SEO Leaders Discuss Search Engine Optimisation in 2012

They should start by building a web site that has a clear business model that draws revenue from search engine traffic in a competitive niche. I have learned loads more building my own revenue streams than I have ever reading a blog or forum. But, if you have to press me for places to learn I would say the SEO Dojo, they have a great community and amazing resources.

I would say focus on two areas of information: 1) News from the search engines. This means changes to the algorithm, new products, and any other verified information from them. A great place for this is seroundtable.com 2) Case studies or strategies. Here you are looking for examples of what has worked for others. You should remain critical of these only because every site is different.

Everything else that doesn't fit in the above two categories is just unfounded opinion, and in my honest opinion is a waste of time.

It depends on what type of SEO you are. If you are in house SEO then you might need to contract with an agency. I say this because in house SEO’s usually end up selling the concepts of SEO more than actually doing SEO. If you are starting an SEO agency or consulting service you might be better suited to specialize in one area, not so much for any other reason than to make it easier to market yourself.

I think they will remain an important factor. Especially for long tail keywords that usually don’t get traffic in social media.

The word change has been used a lot since the beginning of the internet. Everything is going to keep changing, nothing is going to stop. Therefore, it is important now and always to have a strong foundation of the fundamentals of SEO and marketing. Building a strong brand and leveraging it to further your SEO efforts, will be the hallmark of success no matter what change occurs.

That SEO is not easy, fast, or cheap.

That SEO/marketing/business is all the same thing applied in different ways.

I primarily use Raven for research and rank tracking. All other tools we develop internally.

We mostly do high quality link building and high level technical audits.

I really enjoy hotdogs and cold drinks with Jack Daniels in them.

I’d assume the answer depends on the individuals. Some people pick up new things faster by watching others do it, i.e. internship. Others pick up things better by trial and error, i.e. starting your own web site. Some are book people and like to read and practice what they read. It really depends on the nature of the individual.

That is up to your boss. But if it was me, I’d spend at least an hour reading up daily, either during work or before/after. There are great places to find recaps of what is going on, such as the ones I run named the Search Cap at Search Engine Land or my daily recap at the Search Engine Roundtable. Plus I do a weekly video recap for those who don’t have time daily to keep up.

I think an SEO can be a successful one man team, in fact, I think the one man SEO who has specific skills in one industry is much more valuable than a team of people skilled in one area but with no specific industry specialization. The better an individual knows the industry they are competing in, the better off they are in competing in that industry. But if you want a better shot at a long term SEO career, diversity is important. In summary, I think one man can do it all and do it all very well.

Links are and will remain a very valuable ranking factor. But how they are factored has changed greatly over the past five to ten years or so. Social is ramping up, but I still think links will remain more important in the next few years. Of course, Google is much better at determining real links vs fake links. Google is far from perfect, but much much better at it.

Look at Google’s pattern. Google keeps trying to weed out sites created with the sole purpose of getting search traffic and to monetize that search traffic. The goal now is to make the best web site for the user and try to monetize the user some way, but not in order to send them off to another web site to make your money.

The biggest issue right now in the SEO industry is the reputation. Time and time again, journalists cover the dark side of the industry. The industry is not respected, look at like criminals and the work SEOs do is seen as black magic. I thought it was getting better, but it is not.

Respect the industry and it will respect you back.

Don’t do SEO, so don’t really use SEO tools.

I cover what the industry is talking about. If the industry cares, I write about it at the Search Engine Roundtable. Which helps me break down what I should write at the Search Engine Roundtable vs Search Engine Land. At Search Engine Land, I am responsible for assigning the stories to the other writers and covering search news briefs. I cover what is important to the search industry, despite if the search industry cares about it today to discuss about it. Hopefully that makes sense.

Family, web & mobile development and basketball (not watching, playing).

Start by signing up for premium accounts at both seomoz.org and seobook.com. Subscribe via email or RSS to www.searchengineland.com. And lastly, create and manage some websites and try to get them to generate natural search engine traffic. That will help you test out the stuff you read and hear about and separate the wheat from the chaff.

This is a great question, and as with most things in life, balance is key. It’s important to stay up to date on the latest trends, not just in terms of SEO but also in parallel disciplines like social media, content marketing, and analytics. I personally use Google Reader to organize the various RSS feeds that I subscribe to in order to stay in the know. I also use Twitter in a similar manner, by following fellow marketers that are known for sharing insightful stuff.

I’m sure it’s possible for a one-man team to be successful at SEO, but it’s definitely not scalable. Moreover, I don’t think it’s wise to focus all of your marketing efforts on SEO alone. Therefore, it’s crucial to bring in team members and partners that can help scale SEO and marketing in general.

Links and anchor text are still by far the most influential of all SEO factors, and they will likely continue to wield this influence for years to come. You’ll know when links and anchor text lose their influence when Google stops policing paid links. The reason Google polices them is because they are well-aware that said links and anchor text can game their algorithm.

