Question 6. Which provides the greatest benefit, on-page SEO or link building?

This is a tough question to answer because both can play a significant role in the success of a site trying to get to the top of the search results.

Here’s the basic rundown. A site that isn’t linked from any other site doesn’t stand a chance in the search results. It doesn’t matter how well-optimized it is, the links matter. At the same time, a site that is well-linked, but not optimized, CAN get good search engine rankings, but performance will always be sub-par.

Links are important to get on the map, but once there, the optimization plays a much more significant role in helping establishing good rankings. But, then there comes a point, again, where a site can only be so optimized, and the links are what is needed to tip the scales.

Got that? Links > SEO > Links!

7. How important is social media in relation to SEO?

Social media marketing is becoming increasingly important to the success of a website. Search engines are now considering many different social signals when determining relevance of a website, or even a particular web page.

The main issue isn’t whether or not to use social media, its how to leverage social media properly. Many businesses are using social media, trying to get that extra advantage. Unfortunately, they are not leveraging the social media channels in a way that maximizes their efforts into an effective marketing strategy.

When utilized properly, social media can be a strong link building strategy. A well-run social strategy can cover multiple aspects of the off-page link building efforts that search engines consider when determining the value of a website.

8. How does usability factor into SEO?

Search engines don’t have access to the usability data of every website. Though, as more people install Google Analytics or Adwords tracking code onto their websites, and surfers install the Google Toolbar into their browser, Google is able to get more and more of this information and can incorporate it into their ranking algorithms (though they claim they don’t and won’t.)

Short of using that data, search engines can see visitor bounce rates pretty well. Every visitor that clicks over to a site, then hits the browsers back button, sends a signal to the search engine that the visitor didn’t find what they were looking for.

Bounce rates can certainly be an important signal to the search engines. Making sure your visitors get the information they searched for, on the first, click is imperative.

Given access to enough data, I think the engines will look more closely at on-site usability issues. If few people make it to the conversion page, the engines may determine that your site isn’t a quality or trusted site, especially if it is compared to another site that does have better conversion rates.

9. My site is perfect and I don’t want to change anything? What can I do to get better rankings?

Well, in this case, the only thing you can do is to build links, employ social media, and build content. All of these are good strategies, but they also might not be enough. Sometimes you just have to come to the conclusion that your site isn’t as perfect as you want to believe it is.

If you want your site to be keyword optimized and have a significant chance of outpacing your competition in the search results, you have to be willing to make changes. I’m not talking about keyword stuffing or anything like that, but you do have to be willing to make tweaks and adjustments in order to ensure your content delivers for the searchers and provides enough signals to the engines for your targeted keywords.

10. I keep hearing about personalized results, local results, and blended results. How does this affect rankings?

In more ways than you probably realize. There is really no such thing as a #1 ranking anymore. Every search is essentially a unique search requiring a unique set of results. This means the search you perform on your computer will produce different results than the search your friend performs on their computer, even if they are in the same room as you.

Localization, personalization, and blended results have really changed the game. Not only do you have to optimize, but you have so many more options for getting your site in front of your search audience. If you’re a local company, then you’ll likely see traffic drop as your site no longer comes up in searches outside of your local area. But, you lose audience if you’re not coming up in their personalized results. This can be good if it weeds out those who are not part of your target audience, but can also help you if it puts you in front of a more targeted group.

Blended results give you more opportunities to get noticed. Video is the big “it” right now. If you create and optimize a video, it can get you additional exposure on the first page of search results. Same with optimized images, and even mentions, from those in your social circle.

Stay tuned for the last group of five answers…

I submitted 17 questions and a few weeks later they called to do the interview. Fortunately, for me, I didn’t have to worry about any trick questions, because I wrote them. Unfortunately, for me, what seemed like an obvious answer when I wrote the questions, somehow escaped me during the interview.

It didn’t help that the questions were not always asked verbatim. But I should have anticipated that. The interviewer has to own the question he’s asking, not just read them from a sheet of paper.

When I wrote the questions, I knew exactly how I would respond. If fact, I even worked in a few “follow up” questions. I’m quite clever that way! The interview questions were written like a good book; it had a beginning, middle, and an end.

But, nothing ever turns out quite as planned. When the questions were asked a bit differently than I had anticipated, it often led to different answers than I had planned. Which means my follow up questions were, well, somewhat out of place. More than once, I found myself having to go back to re-answer a previous question just so I could answer the follow-up question correctly.

Awkward.

And, all of this was totally my fault. As you can probably guess, I aced How Not to Do an Interview 101.

I figure since this was a learning opportunity for me, it could be one for you as well. I’m a big fan of learning from someone else’s mistakes. Here are a few quick pointers on giving an interview:

Know Your Topic

A no brainer, right? Well, not always. Sometimes when a good opportunity for an interview comes along, we jump at it, regardless of how well we might know the topic of focus. It’s all about the publicity!

I was recently asked to be interviewed on an internet marketing related topic of which I had a good amount of knowledge. However, I also knew that I didn’t have enough of a detailed knowledge to be able to give the interviewer competent answers if they dug too deeply.

At this point, there were two options before me: study up on the topic and hope I learn everything that could possibly be covered in the interview, or pass the interview off to a colleague who I knew would be able to answer the questions better than I could. If it’s a topic you should know in that much detail, then go with option 1. If not, then option 2 is good too.

Be Prepared

If you don’t know all the questions that will be asked, then the best you can do to be prepared is to make sure you’re in the right setting. Go to a location where you’re comfortable and distraction free.

Preparation also means having a general idea of the type of questions you’ll be answering. If you’re doing an interview, like I did, where you get to provide the questions, be sure you write the questions in a way that ensures you’ll fully understand the context. As I found out, this is critical to being able to answer the questions competently.

Looking back at many of my questions, I honestly don’t recall what I was thinking. Where was I going with this? What did I mean by that? It all seemed so clear at the time, but several weeks later, when being asked them by someone else… yeah, I got nothin’.

If possible, keep a list of those questions in front of you while you are answering them for the interviewer. This will help you stay on track for those follow-up questions!

Be confident

Confidence goes a long way. Whether the interview is via phone, email, or in person, if you don’t come in confident, you won’t come across strong. Your answers must be thoughtful, well considered, and should sound like you were ready for them (even if off the cuff).

And, if you don’t know the answer to a question, pretending is usually not the best option. No sense risking being found out that you really don’t know what you’re talking about. Be careful faking an answer, because there will be people out there reading or listening who’ll be screaming out, “That’s not right!!!!”

This is why one of my favorite ways to interview is over email. It really gives you a chance to think through your answers. And, if you don’t like the question, re-frame it so you can answer it the way you want.

I’m sure there are dozens of other tips out there that you can find with a good search. However, these three basics can go a long way. To wrap up, I wanted to provide a link to one of my favorite interviews I’ve ever done. It’s a few years old, but still kinda fun. Enjoy!

To be fair, some of the complaints about SEOs are deserved. Not for the entire SEO community, but for a small segment of “SEO providers.” Unfortunately, like sleezy lawyers, it only takes one to ruin the whole batch, perceptively.

I’m sure many readers have either heard about, or know someone who has had (or have themselves had) an extremely negative SEO experience. I talk to many business owners who are skeptical about SEO because their last SEO didn’t perform as expected, either over-promised and under-delivered, dropped out of contact, or just wasn’t doing the job as promised.

Sometimes this is an accurate reflection of the SEO and their work, sometimes it’s just about misplaced expectations. Either way, something, somewhere went wrong, and the client walked away unhappy, which is never good for the rest of us SEOs looking to make an honest living.

Don’t Let One Bad SEO Ruin the Whole Batch

Every industry, I believe, has it’s Enrons and BPs. Sometimes they are good companies that make very bad mistakes. Other times they are bad companies out to make a quick buck at the expense of others. But anybody who has been burned by an SEO and has decided not to go that route again must consider what else they would be giving up if they followed the same precedent.

Several years ago I had a problem with my truck. Wasn’t sure what it was, but I knew it wasn’t running right. I took it to my local mechanic and paid $80 for a diagnostic. The mechanic wasn’t able to identify the problem and suggested I take the truck to the dealer. $80 lost.

Now I could swear off auto mechanics forever because of that one bad experience (and, lets be real… many others), or I could find a new mechanic that is more reputable and trustworthy. I’ll go with Plan B.

I can’t count the number of times I’ve gotten burned by Best Buy. Several years ago, I bought a vacuum cleaner that crapped out on me in a few short months. I brought it back to the store, knowing the warranty had me covered.

Best Buy informed me that this model vacuum was no longer sold, so my only options were to accept a lower quality, less expensive vacuum for free, or pay an extra couple of hundred dollars for their next higher quality vacuum available. Neither of those options were suitable for me.

The warranty should have guaranteed us a vacuum of equal or greater value, not one of lesser value and quality. A full refund or in-store credit would have been sufficient, but Best Buy refused both options. I spent over an hour haggling with the sales clerk, then the assistant manager, until finally I got the store manager on the phone. Once I managered-up, I finally received an acceptable resolution (cheaper vacuum plus in-store credit for the difference).

I never should have had to haggle for an hour–or get the store manager on the phone–to get this resolution. However, this bad experience doesn’t scare me away from all electronic stores. I simply find a store that provides the customer service I expect, and, well, that tends to be Best Buy still.

We are all going to have bad experiences in life. And if you engage in SEO, there is a chance that you may have a bad experience with that as well. But, don’t let it burn you on SEO completely.

I know that the Best Buy sales clerk and assistant manager were bound by company policy. It wasn’t until I forced a call to the store manager that I got what I wanted, and only because the manager didn’t want to have to deal with such a petty situation. A bad experience with an SEO may have less to do with the skills and qualification of that SEO than it does with misplaced expectations or miscommunication in the sales and optimization processes.

Walk It Off

I can’t remember what movie it was, but I remember a teenage baseball player kept getting hit with the ball by the pitcher. The coach’s mantra was “walk it off”. The more times the kid got hit, the funnier the line “walk it off” became.

But, sometimes that’s what we have to do. You can’t quit baseball because you got hit by a rogue pitcher. Nor can you quite SEO because you had a bad experience. Sometimes you just gotta walk it off.

A while back, I signed a new client that had just ended a 12-month contract with another SEO firm. In our preliminary checks we found that a good majority of this client’s primary keywords were ranking poorly on virtually all the search engines.

I could easily paint this SEO firm as being inept; however, without knowing exact details of the contract, I’d just be talking out the side of my asshat. But, what matters is that the client wasn’t getting what they believed they were paying for. Regardless of contract, budget, and promises made, the client had very different expectations than what was provided.

Within just a couple of weeks, after rolling out our optimized version of their site, our client is seeing significant improvement in the rankings in Google and Bing.

Why was the other SEO firm not able to achieve, after 12 months, what we achieved in a shorter time? Truthfully, I don’t know. Fortunately for both us and the client, they didn’t take that bad experience and let it turn them off to SEO altogether. Now they are getting the results they were expecting a year ago.

Turn Your Bad Experience Into a Successful Experience

One of my favorite movie lines comes from Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. The bad guy grabs what he thinks is the Holy Grail, but he won’t know for sure until he drinks from it. After he does, you see him take a sudden turn for the worse (he died). The knight guarding the grail says to Indy, “He chose poorly.”

This is followed by Indy selecting and drinking from another grail, to which the knight tells him, “You chose… wisely.”

So, you chose poorly on your first SEO and got burned. Fortunately, that doesn’t lead to near-instant old age, your face melting off, or girls laughing at you because you showed up at school naked (am I the only one that has that dream?). You get a second chance to choose a new SEO. Choose wisely.

Research

Do your research before choosing your next SEO. Figure out what you want and what services will be required to get you there. Be willing to explore alternatives and varying options, but also have a basic handle on what it’s going to take to get you the success you want.

