[Jody]: Michel, can you start out by telling us a little more about yourself and how you got started in SEO and some of your motivations for creating SEO Samba?

[Michel Leconte]: I started to really work in SEO in 2001. At the time, I was working full time at an IT firm hit pretty hard by the dot-com bubble burst. SEO appeared as an interesting investment for us and our clients. In the meantime, my partner David Culot was helping travel and car search engine aggregators build their applications. As we grew in sophistication, so did our client size and over time I realized that the process was unduly painful, lengthy, and prone to errors. SEO is sold by professionals as a process that requires an ongoing effort from web site owners. However, there’s no life cycle management built into what SEO experts deliver. As a result, the execution is a hit-and-miss game that generates an awful lot of delays, frustration, and, ultimately, lost revenues for both client and experts. Furthermore, SEO is time consuming to research and test for experts, costly to execute by hand for end-users, and takes very little advantage from the scale of the SEO agency or its customer business size.

[Jody]: Is this what motivated you to start SEO Samba?

[Michel Leconte]: Pretty much, yes. After a stint as CEO for a search engine specializing in business data, I was ready to focus on developing SEO Samba. With an increasing number of applications built in the cloud, development of social networks, progressive deployment of custom and universal search, and a maturing SEO services marketplace, we thought the industry was ripe for a change towards higher value-added services, and that "smart SEOs," as Matt Cutts call them, would crave additional bandwidth to focus on strategy and business development, both for them and their clients. We invented the first organic search management platform to facilitate systemic execution of best practices, adoption of "free-to-play" marketing channels, and enable professionals to scale their practice through software instead of payroll.

[Jody]: Due to the ever-changing nature of the industry, managing SEO best practice implementation can be difficult. Explain how SEO Samba can help streamline this process?

[Michel Leconte]: SEO Samba is built with the ever-evolving SEO landscape in mind. SEO Samba maximizes web site performance with search engines and other "free-to-play" digital marketing channels. It enables SEM firms and SEO experts to manage an unlimited number of organic search clients, projects and web sites from a single interface, and change SEO best practices across them all with a single click. Web marketers and professionals deploy and enforce best practices from a single point rather than manually coding these evolving best practices into each of these sites while hoping that end-users will not gradually undo these practices. SEO Samba facilitates execution and maintains the integrity of best practices while letting expert users adapt their best practices to changes in algorithms.

[Jody]: Very cool. The Internet is a quick way to find information. It’s also a quick way to communicate information. As a result, there is a ton of information that online marketers, site owners and Webmasters must sift through. How does SEO Samba find the "best of the best" in terms of best practices for SEO?

[Michel Leconte]: SEO Samba provides a set of default best practices. However, the platform is flexible enough to allow experts to pick, fine-tune and add their own best practices prior to making them available to a select pool of their clients as they see fit. Web marketers and SEO experts are able to try different things and adapt their strategies as required. SEO Samba focuses on the needs of small and medium business, web marketers and giving additional ammunition to our SEO firm partners. We see organic search as a field increasingly going beyond text results.

[Jody]: We agree entirely.

[Michel Leconte]: Social applications, news, blogs, video are all "free-to-play" marketing channels but are costly to research, select, manage and integrate with other marketing endeavors. We address the manpower challenge faced by SMB by providing a high level of integration and minimizing web marketers’ content creation efforts. For example, our first universal search module (provided free of charge) is a news module that provides a Google News-ready structure, news articles that are search optimized according to your chosen best practices, search friendly scrollers, automated RSS feeds creation, integrated with email newsletter platforms such as Constant Contact, Vertical Response etc. You can publish news across all your sites with a single click then aggregate news items across web sites to create unique newsletters and market to a cross segment of your email list and, finally, save these newsletters with one click to any of your web sites. Each of our upcoming modules will provide the same level of details to ensure web site visibility, while expanding the least time possible from users, content writers, marketers and SEO experts’ perspectives.

[Jody]: SEO Samba will be at SMX West in Santa Clara (booth #321) and you will be discussing SEO automation’s challenges and progress. Can you give us some insight into what some of these challenges are and how SEO Samba works to overcome these challenges?

[Michel Leconte]: It’s quite easy to imagine how SEO Automation resolves issues endemic to providing services in general, such as a hit and miss execution processes through systemic implementation and the lack of lifecycle management of optimized web sites through appropriate historical data management such as automated 301 redirections and such. However, it is important to keep a set of simple-to-follow rules when designing a platform that touches on so many elements and factors. The number one engineering rule we set for ourselves was to design a platform that would leave zero footprints on published web sites. A seamlessly simple rule such as this one, however, brings a number of technological challenges every day to our team as we develop and integrate new components into SEO Samba.

From a practical standpoint, this means that web sites produced with SEO Samba are fully independent from our platform once uploaded to their publishing web servers, and that web pages do not include SEO Samba’s specific code. In other words, web sites published with SEO Samba are W3C html compliant. This rule was set for its far reaching impact and benefits, including retaining full confidentiality for our SEM firm partners using SEO Samba on a white label basis, maximizing end-user web sites’ availability and performances by not placing calls back to our servers, and optimizing hosting options for geo-location, response time, and SEO cross-linking value.

