content to the sites as well. It just bumps you up the search engines even more.

David: How long would you say it takes to perform SEO, or how long does it take to optimize a web or a blog and what would you say to listeners who are worried that it’ll be too hard and time consuming to do this?

Craig: If you had your keywords rich domain and you had your content ready and three to four articles you could start setting up your blog within 20 to 30 minutes. The next step to let the other search engines know about it. I’d submit the domain name, the url through Google/addurl and Google comes to your site, spiders your site and starts seeing what’s there.

Then I’d start getting some back links from article directories or you can go to forums and in your signature strip put a back link there. Start doing keyword research for that site. Find out which keywords you really want to go for. Then start to back link like crazy for those keywords. If you were to do all that you could be up and running and ranked within a week.

David: So that dispels any myth that SEO is really hard to do and it can take months and months to get ranked. You just mentioned you can get ranked within the space of a week. It would depend on the keywords that you’re targeting. Some keywords must be more saturated and competitive than others?

Craig: That’s exactly right. The key factor to get ranked fast and easily is to target keywords that aren’t saturated. And also have a keyword rich domain name related to that domain. If you have those two then sometimes within a couple of days it will start ranking that site at the top of the search engines because you’ve got a keyword rich domain and that’s one of the things that Google ranks very highly.

The other thing there as well you can buy is an aged domain. If you look on Google, GoDaddy.com, aged domains on there. Some of the aged domains are just sites people don’t want anymore, sites that people have bought and they don’t really know what they’re doing. They just don’t want to carry on with that site. You can go and buy them some of them already have a ton of back-links.

David: Yeah, I’ve got a great story of my own about buying aged domains because that’s something I used to do when I was involved in the soccer niche. I actually managed to get the original domain name that was used for the Ghana African Cup Nations 2008 tournament and that domain name was really rich in authority back links. It had back-links from the BBC, The Times here in the UK which is a highly respected newspaper. The NY Times and some Ghanaian government links as well.

Craig: Excellent. I bet that was a lucky find.

David: It was. I can’t claim any real skill in finding that. It was just a case of being in the right place at the right time. One resource that I used to use was a free website called FreshDrop.net. That used to search through the GoDaddy.com auction domains, TDNAM, although I checked that site this morning and now they’re starting to charge a monthly fee to use it.

Craig: Yeah that’s an excellent site. I used to use it myself. There’s a way around it now you can actually use a free software called Domain Samurai. And that basically does the same thing.

David: OK, can you tell us a little about Domain Samurai then?

Craig: It’s just come to the market. From the creators of Market Samurai which is another fantastic tool. Domain samurai is just a free tool. You can download that for free. You can type in your niche and it’ll search through domains related to that. It will also tell you the history back-links of the domain and age of the domain. It’s a great way of doing your research and finding solid age domains. And it’s free.

David: You mentioned Domain Samurai. In terms of SEO for blogging, do you know of any other tools that can make life easier?

Craig: The “All In One SEO Pack” plug-in, which is a plug-in that you set up on your blog and takes two minutes. Every time you put a post in there and you make sure its keyword rich that will be your extension after say .com/ your extension will be your actual title of your article you just posted.

It’ll put your title tags in there. It’ll also give you two or three sentence descriptions what you find in the search engines so your site comes up. Put the title on there and the description underneath it does all that for you.

The other important is the “Google Sitemap” plug-in. What that does is every time you post a new article on your blog, the Sitemap automatically puts in the files making it easier for Google to search your site. That helps you get it ranked highly on the search engines.

Free tools I like are apart from Domain Samurai is Market Samurai. There’s a free trial for that. I think it costs $97 if you want to buy it. It’s an excellent tool. That’s good for studying your competition. You can go into Market Samurai and do a bit of search on that keyword and it will tell you what sites have and you don’t. They might have more back links than you do. The domains might be older than yours. It gives you a good insight into the competition and what you have to do to beat it.

David: So we’ve talked about getting started and some of the tools. For somebody listening to the call today, how would you suggest they get started in SEO on a brand new blog? For instance could you give some step by step points on getting started?

Craig: Start off by doing market research. Without knowing your market you can’t. This way you can find a good niche that you might want to go after. And then a great place to do this is CB Engine which is great way of searching that will show you the up and coming products on the market place. Another place of doing research is Ebay of course. One of my favorite ones is Amazon.

Look at the book section that will give you some great ideas for some niches to go into. Once you have a niche idea the next step there is to do full keyword research because you’re looking for buying keywords not normal keywords. So if someone was looking for a dog training eBook, they’re actually looking for a book so they’re more likely to buy. Rather than someone just looking for dog training tips, maybe, or free dog training tips. If you ranked a keyword like that the likelihood of making any sales is not very high.

So you want to do some proper keyword research. Don’t make the mistake of buying the domain name before you done the keyword research. Then go and look for a good rich keyword domain to buy and if you cant find one, an aged one.

Another great tactic if you got a brand new domain and your struggling to get above the search engines because the competition has an older domain than you. One tip is to buy a keyword rich domain and then go away and buy an old aged domain and point it back, do a 301 permanent redirect and you point the aged domain to the new domain and what that does is Google takes all the attributes of the aged domain and sends it over to the new domain. And that helps you up the rankings. They’re the things I’d start off doing.

David: That’s a really good tip there in terms with the 301 redirect. So I’d recommend that people go out and start looking for age domains especially I suppose if you’re entering a niche that’s really competitive you need every advantage that you can get?

Craig: Exactly. If you got an aged domain that might be a really good domain but its not the keywords you want to focus on, so you just point it to the new domain and it sends all the attributes over to the new domain.

David: When somebody got a new blog set up and they’ve taken on board all your advice, what would you say are some realistic short term and long term goals that they should aim for in terms of SEO campaigns?

Craig: Short term I’d say start off slow, start with one blog on its own. Get it ranked within two to three months. It’s quite easy. Start with small keyword search term and go for that get that ranked. Take everything you can from that and ramp it up from there. So long term instead of having one blog you’ll have maybe five to 10 blogs all on the go at the same time all trying to get ranked on the search terms on Google.

And what that does is it just speeds up the process. And you’re more likely to find that gem of a site that’s going to make you $20 to $200 a day. You find a site like that and you’re kind of sorted for life.

You can reinvest that money into more domains and eventually you can go into outsourcing entire blog setups. You can have one person doing all the writing for you, set up all the blogs and then you can give the content written to the blog design you can put it all together for you. Then you basically just go in at the end and add your affiliate links.

This can all be done very cheaply in the Phillipines. Bestjobs.ph if you go there you can find loads of highly qualified outsources in the Philippines and you can hire someone for $75 a month and they’ll work part time for you. If you want someone full time you can get someone for $150 a month. Which is peanuts. You’ve got someone working for you full time creating all these blogs for you and one site can be paying their wage every month.

David: So as your business is growing, outsourcing is definitely the way forward?

Craig: Definitely. It takes all the stress away and gives you all the freedom to pursue and do what you want and enjoy. You don’t want to be sat at your computer back linking all day. You can pay someone to do that for you.

David: I know back linking is one of my least favourite activities. Can you share with us your least favourite thing about SEO as well?

Craig: Is probably it can be quite tedious and repetitive at times. When you start off if you got no budget at all you’ll be doing all the back-linking and stuff yourself. For your very first blog you want to do all the steps yourself. Then when it comes to outsourcing you can actually train an outsource staff yourself.

That’s like going in blind if you try to outsource to somebody and you don’t know how to do it yourself, the reality is that they’re probably not going to do their job correctly. I’d say back-linking is the least favourite thing that I like doing. I’m not really keen on writing articles and stuff like that. But again when you first start off, I added my own. So I outsource it now because it’s just not worth my time and I don’t really enjoy it that much.

David: That’s interesting because blogging is all about the content and I suppose then the getting that content ranked as well. But you’re having some great success without really liking the writing process or indeed the back linking process as well. Anyone who’s not keen on any of those things should still be quite optimistic about becoming successful online.

Craig: You can get articles written for anything $5 an article upwards and that is what you want to be paying for content. Any lower than that and you probably don’t want to get poorly written content. But $5 is again, peanuts, when you’re making $20 to $200 a day on a site.

David: OK, let’s move onto something a bit more positive then. We’ve had your least favourite thing about SEO. What’s your favourite thing?

Craig: My favourite thing got to be the fact that once your ranked at the top of the search engines, you may do the “Google Dance” where you drop from page one to page two then you settle. You monitor it, you might need more back links. Something like might not be worthwhile buying an aged domain and doing the redirect if your ranked at number three anyway.

So the best thing is once your ranked there like set and forget. I mean you just have to monitor your rankings and make sure your on that first page. The money keeps coming in automatically daily. That’s the best thing. Set and forget.

David: OK. What would you say is the most challenging thing about SEO

Craig: It’s really quite easy once you know how. Back linking is always a pain. When I say back-linking it’s the quality of the back-link that counts so it’s finding the good PR and high ranking sites that you really want to get your back links from. The higher the ranks in search engines, themselves the higher the link juice what is given to the back links to your site. How Google looks at them ranks your sites.

But once you start earning some good money you can start outsourcing all those tasks. Staying focused and not being lazy. It’s too easy just to be lazy and not do anything that day but again outsourcing eliminates that. You can afford to be lazy because your outsourcing it to other people. They’re paid to work for you everyday. You can take days off if you want.

