Q. Hello Vikas, thanks for being on the show. Can you tell us a little bit about your background, how you got into SEO? How you got into marketing?

Hey Dan, thanks for having me here, it is my pleasure. I am Vikas Singal, people call me Sam as well.

I come from a from India as you know.

I was born and brought up in a small town of India

Then I did my schooling all my schooling there in the small town.

In 2002, I moved to Jaipur for my higher education. I got admission in Mechanical Engineering.

In 2006, I got job in ITC Limited, Bangloer through campus placement. So I moved to Banglore to work there.

I was a mechanical engineer who worked for a food company. I got a good job with handsome salary, other perks such as chef, driver, etc.

It seemed great from the outsided but I was not entirely happy with my job as I wanted to do something in ever better.

In 2008, I quit my job and started a marketing venture in Mumbai, but the idea didn’t work.

In 2010, it collapsed and left me with nothing. I was broke I had no savings, no income and to be honest, I was nowhere

On top of that I was getting married. So it was pretty bad.

So in 2010 I came back to Jaipur again and I worked on a new skill digital marketing and started learning about SEO.

I started working on Some forums and started taking freelancing projects in 2010.

Then in around mid September of 2010 I made around $3000 a month for the first time through digital marketing.

And that’s how I realised that this is the right path for me. That’s how it started.

Q. Can you tell us what was pretty appealing to you about SEO/Digital Marketing?

SEO sounded very appealing but on top of that I need something to work on.

Because at time I was already nowhere and had no direction. And I chose SEO as the direction.

It looked promising as it was kind of easy to understand back then in 2010.

And the cherry on the cake was that I had started to get clients already when I started. So once you start making money, you get even more motivated to do it.

That’s how the SEO journey started for me. In 2013, we founded Samblogs.com.

Q. Tell us something about Samblogs.com, about your team, the type of projects you work on and what all you do.

As you can see the name of the website it is Sam Blogs, which means initially we started it as blog about SEO.

The goal was to share knowledge about SEO so people can know and understand how SEO works, how they can rank and how they can benefit from SEO.

All the information about techniques, strategies, what is going on the SEO world.

Then by the end of 2013, we changed to an official agency site so that users can talk about how they can rank their websites.

It was started in 2013 from scratch and by 2020 it became a brand. We were recently awarded as Fasted Growing Digital Marketing Company in Jaipur.

Q. Can you tell us how SEO and search have changed/evolved since 2010 when you started till now?

If I compare SEO to what it is today and what it was back in 2010, SEO has completely evolved and has changed a lot.

Back in 2010, if you had Title Tag, Meta Tag and Description in terms of On-Page and few keywords in the content.

And two tools if I remember correctly, SEO Nuke and Article Marketing Robot (AMR) and just build some links, you would get ranked.

It worked like that, in just 3-4 weeks it was easy to rank even high competitive keywords. It was all easy.

But over the years, Google has been constantly updated Algorithms, they can easily catch the duplicate content.

They can penalise for using links like PBNs and now it has become more about Search Intent and Users.

Earlier it was easy to manipulate Google into ranking you but now it’s not the same anymore.

It is now about pleasing the user experience not the search engine. So things have changed a lot.

Q. What in your mind are some of the core fundamentals of SEO?

I will brief you about 3 top fundamentals of SEO. They are not about what worked in 2010, or what is working in 2022 or what will work in 2050.

SEO is going to keep on changing but fundamentals are something that will always work now matter how much things change.

1. Know your audience:

If you are webmaster who wants to rank on Google then first step would be knowing your audience. 

You need to know what type of audience you want to target, they can be based on the gender, age group, area etc.

Once you know what audience you are targeting you can work on knowing your targeted keywords.

Getting a proper keyword research done and knowing what best keyword you want to target would be ideal

2. High quality content:

Once you know your keywords, you need to analyze which websites are ranking on top for those keywords.

And as you get the ideal of who your competitors are you need to work on knowing what strategies they are following in terms of content.