[Jody]: Great stuff! You’ll also be at SES London in mid-February participating in an Organic Listings Forum http://www.searchenginestrategies.com/london/agenda-day2.html. Can you talk a little more about this and what attendees can expect to learn from this session?

[Michel Leconte]: This session is free form, attendees will bring up their challenges, and between Jill, Brett, Chris, and I we’ll try to bring answers on the spot, point resources, and generalize best practices from our analysis of these specific cases. So, if after a couple days of SES conferences in London, you still have unanswered questions, and need down to earth, practical advices about your web strategy and properties, this is a session you don’t want to miss out.

[Jody]: Yeah those open forum sessions are usually pretty good. It’s always great to see that our peers are on the same page.

[Jody]: Why do you think that online marketers tend to focus budget on PPC rather than SEO? With the current state of the economy, do you think this will change? Will SEO and Organic Search finally get the recognition it deserves?

[Michel Leconte]: I recall a neuroscience study (my wife’s trade) stating that activities that produce instant rewards excite a very specific part of the brain, which in turn sends endorphins throughout your body. So it is not totally surprising that PPC has been such a hit. On the other hand, SEO is a longer-term endeavor based on contradictory theories and information that is confusing to most, rather painful and lengthy to execute, does not scale well, and might or might not meet expectations. Hmmm…do you think we have a perception problem here? Our reptilian brains do not cope well with complexity. This reptilian part of our brains need clear choices—and it makes decisions at the end of the day. For SEO to claim a bigger part of the pie, I think many professionals position SEO as a virtuous foundation for all marketing initiatives, both downstream and sideways, with the highest return on investment of the SEM spectrum. This is all good and well, but for this message to be credible, we need to bring a higher level of SEO performance predictability.

[Jody]: Agreed, we feel that things such as Universal and Blended Search require a higher level of SEO.

[Michel Leconte]: When consulting with larger or growing organizations, scale becomes a consideration. Unfortunately, scale often turns up being a con rather than a pro. Once all is said and done, a couple of challenges, at least, remain on the agency side: how to differentiate your SEO offering from the competition, and how to take advantage of your own pool of business and scale your practice? It is very much part of SEO Samba’s core value proposition to provide answers to all of those questions. The current economic environment will trigger various behaviors. Sophisticated marketers might move budgets away from PPC to SEO if they are convinced that conditions are met for a breakthrough of their web properties in the SERP, while first time search marketers in the small business segment might be reassured by the predictability and immediate return offered by PPC. At SEO Samba, we also see an opportunity in that segment for our SEO expert partners, especially at the local search engine optimization level. We are seeing a new wave of first-time marketers leapfrogging more experienced ones and adopting the technology platform as a way to perform quickly without having to go through the trials and errors of others, while establishing a base from which they can scale their online operations.

[Jody]: Many suggest that SEO is dead? Do you agree or is SEO just finding its legs?

[Michel Leconte]: At this juncture, I believe that SEO is a by-product of “freedom of enterprise” expression. The day it dies, it will be an indicator that we loose our freedom to engage in a free-to-enterprise system. In effect, SEO will die the day there’s only paid-for-placement. However, that business model, like Goto.com found out in its time, is not sustainable in an open network. Only controlled Internet access could maintain an artificial order, de facto restraining listing in such ways. Microsoft and AOL could not impose their vision of the world back in the early days, and no one can seriously contemplate proposing this model to consumers again at this stage and expect them to accept it willingly. Now, do not get me wrong here. I’m not saying that if SEO exists as an industry in your country, then you can establish the fact that you live in a democratic state.
 
China with its developing SEO industry is an illustration of this. I’m just saying that if SEO exists and then dies off, I’d be worried. I’d be worried because I can imagine a landscape where search engine queries would be made by other forms of artificial intelligence based on an expressed or implied need from a human. And I still see a need for SEO on the seller side. Closer to home, I can see a decrease in search engines crawling web sites to retrieve content and use RSS coupled with an updated and harden version of Ping to display updates in real time while weighing interest from social venues metrics. But even then, this trade, albeit with a different name, would survive.
 
As long as free-to-use, relatively efficient large distribution channels are available, sellers will compete to position a product or a service in front of buyers. Even channel fragmentation from personalization technologies will not prevent SEO, or whatever acronym its successor will bear, from existing. It will merely create sub-specializations by consumer profiles…following traditional marketing agency segmentation models (GenX, babyboomers specialists..etc..) only in a more refined way.
 
SEO gives the impression that it’s perpetually looking for its bearings, and in a reactive mode. This is to be expected from a trade that is living off understanding changes occurring in application’s algorithm controlled by other entities. Indeed, the relationship is not one of equals. For SEO to perform, one needs to understand the interest of search engines. On that count, I’m observing that their concern for SEO stems from a quality assurance rather than a business development angle. The mere fact that our designated interlocutor at the largest search engine is the head of the spam team (even if he’s a great evangelist) is telling in that sense. Thanks to our previous experiences working at search engine companies, SEO Samba has integrated this dimension to make websites compliant with published guidelines at the outset. I think there’s also an opportunity for less of a schizophrenic relationship between search engines and SEO, but that’s a different discussion altogether.
 
[Jody]: Michel it was a pleasure. Enjoy your time at SMX West. We’ll catch up with you at SES NY next month.


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