Interview with Karamveer Singh (AKA Jim Karter)
I recently did an interview with Karamveer Singh (AKA JimKarter). Below is an edited version of the interview, if anyone is interested in reading the complete email please send me an email. Interview is spaced by questions.
Karamveer Singh: hi John
Seoandstuff: hey, ready for the interview?
Karamveer Singh: yup.
Seoandstuff: btw i've never done one of these before
Karamveer Singh: its a first for me too..
Seoandstuff: So tell me a little bit about your background
Karamveer Singh: Ok. My name is Karamveer Singh from India.
I am graduated from the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Bombay. I worked for VERITAs Software for 3 years and then started my web solutions company (2 years back)
Seoandstuff: whats the name of your current company?
Karamveer Singh: Adroit Web Solutions.
Seoandstuff: ok, so what does Adoit Web Solutions mainly do?
Karamveer Singh: Its mainly into 3 things..
1. web design
2. SEO and web marketing and..
3. Consultancy.
Seoandstuff: ok great it seems you've made a success out of the epitrope directory, can you tell me about your experience creating this directory?
Karamveer Singh: Epitrope of one of the 5 directories I own and it is doing good. But google (in recent update) didn't do well with the site. Epitrope is a one old domain which I bought it from somebody at DP and created my directory on it to bypass the sandbox. I modified the epitrope's phplinks directory's script to add a details page to each listing where user can add other links and content of the site. Then I started the link building process.
Seoandstuff: so why did you choose Epitrope over the other domains available as you said it was older, what else led you to choose this one
Karamveer Singh: I bought it as it had some existing backlinks which had it made it a PR4. So I bought it and added a lot of backlinks. And, it was already out of the sandbox.
Seoandstuff: ok that leads us to our next question, what would you say are the best ways to build links?
Karamveer Singh: Here are the steps I follow:
1. Create good content.
2. Submit to directories (free as well as paid)
3. Write some articles related to this content and submit to articles directories
4. Exchange prime-location links with with same category but non-competetive site
5. then go for DP's "Link Sales" forum.
Seoandstuff: yeah ive seen you there quite often!
Karamveer Singh: yup.
Seoandstuff: what goes into your decision making when you purchase a link?
Karamveer Singh: There are many things..but here are my top priorities...
1. Age of site..
2. Page rank (backed by the number of backlinks by google)
3. and the relevency of the site with mine.
Karamveer Singh: I never buy links from new sites, whatever is the PR.
Seoandstuff: what about a old pr 7 in a totally unrelated category?
Karamveer Singh: If PR is not backed by number of backlinks (which very often happens at DP), then I don't buy links.
• High PR but old => good for directory.
• Low PR but related => Good for my content sites
Seoandstuff: what seo tools do you generally use?
Karamveer Singh: I use following tools:
• http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion/ ( for keyword checking)
• https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal (again for keyword checking)
• http://www.seologs.com/pr-check/pagerank.html (checking for fake page rank while buying sites)
• http://livepr.raketforskning.com/ (checking pagerank on all datacenters)
• http://www.digitalpoint.com/tools/keywords/ (for checking ranking of all my sites)
• and the last but not the least http://www.google.com
Seoandstuff: ok then, what do you think about the various search engines and where they're going.
Karamveer Singh: Different search engines do different things .. and take different things into consideration.. Google is definitely a winner but it gives a lot of weight to things which are creating problems with SEO industry.. Yahoo is a good guy.. they do things simply.. and MSN seems to like fresh content on the sites a lot. But lately google seems to have a lot of problems with spam and so called 'bad data push'. But still, faith once built is not easy to vanish soon..
Seoandstuff: Do you see msn taking the place of yahoo in the future?
Karamveer Singh: Not atleast for next 5 years. But who knows. This is what we used to think about altavista once upon a time.
Seoandstuff: i used to love altavista back in the day
Karamveer Singh: everybody used to love it once upon a time, but then google came.. who knows who will be next.. maybe MSN may be not..
Seoandstuff: what kind of hat do u wear?
Karamveer Singh: Always White.. SEs don't like anything in black.
Seoandstuff: how fast do you build back links?
Karamveer Singh: Not more than 20 links a week if Pr is less than 5 and approx 10 otherwise.
Seoandstuff: you mean if a PR is 5 then you will only grab 10 a week?
Karamveer Singh: yes.
Seoandstuff: what if your website is older than say 5 years or so
Karamveer Singh: Then I don't think on how many to get and how fast.. i grab them wherever I can find good, relevant links.. but i avoid sitewide if unless they're for a directory
Seoandstuff: so what are some mistakes you have done or seen with regards to SEO?
Karamveer Singh:
1. Not taking proper backup regularly. It has costed me more than $12,000 which managed.com went out of business overnight and switched all their servers without giving any time to webmaster to take backup.
2. Using my yahoo email account + yahoo as a registrar. I had more than 100 domains with yahoo (as a registrar). My admin contact on that domains were also the yahoo email. One sudden day, I lost my yahoo email account. There was no way for me to get those domains back. Yahoo customer service sucks.
3. Sites with the same keywords on all pages (this is a big newby mistake) never work.
Seoandstuff: yep, 3 biggies as far as SEO are H1, title, and domain, I’m talking about the actual domain name (not regarding age and pr)
Karamveer Singh: yes that’s the top 3.
Seoandstuff: how should keywords be placed in the domain, h1, and title tags
Karamveer Singh: the domain name should mostly have only one (main) keywords of yours.. H1 tag should also have only one keyword.. use more keywords in H2 and H3/H4 tags. I put around 150 keywords in my meta keywords. That’s what seems to work best for me.
Seoandstuff: ok, how else would you structure your title tags?
Karamveer Singh: I put my main keyword in just small descriptive title but don't fill it with a list of keywords.. Maybe just one or two keywords in some descriptive form.
Seoandstuff: sounds good and white hat
Karamveer Singh: Oh yes.. I said black is black and not good
Seoandstuff: the final question, what is your newest service or website?
Karamveer Singh: I have just bought a 8 years old domain at DP around a week back and I am working on creating a car site on it. It’s old age is showing its value. In one week, I have started getting 1000 visits and 2000 page views per day.
Seoandstuff: wow
Karamveer Singh: Besides that.. I continuously working on my 200+ older sites.. and also provid SEO services to DP members.
Seoandstuff: ok here is his new site Car Dealers - The list of all car dealers from various states of America for every car.
