Online Marketing Blog

If you’ve been in the search marketing industry for any length of time, you’ve undoubtedly encountered a wide variety of conflicting or outdated advice. Since “how to” information in so many other industries is often presented as an absolute, many people look for the same kinds of static and perpetual rules with search engine optimization. The problem comes from not discerning SEO myth and speculation from fact which can be a very costly mistake.

Moderated by Matt Van Wagner, this session (SEO Don’ts, Myths and Scams) included some of the most experienced SEO practitioners in the business with Jill Whalen of High Rankings, Amanda Watlington of Searching for Profit and Lyndsay Walker from WestJet.

When you size up the search marketing industry, you really have to marvel at all the different information sources, many of them conflicting, and how search marketers are able to stay on top of what’s current and relevant compared to noise and malarkey.

In the course of talking to prospective clients, prospective business partners, attending conferences and events, reading blogs, books, discussion threads, forums, newsletters and industry publications, you can get exposure to an amazing variety of observations about SEO. Many of them are spot-on. Some of them are tales of a mythical nature. A few are just plain bunk.

Matt Cutts of Google has posted some videos of himself answering reader mail on different topics related to SEO:

• Session 1: Including qualities of a good site.
• Session 2: Including some SEO Myths.
• Session 3: Should you Optimize for Search Engines or for Users?

Seeing someone explain a thing is a much different experience than reading about it, especially for people just learning about search engine optimization.

A little over a week ago, Matt made a post about what direction to take his blog. There were a huge number of responses and I tossed one in: