As usual, I’ve been busy, busy, busy. Please don’t hate me for sitting on this collection of wise nuggets from Rand Fishkin. He kindly sent this on to me after our initial interview (quite a bit after–he’s busy too), but since then I just haven’t found the time to post it. Still, better late than never, and as you see, Rand can be relied upon to come up with solid industry information that’s just begging to be applied …

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Rand Fishkin is one of the best-known faces in the search marketing industry these days, and with good reason. He can be relied upon to come up with useful information on any SEO topic, even stuff that’s barely hit the news yet. People like him are molding the industry and deserve to be watched closely.

First I’d like to thank you Rand, for taking the time to answer my questions. It’s wonderful to have such an eminent SEO guest on Marketmou!

It was difficult to try and arrive at a set of questions that might elicit some information no one’s ever seen before:
At least I hope that this information will be helpful to search marketing and SEO people everywhere.

Marketmou: Let’s start with a leading question: Do you think the SEO industry is pretty much saturated with great SEO consultants? Or do you think there’s room for improvement here. I know that many people who come in through SEO copywriting (as I did) perceive the potential to make a good living—but in reality I personally see that there are far too many companies out there who underrate SEO and don’t want to pay what it’s worth.

Rand Fishkin: In my view, there’s a huge lack of talented SEO consultants, and a great deal of opportunity for smart folks who can market themselves well. This is a field that’s still filled with gunslingers - it’s the wild west of the web - and anyone with brains, experience and a proven resume can waltz into a company that doesn’t do SEO well and help them to earn thousands, even millions of dollars very quickly.

Marketmou: First a few questions for people seeking SEO help (as opposed to those within the industry): Do you see any benefits in the introduction of industry standards and certification? There are a few places online where you can get SEO certification and some of them are even ISO-backed, but are they any good?

Rand Fishkin: I haven’t heard great things about any of the existing certification programs. I will say this - it’s something that SEOmoz is looking into, but it’s exceptionally hard to rate SEO skill without seeing actual projects from start to finish. Perhaps a basic set of standards would be good to at least vet the folks who are playing a scam role in the search industry right now.

Marketmou: What advice do you have for an online business looking for SEO help? Do you have any tips for picking SEO consultants who do a great job?

Rand Fishkin: Well, we have the recommended list - www.seomoz.org/article/recommended - but other than that, I’d probably repeat what many others have said in the past. Ask for some references, look at the clients they’ve worked with, ask them to explain the process of SEO and how they see the current algorithms operating. If you can at least familiarize yourself somewhat with how the field works, you’ll be able to see through the scammers and find someone who has a grasp on reality.

Marketmou: There’s still a lot of controversy going on about whether it’s best to get a domain name with a keyword in it, or whether you’re better off focusing on your brand when choosing a domain name. What’s your stance?

Rand Fishkin: If you’re going to build a big brand and have the patience to wait 6-12 months to start dominating for particular keywords, the domain name isn’t much of a hurdle (except at Live.com, who loves keywords in the domain). I certainly wouldn’t spend more than $10-$20K buying any domain name these days.

Marketmou: To be successful at search marketing or SEO, it’s essential to track what you’re doing; do you recommend Google Analytics for tracking website traffic and progress? Or do you think it’s better to go with an independent paid application?

Rand Fishkin: I like the Google analytics, but it is a bit basic, especially when it comes to customized conversion tracking. I’m a huge fan of Indextools, but have also heard great things about a program called “Fireclick.”

Marketmou: Are you for, or against the use of meta tags? What do you say to those who insist that they’re not used by the search engines?

Rand Fishkin: The meta description tag is still used as the snippet by every one of the engines, so I don’t know who would tell you to ignore it. It may not be used for rankings, but it is absolutely used to help you push up your CTR (like the copy of your search ads). Meta keywords is basically useless, though. I don’t recommend that anyone use it - it’s giving away competitive intelligence and in our testing, it had no impact on rankings in any of the engines.

Marketmou: Thanks for clarifying that Rand. It’s a complicated issue. One of your main areas of expertise is link development, and you’ve recently stated on SEOMoz that in your opinion one-off link purchases (as opposed to bulk purchase of links) would most likely go undetected by the search engines. What advice can you give to someone looking to purchase truly useful links?

Rand Fishkin: I actually just wrote an entire blog post answering this question today - http://www.seomoz.org/blog/the-art-of-buying-links-under-the-radar

Marketmou: Would you agree that a pay per click campaign can actually help a site’s organic ranking?

Rand Fishkin: In a roundabout way, yes. If you pull in web traffic through paid search, you’re probably more likely to attract some links to your site from folks who might click those links, as well as improve your branding overall. I don’t, however, believe there’s any correlation between paid search and organic rankings at any of the major engines (except Baidu in China and Yandex in Russia).

Marketmou: Everyone keeps screaming that reciprocal links will now hamper your progress with the search engines. Do you agree? Is it still worth pursuing reciprocal links?

Rand Fishkin: We’ve seen Google take some pretty harsh, direct steps against reciprocal linking in specific verticals (like Real Estate). I’d be paranoid to engage in it on any type of large scale at this point - I think you’re setting yourself up for trouble.

