I recommend all of you read these articles, and feel free to pass it along to your colleagues who might be thinking about hiring an SEO consultant or creating an in-house SEO team. Bowman carefully lays out the expectations of the phases of bringing an SEO specialist into a company, how the SEO might want to approach their new team members to set about change, how departments may receive the SEO positively or negatively, and how to prepare on all sides for what could be a battle of the egos. The article is spot-on, and gives advice for all teams that will be affected by the newcomer. A major question the article addresses is, Where in the world do I put in-house SEO?

I wasn’t able to find the fully published article in any one source, so if you’re able to get a copy of the Winter 07/08 issue, it’s a great read!

Do what you have to do to rank now.

An over-arching sentiment was that while in the process of “futureproofing” your SEO strategy, ensure that you are competing for rankings now in congruence with ramping up your long-term strategy. This may include strategies that aim for short-term boosts in rankings (i.e. buying links), but keep in mind that over time these strategies can stop working. Ensure you’re building quality content and thinking about the future long-term health of your site. While SEO theorists will argue that buying links are a no-no (to Google), idly sitting on your hands while your competitors are knowingly buying links and outranking you is not in the best interest of your site.

On a side note, Jason Calacanis interjected with the question, “So if everyone else isn’t paying their taxes, you’d tell your clients not to pay their taxes?” Wil quickly replied, “I don’t know about tax accounting, but what I do know is SEO.” On a side side note, if you’re unaware, there’s been an air of tension surrounding Calacanis’ keynote speech which you can read about here and here. I encourage you to read about it.

Link diversity: gain a wide range of link sources.

There are many types of links you can get to your site, but PR links (public relations) are better than link bait links. I associate this sentiment with Michael Martinez’s claim that there are different benefits that incoming links contribute — one is passing anchor text, another is passing traffic, among others. By diversifying your link building and gaining PR links, this will help spread buzz about your site, in turn gaining you even more links from other real sources. Hence, the more PR your site gets, the less dependent you are on the short-term boost of purchased links.

The keyword tag is useless.

Focus on creating a good title attribute and meta description which will give an accurate description to actual users who are performing searches. The keyword tag has less influence on search engines than they did in the past. Don’t spend an exorbitant amount of time on your tags. They should just make sense to the user.

If it’s easy to catch, it’s easy to penalize.

Do not use link brokers, link exchange networks, linking “services,” or any automated system for gaining incoming links. If Google can catch it, they have the opportunity to penalize those who are involved through algorithm updates.

Don’t chase Google.

Google does what is ultimately in the best interest of their shareholders. Keep an eye on what they are doing to stay on top of changes. Look at the categories in the Google co-op so that you can be prepared for these changes.

Build asset inventory.

Include videos in your site and optimize them accordingly. “How-to” videos do well in Google. I agree with this point because I still get traffic from keywords relating to “how to swing a golf club.” How ironic is that?

Consult your clients on what’s good now, while guiding them for the future.

Tell your clients how to use Google to their advantage, but keep in mind that changes can occur at any time and be prepared to change as soon as these changes happen.

Give away free content.

Free quality content is great link bait. Hoarding content will not help get it into the right hands. One goal is to get your content to reach as many people as possible. You’ll get some great links for it — for free!

Fear MSN, Yahoo!, and Ask.

While Google doesn’t publish its own unique content, and neither do the other search engines, it doesn’t mean they never will. Anything can change at any time and one possibility is that they may one day add their own published content. Wouldn’t that suck…

Recommended Tools:

• Touchgraph
• Google Alerts
• Copernic Tracker
• QuantCast

[Wil's presentation slides will be posted online soon.]

I believe I came across your blog after reading a comment you’d left on SERoundtable.com and was impressed with your knowledge and over 10 years of SEO experience. Are there any aspects of SEO you feel you still have yet to conquer?

There is always something new brewing. Social media marketing and optimization are topics I have not really immersed myself in. I don’t much believe in manufactured link baiting, either, but some fairly obscure people have claimed to be able to do it for their clients.

The content on your blog is typically very advanced knowledge. Are there other complimentary resources that you would recommend for beginner and intermediate SEOs to read alongside your blog?

I started SEO Theory because there were no other resources that consistently focused on intermediate and advanced theoretical topics. It’s challenging to develop new content in that mode every week.

For hard core research, you have to poke around and see who has the bug that month. There is usually nothing new or interesting out there.

For search engine industry news I follow Search Engine Land and Search Engine Journal. Search Engine Watch has actually done a pretty good job of digging up obscure theoretical posts. I would check their blog links from time to time and just scan the archives.

Since I no longer have time for SEO forums I rely almost completely on SE Roundtable to mention notable threads. You’ll see most of the latest algorithmic and technique-driven trends there.

The amount of quality content you provide every couple days is almost mind-boggling. What inspires you to write SEO Theory?