SEO plans and pricing differ widely, and it is often difficult to compare apples to apples. Do your best to understand what you’re getting for your money. If one SEO is expensive, find out why. If another is cheap, again, find out why. You often get what you pay for, and somebody charging more is often doing far more extensive work to ensure you’ll be successful.

Get Recommendations

Recommendations are great. Ask around to find out who others use and what their experience has been. If you find a company you are interested in, ask others if they have heard of them. Read lots of blogs. Choose someone that you know has the experience to get the job done.

Check References

Every SEO should be able to give you a list of references. Don’t settle for less than three, but five is a better number. Of course, every SEO will send you their very best references, those that will give the most glowing report, but you can’t discount this.

Talk to each reference to get more than just a thumbs up or down review. Find out if they are happy with the results they are getting. Ask what keywords are being optimized and verify rankings.

You should also ask about their specific SEO plan and if the reference feels as if they are getting their money’s worth. Find out how competitive their keywords and industry are. Get details about how the SEO works, how they communicate, and their overall work ethic. All of these things can weigh heavily in your decision.

Verify

Ask either the SEO or their references for stats and try to verify them as much as possible. If they spout numbers for success, ask who they can talk to get confirmation of these numbers.

Validate Communication

Don’t jump into a decision, but instead keep communicating with your SEO prospect. Call to ask questions about their experience, details about their proposal, expectations for results, expectations from you, how they work, etc. Look for anything that you think might cause a communication problem. If you see warning signs, make note of them. Ideally, you’ll be doing this with several companies at a time so you’ll get a good sense of who will be better to work with.

Being diligent isn’t foolproof, but it is a fool suppressant. By taking the time to look into each of these areas you’ll be far less likely to pick another lemon SEO. But, more than likely, you’ll actually pick a winner.

With your negative SEO experience behind you, you can now move forward in a better position to ensure a positive SEO experience and a chance to achieve the success you deserve.

You can also read their [link no longer available] mini-interview with Matt McGee as well.

Your business card shouldn’t be a substitute for your networking capabilities. You have to do the hard work first, become memorable. Identify the people you know can help you achieve your goals and those who you can help to achieve theirs. Don’t just hand out the card while sipping cocktails at a seminar or your card will be amongst the thousands thrown away every week.

After you’ve determined who may be a valuable ally, convince them that your resources can be beneficial. Give them the desire to have a professional relationship with you. Successful networking takes energy, but if accomplished they’ll want your business card and more importantly, they’ll hold on to it. It won’t be another bit of cardboard that gets tossed out.

This doesn’t mean that business cards are not an essential part of the networking process. They help to convey, in a simple form, that you are available to offer your services.

This copy from a business card did a pretty good job:

IGNITE YOUR ADS!
Writing That Launches Sales … Watch Your Profits Soar!
Joe Blow – Copywriter & Sales Consultant

The card is simple and straight forward. The copy doesn’t leap off the page, but it makes a simple pledge. That is exactly what you need to accomplish with your business card. If you try to do more with your card, you run the risk of failure.

Key tips to a good business card:

Remember, the main thing is to do the selling yourself. Use the card to reinforce your main message. Here are some unique business cards that are sure not to end up in the trash:

This business card was created for Melvin who is known as a “hacker”. It represents his line of work with the lockpick concept. Besides being just plain cool the various tools can also be removed from the card and used “for all your breaking & entering needs.”

And of course the big hit is Hugh MacLeod’s business cards with illustrations on the backs:

You can see more of his drawings at gapingvoid.com. Share your business card bests and worsts!

1) Aside from SEO education programs you provide, you’re known as a keyword research expert. What do you feel are the most important aspects of researching and selecting keywords for an optimization campaign?

You’re looking for terms that are going to be used by the target audience. The approach we take is to look at relevance as the key factor in determining what the most important search terms might be.

We use a formula called weighted popularity – if you believe that there are 100 searches per day for a given search term, and that 50% of the folks using that search term would be interested in what you have to offer, then we multiply 100 searches by 50% and say that there are 50 targeted searches per day.