David: As an SEO expert, you’ve been able to cut through a lot of the misinformation that goes on about SEO techniques. But can you suggest to our listeners any pitfalls or mistakes they should avoid?

Craig: As long as you do your market and keyword research first and you look into it I think you should be fine. The thing people do is they find a niche they want to go in and they go out and buy a domain before actually doing anything which is really that should be the last step before you blog.

Do all your keyword research before. Get your niche ideas and then do your keyword research for those niches and which one you want to go for and then find your domain name. If you do it in that order you have no problem. That’s the pitfall I see people making the mistake. Buying the domain straight away instead of doing their research first.

David: Would you mind sharing the biggest mistake you or someone you know has made with SEO?

Craig: I’d say that’s what I used to do when I started I’d find a niche and buy a domain what I thought was good. And I was wrong. I should have done the keyword research first then took those keywords what I was going to target and then find a domain name that way.

So that’s the biggest mistake I would have done. You can waste a lot of time trying to get ranked for keywords that are never going to make you any money.

David: Moving on then, where do you see the future of SEO? Do you think its going to become more or less important?

Craig: I think its going to be more important. I don’t see how it can get less important. Where you’re paying to actually get on Yahoo or Google, those prices are going through the roof. A lot of people are dropping out of those because they can’t afford to do it. They eventually have to replace their income so will be looking more into SEO.

I don’t see there’s any negative things about doing SEO. The positive things are if you do it now, in a few years time when everybody starts catching up and doing it themselves, you already have your blogs and domains out there and they will already be a few years older. You will have aged domains ranking in the search engines. You’re going to be the competition that they will be trying to beat you.

David: Do you think it’s going to become easier or more difficult to succeed with SEO as time goes on?

Craig: That’s a hard question to answer really. I don’t really know what the likes of Google are thinking. If you start now you won’t regret it. The aged domains are the ones that will get ranked in the search engines. That’s the way to go. I can’t see it getting any more difficult because again Google always rank the aged domains higher than the brand new domains so back linking is always going to be a factor.

David: What would you recommend the first thing our listeners do after the call in terms of improving their own SEO?

Craig: I’d say get a copy of Market Samurai, even if you just use trial version and study your competition. Type in your keyword search term and it will tell you the sites ranked above you. If they have an aged domain, then you do a 301 redirect from an aged domain and get yourself above them.

If they have more back links to their sites than what you have, you do more back links. If they’re an authority site and they’ve got more content on the site, add more content to yours. Study your competition first of all and make sure you do your keyword research.

David: That’s some really simple but powerful advice on how you can improve your own rankings in the search engines. OK, we’re nearly done. Where can listeners find out a bit more about you?

Craig: I have a great product at the moment teaching the system I use which is called Google Supremacy. You can find that at GoogleSupremacy.com I also have a personal blog where I put some great articles and content on there people can look at for free and that’s at CraigDawber.com

David: You just mentioned your new product ‘Google Supremacy‘, can you give us a bit more information about that?

Craig: Google Supremacy is a system I use everyday. It’s the system I used to train my outsource stuff in the Philippines at the moment. It’s really about finding a good product and a good niche. It’s your own product or someone else’s.

It’s about putting a blog and getting it ranked on page one of Google. And then to make daily sales. The product consists of 132 page Google supremacy book where I explain the whole process in detail. You get my 45 day blueprint where you follow it step by step to be ranked high in the search engines and have traffic coming in from multiple directions and you’ll have all the traffic you ever need come to that site.

I give you five niche blog themes which you can use as they are or rebrand them.

I give you over 20 videos showing you how to build a proper blog from scratch and how to get it ranked and loads of other bonuses as well.

The system is for beginners and more advanced, more for people who can see the bigger picture and having a few sites doing well and earning you $20 plus a day on autopilot with a little bit of hard work. It truly can give you the lifestyle that most people are looking for.

David: Excellent. Ok Craig, thank you for the call today. We’ve covered loads and loads of good stuff. Can we just end with you perhaps giving our listeners the best advice you’ve received regarding SEO?

Craig: The best advice really, there are a lot of people on this call that are just bouncing from one opportunity to another. There’s a lot of systems out there that do work. What people do is to buy one system and use one then they get like a week or two into it and give up. Then start bouncing to another opportunity because it looks better.

A lot of people are just looking for a magic button that you press and pops millions of dollars. And we both know that’s not the case. So I just say if you follow my system and give it a chance it will work for you. Even if you don’t use my system I’d say stop bouncing from one to another and concentrate on one system.

And once you start making money with one system then you can experiment with other systems. And who knows where you’ll be in a few years time. It’s really up to you as the individual. One thing I’ve learned in life is that action takers are the ones that succeed.

David: Ok great advice. Thank you very much Craig.

Craig: Pleasure. Thank you very much.