SEO is technically still considered as a rather new niche market. This has resulted in many scammers trying their hardest to pocket as much cash as they can while SEO is still crawling its way through infancy. Unfortunately, because it`s quite a young market, the public are largely unaware that it exists, let alone what it can do for websites. Its relative youth and inexperience also make it difficult to determine which agency`s promises are actually reasonable, or at least believable.

Gord Hotchkiss (CEO of Enquiro) writes a fantastic column called Just Behave on Search Engine Land every Friday. He analyses search behaviour, often delving into the complexities of the human mind to get to the bottom of thorny issues. His most recent column dealt with the illusion of conscious will, which shows that even when we think that we are making conscious decisions, we are in fact acting subconsciously.

This has huge implications for all marketing-related activities, especially search, because it proves that people aren`t motivated by the factors that they think they are. We believe that we`re being honest when we answer survey questions or participate in market studies, but we`re actually not. Hotchkiss cites his first research study as proof of this phenomenon.

In September last year Stoney deGeyter wrote a very entertaining post in which he claimed that content was dead, and that community has replaced it as king in the tired old cliché. It was nearly everything a good post should be, controversial, topical and witty. He even threw in some content-related statistics, which he claims don`t really make the appropriate connection between the importance of content and web marketing. The problem is that he`s trying to refute the irrefutable.

Images are becoming an increasingly prevalent method to source visits to your website. Google`s Universal Search is one of the tools that make this possible. With a fair amount of images present in multimedia, including books, news articles and reviews, showing up in SERPs, will they replace traditional search results or simply supplement them?

Jack Menzel, director of the universal search program, says that Google has not yet made a decision on this and that only a limited number of Universal search results get shown. Susan Moskwa, also from Google, shared the sentiment. She says constant testing is being done on how to implement universal search results effectively and that we should “stay tuned”.

Just as Paris Hilton is a brand, so are you. Paris is associated with certain things, shoes, cars, money, clothing, nightclubs… you get the drift. How she conducts herself and what she does affects her reputation and the way outsiders see her as a brand.

Personal and corporate branding are very different but equally important. Corporate branding is a lot easier as you can have a group of brand ambassadors looking after one brand. Personal branding is a little trickier . You should always pay attention to personal branding. At the very least, you want to make yourself easy to be found via Search. People used to call and check references. Nowadays, you get Googled.

There`s no hiding from the fact that search is evolving. It happens every day right in front of our eyes, yet we seem so slow to acknowledge this process. Search engines need to evolve accordingly so that they can stay profitable and relevant. Since 2007, when Google launched its Universal Search, they have been including image and video results in their SERPs. So, is this the nudge that small businesses need to compete with industry big-wigs?

It`s no easy task to master and could take years and years. The search landscape is extremely dynamic, so if you don`t have passion, determination and a thirst for knowledge, there is no way you will ever reach the pinnacle of success.

Hard work is a given, high energy is a prerequisite. If you have all of the above and adequate resources and relationships to support your endeavour, there is no reason why you shouldn`t succeed.

According to Adam, the challenge is in getting clients to adopt SEO when they have never heard of it, don`t believe it is “really that important right now” (typically heard from startups), or still believe SEO is spamming.

How do you stand out from the crowd as an SEM agency? The competition is getting tough and we have to up our tactics if we want to stay ahead of the masses. The best way to do that is high quality of work and service, service, service…

The customer or user in this case is, to be politically correct, king or queen. The trends show that SEO/SEM firms are gradually focusing their attention on the user, specifically offering website usability as a service. I feel that it is very important to acknowledge that usability requires its own skills set and shouldn’t be confused with SEO. Usability addresses human interaction with a web site while SEO addresses the search engine interaction with the web site. Saying that, all SEOs should have knowledge of usability and every SEM agency should look at adding SEO to its repertoire.

It looks like Google have pulled out some contradictory rabbits from their own black hat. They accuse others of following ‘black hat` tactics, while it appears they are following similar procedures themselves. Should we believe everything they say? It appears that soon, SEO specialists will have to change their job title just to stay under the radar of Google`s incongruent accusations.

They appear to have set these rules and guidelines for online marketers and the entire industry to follow, especially when gathering backlinks, and then left evidence of being the biggest culprits by not obeying their own rules. Google have been bartering off backlinks to their own blog, an act which they say is ‘not best practice`. So is the ground that they are setting for us all that trustworthy?

During my daily trawl for interesting SEO/blogging news I came across a post by Deb at Network Blogging Tips that lauded the list. She proceeded to list five (because odd numbers tend to prompt readers to add to lists and encourage more interaction) reasons why she thought list posts were the bees knees.

Now, I have issues with list posts. I tend to skip lists when I come across them, usually with much rolling of eyes and questioning of the heavens (e.g. “Why, oh why, in the name of all that is holy, has someone written yet another list post?”) The only reason I read Deb`s post was because the views expressed so directly contradicted my own.