So I like to start with the same basic research, to come up with a list of “core” search terms. Everything else revolves around these core terms.

In addition to these core terms, there are what I call “modifiers” – those words that will be used by searchers along with the core terms. So if “website hosting” is a core term, you have modifiers like PHP, small business, cheap, unlimited bandwidth, etc. that you can find by using tools like Wordtracker’s multisearch tools or Keyword Discovery.

Some of those modifiers will be relevant, others won’t. Rackspace does great dedicated hosting, but they wouldn’t want to use “cheap” as part of their keyword strategy. Many terms will also have alternative spellings and misspellings. Website or web site? You have to target both, so these have to be taken into account.

2) Do you feel there are any differences between research/selection for optimization vs. PPC campaigns?

I don’t think the basic research is much different. The difference is in how you target the terms.

Over the lifetime of a campaign, SEO results and PPC results can create a feedback loop. So a broad match on a general search term in the PPC campaign can give you lots of specific search terms that you can feed back into PPC as well as apply to your SEO strategy. Terms that come in via SEO may end up in your PPC campaign. That’s one more reason why analytics is so important.

In terms of targeting, again, that’s where the main difference comes in. It costs next to nothing to add search terms to a PPC campaign, you just paste them into your list. With SEO, you have to add content so it’s harder to target the marginal or low volume search terms, even if they may be very targeted and relevant.

With SEO, you generally build pages around the core terms and work the modifiers into the copy and your internal links. This does broaden the profile of the page considerably. You have to target the important terms first though. Because content has a cost, you can’t necessarily build a useful web page to directly target every variation, so you have to use links and copywriting to broaden the profile of your pages. This keeps the site’s content compact and enhances usability.

The advantage you have with PPC campaigns, especially with Google where you can dump in a huge list of terms and use all the different matching options, is the ability to cover your bases more speculatively. Tor Crockatt from Miva gives a great presentation at SES on how they spin up keyword lists. Basically it’s the same idea as mixing core terms with modifiers, but with PPC you can add in all the possible synonyms, spellings, adjectives, etc. You build a big list by doing all the permutations and combinations.

I have a free video on keyword strategy that goes into a lot more detail on this, www.seoresearchlabs.com/ses.zip, the archive also includes my most recent presentation from SES. The video runs 75 minutes and goes into a lot more detail on many aspects of keyword strategy, how to leverage PPC to inform SEO, and how you can take a more scientific approach to the question of relevance.

[editors note: In his answer to question #2 above Dan used the phrase “core terms” in the same context as I use "keyword themes". Targeting core terms and their "modifiers" is what I refer to as "keyword theming" in question #3 below, so the intent of question #3 has already been answered above.]

3) How important do you think keyword theming is when implementing them into a site for optimization?

I don’t know about themes and all that. We had some ideas about that a long time ago, but it was largely misinterpreted, and Mike Grehan among others pointed out the absurdity of many interpretations. Basically, I will say that having related content linked together is a good thing, period, even if search engines didn’t exist.

I took a deep look into the idea of Topic Sensitive PageRank a few years ago, and that paper is still on my site (http://www.seoresearchlabs.com/seo-research-labs-google-report.pdf). You can see that whatever ideas Google has about themes and topics, it’s pretty coarse. For example, the personalized search and site-flavored search tools are based on topics, but there are only like 70 topics altogether. So any idea of strongly “theming” within a site is likely to be misplaced and overkill. What’s the theme of Amazon.com, and why do their pages show up in so many search results that aren’t about books?

To me, the information strategy of the site is far more important. Who are the members of your target audience, how can they be segmented into meaningful groups or personas, and what are the information needs of those groups? If you build your content around answering their questions and helping them get what they want, then you are doing it the right way.

4) Different SEOs have different keyword implementations into a site. Some will give clients 25 keywords per page, while others will only do one, two or three. What do you feel is the best practice and why?

Well, there are a couple ways to look at this. I’ll start by repeating a point that I beat to death in my classes, which is that your goal as a search engine marketer is to bring the visitor in to a page that is as close as possible to their goal. The searcher’s goal may be obvious from very specific search terms, or it may not be obvious with more general terms.

