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 …

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? 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: I’d say the industry has a long, long way to go before we reach saturation. There are an exceptionally small number (probably under a thousand) high quality SEO consultants and practitioners worldwide, yet hundreds of thousands of businesses and organizations that need SEO help. Certainly there are challenges to receiving recognition in the industry, but at SEOmoz, I receive an average of 3 requests for client work every day, 99% of which I send to our recommended list, and everyone on there tells me they’re constantly turning down work.

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 can see an opportunity for some industry standards, but I don’t think that outside of the search engines themselves, or at the very least, an organization that they endorse, it will be possible to build a certification program that the wider world will take seriously. There’s so much opinion and variance and personal experience that goes into the practice of SEO that it would be very challenging to build a curriculum that was independently verifiable.

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 a list of great people here – www.seomoz.org/article/recommended. Outside of that, I think that Karl Ribas wrote a great piece on the subject at Todd Malicoat’s blog and Todd himself gave a terrific list of questions to ask your SEO company – here.

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 have a large amount to spend on a domain and are entering a competitive industry, I’d say go for the keyword-relevant domain name. It can give you a headstart in rankings and relevance that’s tough to match (especially because all your links will contain the right anchor text). However, with some elbow grease and a lot of creative content and promotion, you can overtake even the most targeted domains. However, I would be very firm in saying that your domain name has to be brandable. Thus, if you’re trying to sell digital cameras, registering a domain like digitalcameras.com is terrific, but getting something like digital-camera-reviews4u.com is terrible, even though it technically contains the keywords. You’ll never build a brand that folks can share in person or offline with a domain like that.

Marketmou: 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: It really depends on what you need to do. I’d say that for a lot of small companies and blogs, Google Analytics is a fine solution. However, once you’re moving into mid-size company or larger, and derive significant revenue from your website, you’ll almost certainly want to upgrade to something more robust with more tracking capability (provided that you know how to use it and how to derive benefit from the data).

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: I’d say check out Danny’s latest piece on the keyword meta tag, where you can clearly see that there’s almost no reason whatsoever to use it. As for the meta description tag, that’s pretty universally valuable, as it serves as the “ad copy” for your listing in the SERPs. Of course, you don’t have to use it, and if you can’t take the time to write a good one, I don’t usually suggest automatically creating one from text on the page or writing one universal tag for an entire section of the site. The engines themselves will do a better job pulling snippets than your software will.

Marketmou: 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: If you want to buy links under the radar, you’ve really got two options – either go direct to site owners or advertising managers, or contract a firm who will do this for you. Buying links through large link networks takes on a bit more risk, IMO, but it’s certainly helping a lot of folks rank, so despite my personal apprehension, it’s tough to say that you should never buy through a link broker – just be aware that the money may not get you anything.

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

Rand Fishkin: I suppose in some small way it does, as those visitors who get to your site through PPC may end up linking to it, talking about it, promoting it and spreading the word. However, I don’t believe there’s any direct correlation from an algorithmic standpoint.

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: I think that I agree with the general fear of reciprocal links, but only if we’re talking about the very specific link exchanges where sites link to each other from large link lists that have little to no relevancy or value to humans. Certainly I don’t think that just linking to a page on a site that happens to link to your site on another of its pages can cause you any problems. Just think of how incestuous and reciprocal the nature of blogroll links are – the search engines certainly won’t be penalizing all of those sites.

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: PageRank is technically a measure of link popularity, so I’d say that no – traffic wouldn’t “make up for” a lack of link juice. There are plenty of highly trafficked sites and pages that have little to no visibility in the engines because they haven’t made themselves link friendly or crawlable – it’s one of the best reasons to get SEO help, actually.

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’d always recommend avoiding a subdomain – it won’t necessarily have a negative impact, but in our experience we’ve seen plenty of times when a subdomain doesn’t inherit the full “trust” and “ranking ability” of the main domain, so I’d say it’s best to use a subfolder on the main domain instead.

Thanks Rand, I really appreciate you taking the time to answer my questions. I know that this information is highly valuable to anyone seeking further SEO knowledge. I’d love it if we can do this again in the not too distant future.