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.