Marketmou: Does traffic contribute to page rank? If a site was getting lots of healthy traffic, could it make up for lack of backlinks?

Rand Fishkin: Interesting question - I’ve heard of the search engines in patent applications using traffic as a litmus test for legitimacy, but since none of them can actually monitor a site’s traffic (unless you’re running Google analytics or all your visitors have the Yahoo/MSN/Google toolbar installed) it seem to me a moot point. In an ideal world where they could measure traffic and it couldn’t be gamed, I think they might try to, but for now, I’d say no.

Marketmou: Lastly, is it best to create a subdomain for your blog? Or is it better to have it as part of your main domain?

Rand Fishkin: I’ve seen instances where the subdomain wasn’t treated with the full “respect” and authority as the main domain, so I’d say from a best practices standpoint, keep your blog in a subfolder rather than a subdomain.

Thanks Rand, I really appreciate you taking the time to answer these questions. I’m sure we all agree that there is some really useful information here for beginners and experienced search marketers alike.

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It’s a no brainer that if you want to learn about anything, the best way to do it is to talk to the very best in that particular field. With this in mind I thought it would be fabulous to do a series of interviews with the foremost experts in the search marketing world.

I’m honored that Rand Fishkin of SEOMoz agreed to start us of by answering some questions I put to him. Rand, if you’re reading this I really appreciate it.
I hope that by putting each star interview in a separate post it will make this resource easier to access. Have fun.

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Many entrepreneurs balk at the cost of good SEO consulting work. There have been a number of articles posted online to try to address this situation, but I’ve recently come across an excellent one.

Entrepreneur.com has narrowed down 10 questions that you should ask to see if you’re getting the service that’s necessary for healthy ranking. Since there’s a wide variety of SEO consultants out there, and since the standards in SEO consulting are anything but easy-to-define, you might find this article very useful in helping you to make a decision.

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This is a question that website owners often ask themselves. They wonder if a little work from an SEO consultant could actually help their bottom line.

There are many ways an SEO consultant can help, and not just with SEO!

• First, the creation of great content with lend considerable credibility. The better the writer, the more likely you are to be seen as an expert in your field. This is a key factor in determining how many of your visitors actually go on to become clients.
• Second, advice on web design from someone who knows why, for example, Flash is a bad idea, and why CSS is a great idea, can make all the difference to your search engine ranking–without even doing anything else.
• A good SEO consultant can get you moving in the right direction as far as link campaigns and link juice is concerned. Ultimately, good links can do more than anything else except respectable content to launch you as a force to be reckoned with online.

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I’m having a tough time getting my brain round the information I need to gather for a technical link bait article I’m writing. The reason is my allergies. Not enough that my breath is coming in gasps and my eyes and nose are streaming. The medication that alleviates the symptoms just a little is also making my dozy. I’m also taking some natural remedies…

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I recently came across someone who spent a great deal of money having a new website developed. He actually didn’t know anything about the Web, so he was in the position that he had no way of knowing what was a good Web design and what was old, outdated and likely to antagonise the search engines. So he was not lucky in his choices. When I came on the scene, the website was a done deal. I knew I’d be treading on some toes (this is not new to me: I’ve had to break bad news to website owners on many occasions), but ethically I knew I had to tell him the truth. So I explained in detail how and why the features of his website would never give him the business he wanted. He was angry: angry with his designer and angry with me because I was the bearer of bad tidings.

For some weeks I didn’t hear from him.

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For anyone who’s been off the planet for a while, a link strategy is probably the most important aspect of running a website these days. Yes, I’m an SEO copywriter, but I’m still telling you that because of Google, you’ll never make it online, even with the best copywriter there is (me of course), unless you have more inbound links than your competition.

One of the easiest (yet most difficult) ways to get links is to create link bait and spread it liberally throughout your website. Why is it the easiest way? Because once your link bait is on your site, you can sit back and let others create links for you. Why is the most difficult? Because thinking up stuff to put on your site that constitutes link bait is enough to give you internal combustion.
The unspoken question of course is, ‘how the heck to we create link bait?’

Since I’m in a good mood tonight, I’m going to tell you how to create link bait. What put me in such a good mood? My husband just bought me a new fax/copier/scanner/telephone, which I’m truly delighted about. It may do other things too, but I haven’t had time to read the manual properly yet. Yay.

Oh yes, where were we. Link bait.

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It’s so strange. We SEO people spend our lives giving weight to all of the main search engines. The big three are Google, Yahoo and MSN (or Windows Live Search as it’s now called), yet really, most of us only really care about one result. Care to guess…

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In my quest to achieve a really fast loading website I’m constantly on the lookout for something better. That’s why I’m redesigning my Wellwrittenwords website yet again!

A superior onine presence is not easy to achieve. If your’e serious though, the first thing you need to do is employ a design that not only looks great, it pleases the search engines too.

It needs to be fast-loading, easy to read and free of nasties that the search engines will penalize for, such as the wrong kind of navigation.

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