SEO consultants can sometimes have wildly different opinions about how a site should be optimized. Who and what should you believe?

Everyone has an opinion. No one is 100% correct. Why?
1. Google won’t tell us their algorithm.
2. The variables that affect ranking are too numerous.
3. Many of the variables that affect ranking are well beyond your control and cannot be measured.
4. Everything changes.

If your SEO efforts don’t get the results you want, make sure you’ve got the fundamentals down (i.e., lots of great content and lots of great links on other sites to your site), look at how the competing sites are besting you (i.e., number of pages and number of links), remove obstacles for improvement, and keep an open mind to what may be the problem and what may be the solution.

Understanding the fluid nature of SEO is essential. Everyone is continually optimizing. Getting great rankings for your handful of prime terms can be a pushing match to the front of the line.

A technique that may not have worked in the past isn’t necessarily bad SEO. In fact, it may have not worked because of external factors. Suppose you add 20 new pages of great content to your site at the same time three competitors add 100 pages each to their sites. When you don’t get the results you expected, does that mean that adding great content to your site is bad SEO? No.

Marketing is a continual cycle of analyzing and adapting. This particularly applies to SEO. Persistence is golden.

I get to talk to a lot of smart people about how to improve their site’s search marketing performance. And I read a lot of industry news and opinions on SEO, from both the SEO agency side and from the client side. Plus, there is such excellent research on trends and patterns, from MarketingSherpa, eMarketer and the like. It’s great to be in a hot industry.

One of the trends that gets contentious is one where we see traditional advertising agencies somehow acquiring search marketing “expertise” overnight. I’ve always contended that search engine MARKETING is what SEO is all about–and that PPC is just search engine ADVERTISING. Agencies should be able to do a good job at PPC, because that’s a world they understand (although writing classified ads is not the creative activity that justifies their high fees). On developing a robust strategic information architecture, writing page content that cascades into the site, drawing the search engine spiders along and establishing authority on choice keyword phrases? Not exactly the forte of a hot creative shop.

On the other hand, (more…)