Pierre Zarokian

Company: Submit Express

Submit Express is celebrating its 10-year anniversary.
Being around for 10 years and evolving with the times has enabled us to become experts in the industry.

Pierre Zarokian is an Armenian born in Iran, and came to the USA as an immigrant in 1987. After studying computer science at Cal State Northridge, he became an IT support technician. With a background in computer science and web development, it was natural for him to get involved in SEO. In the mid-90s, while developing a search engine for a yellow page company, Pierre became interested in how search engines determined their rankings, and eventually decided to start a search engine submission and optimization company. He founded Submit Express in 1998, right around when Google was launched. IThe company started in his parents’ garage with virtually no investment, but was able to make the company succeed within a year. Pierre then rented an office and started growing the company. Today, Submit Express employs over 30 people. He is still the president and involved with day-to-day operations and management.

What are your main services?
Submit Express started out as primarily a search engine submission company, but today, 95% of our business is SEO services. These include link building, social media networking and optimization, blog creation, article writing, submissions, and more. In addition, we offer pay-per-click management, press release services, and opt-in email advertising. We recently added foreign  language SEO services, including Spanish, French and Russian SEO. We also offer reputation management services.

What makes your firm different than other companies?
Submit Express is celebrating its 10-year anniversary. Being around for 10 years and evolving with the times has enabled us to become experts in the industry. Submit Express is always adapting to new technology and enhancing our services in dynamically growing areas such as social media. We have an experienced and professional copywriting staff. We also have a team of dedicated link builders with access to a large database of reciprocal link partners and other sites and directories where they can quickly acquire quality links.

We currently have over 600 SEO clients. Having a large number of clients helps us detect algorithm changes in the search engines very quickly. We are able to pinpoint and reverse engineer the algorithm changes by analyzing ranking report data collected from all of our clients and comparing common factors.

Tell us about your firm’s success story.
One of the biggest success stories has been our own rankings in the major search engines. For years, Submit Express has enjoyed number 1 and top 10 rankings for top keywords such as “search engine optimization,” “search engine placement,” and “search engine submission.” These have resulted in an enormous number of visitors to our website and have made Submit Express a household name in the SEO industry.

Submit Express was named as one of the fastest-growing companies on the Inc. 5000 list in 2007 and 2008. We have also made the 2008 Deloitte Technology Fast 500 list as one of the fastest-growing technology companies in the US.

According to you, what are the most important questions a potential customer should ask before choosing a vendor like you?
Clients should compare vendors and ask as many questions as possible. They should make sure that the vendor does not use any black hat techniques. This can be done by asking for some client references and analyzing the website content and back links. The company’s own website SEO should be analyzed as well. Check if the vendor itself ranks for any industry terms in the top 10 of Google and other major engines. If you are a beginner and don’t know how to analyze SEO and back links, then do some background checks on the company via the search engines. Ask in popular SEO and webmaster forums if anyone has anything good or bad to say about the companies you are considering.

Make sure the company you are considering employs staff who are knowledgeable in back-end applications and programs that were used to build your own website, whether it is simple HTML, PHP, ASP, Cold Fusion, Flash, Yahoo Store or others.
Make sure the company will do all aspects of SEO, including professional copywriting, content/title/meta tags optimization, creation of site maps, link building, internal link structure optimization, submission to major free and paid directories, social media networking, and anything else that is important to you. The more services a company offers the better.

Lastly, ask if the company offers any kind of guarantee. I know that Google says to beware of companies offering guaranteed rankings. However, I say beware of companies not offering guarantees. All good SEO companies should know what they can achieve; they should give you some kind of expectation or guarantee, such as X number of top 10s in Google, MSN, and Yahoo within 6 months or 1 year.

What are some of the myths of SEO?
Any SEO company offering guarantees is a scam! As I just mentioned, any good SEO company should know what they are capable of achieving and offer you some kind of guarantee.

Bulk submission services are bad and could cause you to lose rankings!
We get bashed a lot for offering submission service to thousands of search engines. However, we have not seen anyone lose rankings due to this service. It is true that bulk submission service may have lost much of its effectiveness. However, it is not true that it will result in lost rankings. The reason for this is that Google and other major search engines simply don’t index most directories and/or pages that contain hundreds of links. Google has even removed hundreds of directories from their index.

Although submission is a very small part of our revenue, we have decided to keep the service and include free ranking
advice with all orders, which results in better overall rankings for our customers.

How do you develop your skills in this continuously changing environment?
Most of our skills are developed through actual experiences while optimizing our clients’ websites. Our key employees always read the latest SEO-related newsletters, blogs, and forums, such as Planet Ocean, SE Roundtable, WebPro News, SitePro News, Webmaster World, Search Engine Watch, and others. We also attend several trade shows annually, including SES, SMX, and PubCon.

What do you see as the future of the industry? What will be the challenges?
Things will just get tougher and tougher for SEO. In the future, because of the personalized search results that are already being provided by some search engines, not everyone is going to see the same results in the SERPs. For example, if I type “apple” in a search engine, I may see results about Macs, but if you type “apple,” you may see results about fruits. Personalization is the future, and that will require a different type of approach toward SEO.

Personal data collection is also becoming a big problem. With all kinds of privacy laws being passed, search engines are cracking down on sites that do things like offer visitors the chance to “Win a free iPhone” in order to collect their personal data and sell it to marketing companies. In the near future, these types of sites are going to rethink their approach and come up with unique new ways of achieving their goals.

Where do you see your firm in the next 5 years? What about you personally?
I see our company just growing and growing. We may get acquired or merge with a similar company or we may even acquire some smaller companies ourselves.

As far as services, I think that 5 years from now, SEO is definitely not going to be the same. SEO will still be there, but it will entail much different work than is being done today. SEO companies like ours must adapt to new offerings.

I can’t say where I will be in 5 years. I love running a company and may still be here running Submit Express in 5 years. However, I may also retire in a few years and take some time off to concentrate on my other passion, which is producing electronic music in my home studio. I am an entrepreneur by heart, and even if I retire from SEO, I see myself starting other companies, becoming a private investor in new companies, or going into real estate investments.