The type of page that you build for a search term, therefore, depends on the search term. In some cases, you want pages that give the visitor a set of choices, so that you can move them toward their goal. In other cases, you want to ask for the money on the entry/landing page.

Keyword strategy for web pages is all about getting the visitor to the right page. So on any given page, you target the terms that are going to fit the requirement of getting the visitor as close as possible to their goal.

Sometimes, this means that you have one search term on a page. Sometimes you may have many more. In practical terms, you have 10 words to play with in the TITLE tag, because the engines won’t index more than that. This puts an upper bound on the number of “core” search terms you use on a page. I would certainly think that most pages would have closer to 25 keywords in the copy, if you include modifiers and that sort of thing.

As I already mentioned, you can broaden the profile of a page, and have it appear on more different searches, by using internal and external links with modifiers and other terms. If I have a web page with car rental outlets in the Dallas-Ft. Worth area, I can also target the names of other towns with copy and links. We can target a lot of local terms on the same page. The case for building separate pages involves the possibility of a higher click-through rate – if I search for “car rental Plano TX” then it does help a bit if Plano appears in the title.

I have many individual web pages where the search term referrals each month include hundreds of different terms. Which ones did I specifically target, probably fewer than 5 core terms, the rest are part of that “long tail” we’re always hearing about.

5) Over the years I’ve seen quite a few SEOs and SEO firms move away from providing actual optimization services and move toward education or providing software or reporting services. What’s your take on that?

If that’s what they want to do, then that’s what they should do. The larger business world needs more consulting and education for their in-house resources, and less reliance on someone who comes in and just changes the site. So if individual SEOs get tired of rewriting client pages themselves, and they’d rather teach someone how to do it, and make their long-term revenue off stuff like analytics and real consultation, then that’s very positive. It really just reflects that individual’s professional growth.

There are some areas where I think the client should exercise a lot more control, like link building, since it can affect their reputation in the long run. Relying on an SEO firm to do it right, and do it for you, is unrealistic. Not that everyone out there will rip you off or screw up your site, but you ought to know what’s being done and understand the implications.

Personally, I don’t have SEO clients because I provide so many services to SEO firms and it would just be too much of a conflict of interest. What if I got a keyword report order for an existing client? Would I call them to try to win them back, or be loyal to my “other client” who was about to win their business away from me?

6) I believe that SEO is dying as a stand-alone entity and that SEO companies need to provide additional marketing oriented services as part of their strategies in order to provide real success for their clients. What do you feel is the importance of the marketing aspects within SEO?

Well, if you’re going to add value, you have to focus on business results. If you define “SEO” as getting web pages ranked, then yes, it’s already dead and was never really alive in the first place.
If you define SEO as optimizing a web site to achieve business results through organic search engine listings, then it’s very much alive. But it has to include analytics and everything else that makes it possible to measure and improve business results.

The problem with SEO by itself is that you can’t get the best results without touching a lot of other areas – paid advertising including PPC, usability, analytics, conversion, etc. So a one-trick pony is just that – it may be a cute trick to make your client #1 for some search term. If it’s done in a vacuum then success from a business standpoint, if it happens, would be more like a happy accident than the result of some intentional activity.

7) If you were to develop a search engine, what are the five key elements you would consider most important to analyze?

I’d put a heavy emphasis on linking relationships, link quality, topical relevance, and that sort of thing. I’d look at user feedback that you get from the browser toolbars too. How much time people spend on a site, how many pages they view, and how diverse the audience is. I’d definitely make an effort to determine what the real content of a page was, vs. navigation and other clutter.

Do you see any paths the major search engines are taking that you feel is the wrong path?

I think they don’t do enough to disclose the paid advertisements. Yahoo in particular, where “organic” listings may be pay-per-click, and where we’ve seen some pretty compelling evidence that some search results are hand coded. Matt Cutts showed a great example at Consumer Reports’ conference last spring in Berkeley – how many of those “perfect search results” were paid listings? We don’t know, there is no disclosure.

