I decided to make some relaxed questions to SEOs who are huge inspiration for me and teach me a lot of things with their blogs and tweets. I hope this project will evolve in something cool for all you, and it’s gonna be a series called “Meet your SEO“. The questions are always the same (with some differences), so it’s more simple to compare the answers. Hope you enjoy this, and if not , I am so sorry for you 😀

Today I have the pleasure to talk with Gaz Copeland . Gaz is an UK SEO, owner and creator of the SEO and marketing blog Stoked SEO. Enjoy!

When did you enter the SEO world, and why ?

I started to take an interest in SEO shortly after setting up my wife with an Ecommerce store about 5 years ago. We set it up without really knowing too much about what we were doing and after a few months with limited sales I started to look into what we needed to do…..I discovered there was such a thing as SEO. I was a programmer at the time and spent all my coding time listening to podcast after podcast on SEO, PPC and general internet marketing. I must have listened to 100’s of hours over a 6 month period and didn’t get bored.

A great tip about onpage optimization?

It’s all about the title tag. So many sites miss this one but a simple tweek of the title can massively improve rankings.

The most stupid thing people believe about onpage optimization?

I’m not sure they believe it but I get emails daily from people explaining how by linking to their site it will actually improve my sites ranking.

A great tip on how you build links?

I think that it must be my Ecommerce background but I’m a big fan of running competitions and giveaways in order to attract links and traffic. I wrote a post about using blogs to run giveaways using some real data from one of my previous efforts, it’s pretty obvious this tactic really works!

Another thing I’m enjoying at the moment is a little bit of “Ego Bait”, although I don’t particularly like that phrase as it sounds false and manipulative. The one tip I would give for anybody doing “Ego Bait” is to be sincere. It’ll work a whole lot better if you are.

The most stupid thing you heard about linkbuilding?

That people will link to you just because you ask them to, people try this all the time and wonder why it doesn’t work.

If you have to explain what you do at a 10 year-old kid , what are you gonna say?

10 Year old kids are pretty smart these days, they probably know more about SEO than I do.

What do you drink when seoing?

I’m English so it’s Tea….obviously.

What do you think about SEO community?

The SEO community is filled with absolutely amazing people to whom I will forever be indebted. In my latest blog post I said “One of the things I love most about the SEO community is the people, some of the friendliest, intelligent and most inspirational folks I have come across are working in this industry.” that sums it up for me. If the community wasn’t so open, welcoming and above all helpful I would never have gotten into SEO.

Make yourself a question and give an answer.

Why are you so freaking awesome? (note from Alessio: “me? well, thanks Gaz :D)

Great question, but I simply don’t know.

Who is your biggest SEO influence?

That is an impossible question as there’s not a single person who has influenced me the most. I am a student of the whole community and there are so many influential people within it I couldn’t name just one.

If you weren’t an SEO, what would you like to do ?

Superhero.