SEO and SEM Quotes

I like to read a lot online. And as a professional search engine optimizer, I often read the blogs of others that are involved with both SEO and SEM. During the course of all of this reading, I often come across comments from people that are interesting because of the insight they provide in to the people making the comments. Here are 5 direct quotes from people around the web.

First up we have someone that is clearly enthusiastic about his company's services. I like to see this sort of passion from a company stakeholder as long as it's sincere.
"In fact, I'm about, oh, 100% sure that EF's approach is the single most sophisticated one on the market."
-- comment by Chris Zaharias, SVP of Efficient Frontier

Confidence is good. This might be a little too much confidence.
"Now, anyone who searches for my name and does a little reading knows that I am probably the brightest white-hat on the planet."
-- comment by Shari Thurow

Ooops. Not sure I would admit to having spam sites.
"I'll group all of my tech sites together, all my fitness sites together, all of my spam sites together, etc."
-- comment by Mark William Wielgus

Misconceptions in the SEO world aren't so bad. In fact, I'd argue that they're good for business.
"That's because Wikipedia is full of links to other Websites and the number of links on a Website is one factor that Google's search engine uses to rank the popularity of a site."
-- comment from the Washington Post, and noted by Jordan McCollum

Rand Fishkin of SEOMoz who once again impresses with his honesty. You won't find many individuals or companies that will openly admit that a competitor is better than they are.
"I think it would be foolish of me, after seeing their processes, to assume that we could bring the same level of service (or detail) to a large scale keyword research or link discovery project. We're simply out-gunned."

Following the theme of honesty, a post over at Scoreboard Media
reveals a simple truth some many people fret about unnecessarily when creating a new site. I happen to agree with this one.
"Yes, I know the branding value of .com but an audience can be developed without a brand. A brand cannot be developed without an audience. You figure out what that premium is worth."

I particularly enjoyed this second one from Scoreboard Media (yeah, I did a lot of reading on that site today). The young folks in the crowd might find this comment too cynical, but those of you that are older will likely nod your head knowingly.
"Do not lob the bleeding heart teaching is so rewarding argument at me. Trust me, it's not as rewarding as cashing checks from your couch."

The author of Tropical SEO (site now gone) has similar thoughts to Scordboard Media. And like many of us SEO's, he has been bitten by the online income bug.
"However - know this - I love being lazy. I love the feeling of not lifting a finger, and getting a check in the mail"

A quick tip David Naylor that I first read about from Jennifer Slegg on how to do a check of your copy to see if you've gone overboard with the keywords.
"Dave prints the content, then takes a highlighter and highlights the keywords. If it looks like more highlighter than white, you need to tone those keywords down a bit too."

And I'll end with this head-scratcher.
"Even if you don't grasp any of the math and only have a half a clue of what it's all about, don't worry. At least by reading it, you may never understand what it is or what it does: But Garcia certainly emphasizes what it isn't."
-- comment by Mike Grehan

And here's a funny one. Rand Fishkin declares that Wikipedia is S.P.A.M.. Yeah, that's an acronym. It stands for Site Positioned Above Mine. I couldn't agree more with Rand's assessment!

Saul Hansell in a recent NY Times article writes, "And media sites are discovering that many people are ignoring their home pages - where ad rates are typically highest - and using Google to jump to the specific pages they want." When I read this I couldn't help but say, "a-ha." I've been trying to emphasize to website owners for years that they've been putting way too much time and brainpower towards their home pages and not enough to the meat of their sites i.e. the actual articles pages that have the content people are searching for. Which isn't to say that home pages aren't important. They are just less important than they used to be.

This next quote comes from Dirk Johnson on a recent LED Digest newsletter (issue 2421). In this newsletter he lets a reader in on a little secret. "I think that maybe you have spent far too much time buying into the great content trumps all theories that are rampant in the SEO world."

I think Dirk's comment might require some explanation. Content is often said to be the single-most important element of an SEO effort. While it's certainly true that with all other things being equal, the best content will rank higher, it's important to remember that content alone isn't guaranteed to win the game of SEO. In fact, content that is poorly structured, unpopular, and buried deeply within a site will certainly rank poorly over even a spam site if that spam site has done a better job at implemented all of the SEO best practices. In this regard I agree with Dirk's statement.
OK, I'm off to do some more reading!