I think that there is an inherent conflict between paid contextual advertising and good organic search. Google and Yahoo pay a lot out through Adsense and YPN, and they have a lot of revenue tied up in that. If they really did something about the splogs and keyword driftnets that are built to siphon off traffic from “long tail” searches, they’d lose that revenue source.

So with all the search engines now, the quality of results for general searches is pretty good, but for very specific searches you may get a lot more spam than information when you search. That’s a huge problem. I’d take some percentage of the revenues and use it to do site reviews. Take a look at the page that’s generating the click and dump ‘em if they’re spamming. Requiring a small deposit on new Adsense or YPN accounts would stop people from opening multiple accounts to spam.

Yahoo buying Delicious, well, if they actually try to use tagging in search results, that would be about 180 degrees away from the right path, but they probably have other plans for deli. When you think about what Yahoo or MSN is doing, you think about how it will bring users into their portals. When you think about what Google is doing, ask how they’re going to turn it into an advertising channel.

A lot of this, though, is that the engines are up against a million hackers who want to game the system, and that’s just tough no matter what you do.

9) In regards to the SEO industry, what would you say is 1) the best thing to happen to the industry, 2) the most important advancements within the industry, and 3) the worst thing to happen to the industry recently.

1) The best thing that’s happened is that people are starting to focus more on results and less on rankings. This is evident when you go to SES or other conferences. Along with this, there are more people actually learning how the search engines work, not just how they can be manipulated at the present moment.

2) The most important advancements involve synergy between paid and organic, and getting new tools that help manage it all, but the best is yet to come. We’ll see real professional certification coming soon, and that’s going to be huge.

3) The worst thing is just bad press, and inaccurate reporting. Newsweek did OK with that article on Rand, but not great. When we’re portrayed in the light of (that company from Las Vegas) or Google bombing, it’s not so great.

10) Would you make a prediction as to how or when Google might lose it’s dominance, or at least what might cause such a fall?

First, someone else will have to take organic search seriously. I don’t think MSN and Yahoo really have their hearts in search. They are getting search users from their portals and services, and they don’t really try to win searchers from Google. Ask has a nice new interface, but the search results are so-so because they don’t really crawl the web very well.

If Google does lose their dominance, it will be because they didn’t innovate, or because someone else buys market share. As in, Microsoft buys AOL. Start the rumor.

Bonus Question: I had previously asked Dan to explain the process of checking to see if a site passes link reputation. Below is his answer in full:

The basic drill on checking if a page passes reputation: It’s possible to get an affirmative result, it’s possible to get a negative result, but sometimes you can’t really get either… and it’s really subjective in terms of the degree of confidence you have in the result, because we are relying on some assumptions.

What you need is the text from a link on the linking site, to use in an exact phrase search. So for example, the site you’re checking might have a text link that says “big boats small boats medium boats – the boat guy” linking to www.the-boat-guy-who-buys-links.com – as long as this doesn’t appear as a phrase on the target URL, then you can run a test by doing an exact phrase search on Google for “big boats small boats medium boats – the boat guy”.

If you see exactly one result (the linking URL) then you would say that the link, at this point, has not passed text reputation to the target URL. If we get such a negative result, we look to repeat this result with other links, because it’s possible that the link we checked is too new to have passed reputation, it’s possible that links on a given site must “age” before reputation can be passed, but that they will eventually, and it’s even conceivable that the links to a specific site might undergo “aging” before they can pass reputation – for a while, we suspected this could explain the “sandbox” but it’s definitely more complicated than that.

If you see exactly two results (the linking URL and the target URL), then you would say that the link has passed text reputation to the target URL. You can validate by checking the cached version of the target URL, and look for “the following only appear in links pointing to this page.” Again, we look to repeat the test, because it’s possible that there are other links which are passing reputation to the page, but have dropped from Google’s index for some reason, that the target URL has changed, that the indexed version doesn’t match the cached version, etc.