So that you can beat them in terms of quality. It is not about the quantity. While doing SEO focusing on quality over quantity should be important.

3. Get relevant links: 

While acquiring backlinks for your website, your goal should be getting as relevant links as you can get.

For example, if you have SEO website then you need to focus on getting links from websites that are related to SEO, not from someone selling groceries.

So these 3 fundamentals are going to remain constant.

Q. Can you tell how site speed and core web vitals influence SEO?

Almost everyone out there has smart phones and most of the people do their research on mobiles since it is quick and easy.

And this is why the desktop searches are declining. And this is why, Google introduced something called Mobile first indexing.

Which means Google uses mobile version of the for indexing and ranking.

So if you want to rank for your website on Mobile version, you need to optimize for it.

And this is why site speed is really important. If your website’s loading speed is slow and not matching according to Core Web Vitals, you will not rank on top.

So site speed and Core Web Vitals are crucial especially for Mobile Rankings.

Q. What are some of your best tips for Link Building?

It is a vast topic if you actually dig into it.

So first thing I would say is that it is more about quality of links of quantity of links.

When you are getting started with the Link Building phase for your website, you can ideally start with Diversified Links.

Diverisifed Links are links that come from base domains like Blogger, Weebly Tumblr, etc. where anyone can go, publish an article and build a link.

You don’t have to overuse them, you can just build a few links that can help you build a foundation for your website.

Once the foundation is built and you are looking to reach a more relevant audience and have a great quality of content, then you can go for Guest Posts.

You can reach out blog authors that are relevant to niche of your website and you can get Guest Posts done for the site. It should be more about relevancy. 

New techniques like getting links from interviews, podcasts etc, not everybody is doing them as they are new ways to acquiring links.

So reach out to people doing podcasts related to your website and get links from them by doing interviews.

These are a few great link building techniques that will work forever.

If you go for shady link building techniques like unsecured PBNs that are more of Black Hat Part of the SEO, they can give you quick results.

But they are very risky in terms of Google, and the results may not be stable.

Q. What are the top misconceptions you see about SEO?

SEO is a vast topic which is quite misunderstood by a lot of people. There are so many misconceptions, I will cover the basic ones.

1. SEO is a one-time thing.

So many webmasters come to me saying that they have a limited budget, so they want to rank on top in just 1 month and stay ranked forever with one campaign.

It doesn’t work like that. It is a continuous process. You need to stay regular with SEO.

If you are regular with SEO, you can get a huge ROI as compared to Facebooks Ads, Google Ads, or any other type of digital marketing.

Business owners should have a separate budget for SEO and keep in mind it is not a one-time thing.

2. Link quantity is everything

Some people think that if they 2K Backlinks and their competitor has 200 Backlinks, they are ahead of them, which is not true.

The fact is, it is more about quality of the link. If you have a high quality link coming from high authority website then it can be more effective as compared 100 links coming from average websites.

3. SEO is dead.

SEO is very much alive. The tactics and algorithms have changed but if you do it properly an stay continuous with it you can see results

It is more about high quality content and optimizing for the search intent.

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Q. What do you see as the future of SEO for businesses?

SEO is there to stay, and it will continue to change as change is the only constant thing,

So SEO will keep on changing but you will have to adapt to those changes.

According to me structural data will be more important..

Content marketing is the next name of SEO. You have high quality content and you market it through influencers, podcasts, etc to reach a new audience.

Core web vitals will hold more importance than they do now. A lot people are not optimizing for them as of now.

So these things will become more prominent in the next phase of SEO.

Q. What would be your top pieces of advice for business that are starting SEO today?

Take SEO as a long-term investment. You should set aside a budget for SEO, know your audience, analyse your keywords, create high quality content.

Optimize and market your content for the audience. You do not have to start with thousands of dollars. You can always start small and increase gradually.

And focus on deep linking, internal linking. Get a proper strategy through a good SEO Agency.and get relevant good quality links.