I enjoy the challenge of working against time and large groups of people who have spent more time in school than me.

What is in your opinion the currently most overused and non-beneficial SEO technique that you’d recommend people to stop using? Along these same lines, what would you say is the most popular SEO myth?

The most popular SEO myth today seems to be the idea that people can use rel=’nofollow’ to control the flow of PageRank through their sites. I wouldn’t trust Matt Cutts to do it properly for himself, let alone teach other people how to do it without risking total search disaster.

The most overused and non-beneficial technique, in my opinion, has to be link building. There is a difference between building a network of references for a blog — which you have done very well — and simply grabbing as many links as you can for a blase business site. If the links bring traffic, crawlers, or credibility then they are worthwhile. If they just increase the number of links reported by Yahoo!, they’re pretty much worthless.

In internet marketing, we learn by doing. Is there one SEO technique that you recall implementing that was a huge mistake? Would you like to share what you learned from that experience?

There have been some disappointments and some very unexpected surprises. Perhaps my biggest mistake was not paying attention to the Google Toolbar this year after Google began ramping up its rhetoric against paid links. I didn’t see the Toolbar PR reductions coming — not with a direct connection to the paid links. If anyone had asked me to predict whether Google would do that, I’d have said, “Why would they be so stupid as to point out which sites no longer pass value?

Well, live and learn. I’m watching Toolbar PR shifts a little more closely. There may now finally be some value in the green fairy dust.

The battle between search engines and SEOs began early on. Is it a necessary relationship that benefits the site owners as well as Google? [read: would Google be where they're at without SEOs?]

Site owners benefit more from good SEO than from search itself because the fallacy of search is that it cannot bring relevant traffic to every site. Good Web marketing ensures that search optimization is only one strategy out of many.

I think the question would work better, however, if we asked whether the search engines are doing an acceptable job. I don’t think so. Search engines need responsible optimization as much as site owners do.

Do you foresee Google making any drastic algorithmic changes soon, seeing as how they can’t possibly find everyone that buys and sells links? Or for any other reason…

They make little algorithmic changes every month, but they tend to introduce substantial changes 2 or 3 times a year. On the basis of past experience, I would say we can look for more changes around March or April but that’s just based on past performance.

I seriously doubt Google can have much of an impact on the buying and selling of links. The networks have simply moved underground, and those networks that have died will be replaced by new stealth networks. The real problem is that Google has now made things harder for itself (managing the PageRank mechanism) than before.

Do you feel then that Google might be fighting a battle they cannot win? [read: can they still dig themselves out of this hole?]

Google used to do a pretty job by focusing on non-link related factors for their rankings. Over the past year to year-and-a-half they seem to have decided it’s time to make links a significant factor. The corresponding decline in quality of their search results should have been a wake-up call for them.

Even if they suppress the paid link economy completely, however, that won’t significantly affect the quality of their search results. So to me it’s no so much that Google is fighting a battle it cannot win as it is fighting a battle it cannot afford to take on at all.

Let’s turn our attention now to the users — how do you feel Google is doing with providing a quality user experience in search? Do you think for the user’s sake they’ve been moving in the right direction? [read: how are they doing combatting spammers?]

Spammers are not Google’s problem. Google’s bad assumptions about quality and relevance are Google’s problem. I find myself using other search tools more and more because of Google’s failures than because of professional need. That is the real disappointment I have with Google’s user experience. I LIKE the Google interface. I just hate the fact that Google won’t show the most relevant results first.

Thank you for taking the time to provide some very valuable SEO insight with myself and my readers. Do you have any parting thoughts you would like to share?

I think if people spend less time trying to think like SEOs and more time making connections with other Webmasters they’ll find that a lot of their search optimization needs are either met or made less compelling.

In what I take to be a rare pro-Google post, Mike Grehan makes a profoundly concise statement about what people should really be focusing on:

Forget about search engines for the moment. The natural algorithm of the Web is all about linking. That’s why Tim Berners-Lee invented it. So if you build a Web site you don’t think stands a chance of attracting some natural linkage data around it, it’s probably a waste of time to even open your FTP client.

There is a lot of solid SEO Theory behind Grehan’s thinking. He is one of my favorite SEO writers. He gets the difference between linking-because-some-SEO-says-we-should-link and linking to content you feel should be part of the Web. That doesn’t have to constitute an endorsement. You’re just saying, “Hey, look at this. It’s interesting.”

SEO Theory is really all about that: being interesting to someone.

Feel free to leave comments and/or questions, or visit the SEO Theory and Analysis blog here. [Download SEO Theory white papers and FREE Quick Reference ebook here.]

Recommended SEO Theory Blog reads:

• SEO Theory for Beginners
• SEO Checklist
• On-Page Optimization SEO Checklist
• What Every SEO Should Know About Link Analysis [and related articles]
• Two-Minute SEO
• How to Construct a Valid SEO Test