If you see more than two results, well, I’d normally just go look for another link to play with, but if it’s a handful you can check to see why they’re showing up in the SERP. Usually this happens because the phrase is too common, or because they’ve used the same anchor text in more than one link. So if the boat guy has used the same anchor text with several link buys, then you wouldn’t know which links are passing reputation. However, if the target URL is not among the results, then you have probably found several links that aren’t passing reputation. We occasionally find cases where there are hundreds of results for the phrase search (may be multiple sites, may be run of site on one site, etc.), but the target URL isn’t included among them, and this gives us several URLs at once that aren’t passing reputation.

It can take some time picking over a web site or page to find good candidates for the phrase search – we look for long strings of keywords because they’re unlikely to appear as a phrase anywhere. It usually takes 5-10 minutes on a given site to find something, or to give up. Crappy directories tend to let sites load up their titles with keywords, so it’s usually pretty easy to find some text you can do some tests with – just look for long strings of keywords.

A useful exercise, if you have control of the linking site, is to do these kinds of controlled tests by putting up links and monitoring the SERP for the phrase search. We’ve been able to find that some websites in fact DO pass reputation, but that it can take several weeks for it to show up. Many sites (Aaron Wall’s search-marketing.info site, for example) are able to pass reputation within a couple days, and affect fairly competitive SERPs pretty quickly. If you just happened to have a link farm or network of your own, you might be able to use this information profitably for your clients.

When we checked the O’Reilly site (that Matt Cutts had commented on), we were even able to find links within blog posts (content) that clearly weren’t passing reputation, even months after the content was created and presumably indexed. That’s one heck of a harsh sanction to hand out, in my opinion.

Yes, I probably need to spend less time thinking about this stuff and get some sleep or something, but in a world where the other 999 experts are so busy “doing” SEO that their understanding begins to diverge, I think there’s room for one geek who just plays with it, assuming I can continue to find enough professionals who are willing to sponsor my efforts.

Dan

Dan has another link building clinic starting up in about 3 weeks. I’ve gone through this class and found it not only extremely helpful but fun as well.

“The computer science department there makes you take two outside classes, so I took classes from the Information and Library Science department about search engines. It turned out that search engines were really exciting stuff: term frequency times inverse document frequency and all that stuff.”

Aaron Wall’s interview with Matt is very informative as they talk about everything from spam to algorithms to…volleyball. I think this is one of the better interviews Aaron Wall has gotten to do.

” In the spring of 1998 I started working with my first paying SEO client. By 2000 I was overwhelmed with clients and by 2003 I had dropped most all of my clients.

I guess you could say that; I came, I saw and then I left…

The simple reason I dropped most of my clients; I did not need them. I found I could make more money (with less problems) without clients.”

“With so many franchise opportunities available throughout the world, it can be quite a daunting task for a person seeking a franchise opportunity to narrow down to the one that fits their interest and expertise.”

“The training process is certainly designed to get them started with the knowledge and information that they’re going to require to handle the technical side of the business. One of the things we talk about to our franchisees in training is, ‘Welcome to the rest of your life of learning.’ “

“I like knowing my clients and knowing my employees, and knowing what my employees know. Our current team now has good experience and it took years to build that knowledge…”

“Bad clients call or email often. Problem is, if I sold them, then they want to talk to me, and if 80 clients all called and chatted 1 hour per month I’d have no time.”

“People are so stuck on ways to get links fast…press a button and whammo, 1000 backlinks…why not find that site that’s in the top 10 for your phrase and isn’t selling anything (a real resource).”

But now he is being interviewed by Andy Hagans of Link Building Blog. [Sorry, links no longer available.]

It’s pretty good.

” I don’t see any scaleabilty to be honest, the best service a client will get will be from “the proprietor” him/her self. Bringing in a bunch of marketing graduates won’t improve the offering, it goes the other way. I have yet to see an SEO “scale” without falling to bits. Just look at WebSourced.”

” It’s very tough out there for people looking for SEO’s, the main reason being that most clients are lazy. There are not many businesses out there where the internet could not be playing a very significant role in their operations, they need to get with the program and put some work in researching.”