I actually think that this is faulty thinking. Sure, there are algorithmic changes that manifest themselves, some more impactful than others. However, if you are focused on the fundamentals (e.g. conversion optimization, brand building, content creation, SEO-friendly architecture, social influencer outreach and engagement, etc.) and if you are spreading your wings beyond SEO into other key marketing channels, you will never have to worry about the ever-shifting algorithm.

I pitched SEO for five years straight, and the one thing I ran into time and again was competitive pitches that sounded really smart and intuitive but were actually based on SEO nonsense. Unfortunately, many marketing decision makers are incapable of deciphering truth from fiction when it comes to what really works in terms of SEO.

The scientific method applies and works wonderfully!

I just signed up for the enterprise SEO Automation platform, Searchlight, which is offered by Conductor.com. It’s pretty amazing and helps automate a lot of the tactical work and analysis, so that my analyst and agency partners can focus on more strategic work.

I actually focus on enterprise interactive marketing in general, with a strong focus on all aspects of SEO, paid search, social media, and analytics. Some folks might say that my main area of expertise within the SEO realm is social media-infused link building.

I’m into skiing, science, scepticism, and playing the guitar; not necessarily in that order! Everything I do in the professional realm is geared towards providing for my wife and son. They are the most important thing in my life.

I'd say either get an internship and learn on the job, or pay a few hundred bucks and join http://www.seobook.com/. I cannot think of a better site for a newbie. Doing your own site is something I'd also recommend because some SEOs don't seem to be very technical, and I think that in order to really dig into a problem and figure out what's going on, you need at least some technical knowledge.

I have to run a company of 20 people, curate for a site, moderate a site, and write for several industry sites each month, so I spend the bulk of my time keeping up with what is going on in the industry. If something happens that my team needs to know about, I tell them. If you were in a situation where no one else was informing you, I'd say read your arse off in terms of articles, but don't screw around on Twitter for hours a day. In terms of percentages, I'd say 25% of your day should be spent learning and researching. I rely on Twitter, MySEOCommunity.com, the Marketing Land email recap, and just chatting with my industry friends either on the phone or on IM to keep up with anything I might have missed.

I know a lot of very successful SEOs who are 1 man teams so absolutely. I think that all depends on the type of person that you are and what background you have. When I began doing SEO I had to do it all, so I have a wider breadth of knowledge than some (and less than others) but we're seeing more and more niche SEOs who probably would need to either refer a client out for help in an area they didn't specialize in.

I think that, at minimum, links (the way we currently do them) may become slightly less important but I don't see them ever going away. I certainly don't think it will happen this year. I think other things, like social signals, may continue to be a big part of what we look at and work with, but I still think a good link is always going to be extremely valuable to a site.

Keeping up with what's going on in social is critical in my opinion, even if you hate it or don't do much work with it. It's definitely changing the game for all of us. You just need to figure out how to use it to your advantage whether it's for finding bloggers to broadcast your message or finding new ideas for your PPC campaigns.

It's difficult to be told exactly what to do by a client, then criticized when something you've warned them about does indeed happen. Even with clients who work with other agencies who do other parts (we just do the links) we are usually the ones to blame when something goes wrong. We don't usually have budget problems or validation problems, so I'd say that my personal biggest challenge is in trying to make a client see problems that we could run into if we continue to do what he/she dictates.

I have learned to always check for the simplest solution to a problem before digging into the details. You have no idea how many sites have been “accidentally” blocked by robots.txts when the clients are going nuts.

I love Link Research Tools and Majestic SEO, for link tools. I also really love Ice Rocket and Crowdbooster for social tools. In terms of which ones I couldn't live without, I'd say none, honestly, as I didn't use anything when I started out so the lack of a pretty interface doesn't bother me.

Link building is what my agency specializes in, but my background is in technical SEO and I do some PPC for a client. We don't currently have a company blog so I tend to write for the SEO Chicks and Search Engine Land and do a few guest posts here and there. I don't tend to tweet that much about links either...I mainly tweet complete nonsense mixed in with some good articles I am reading.

I really like violent gangster movies, punk rock, Scandinavian mysteries, and Mexican food.

I think everyone learns differently, has different goals, and has different forms of inspiration. Whatever the best path is depends mostly on the person.

Originally I liked the idea of helping people and doing things I was passionate about. So for a lot of people starting a project around where they are passionate about it gives them advantages of already knowing the topic, understanding the lay of the land, and seeing potential entry points in the market. To this day I still have trouble working hard on a project that I am not that interested in.

That said, there are plenty of people who are all about the numbers & don’t need to be passionate about anything other than the potential returns of the idea.

If you are totally new to SEO & are starting your first project I like the idea of building in a market you know well because you are already engaged in it. At the same time, if you have capital and are driven by potential returns then there are lots of ways to enter the market with leverage (like buying an old site, buying a great domain name, etc.)

If you already have traffic make sure you install web analytics right away. And if you are just starting out it is worth installing a web analytics package right away as well.

I read whatever happens in our forums, news sites like the WSJ, a dozen or so industry blogs, the daily Search Cap newsletter, TechMeme & homepage threads on WebmasterWorld. I also read select sites in the domaining niche, the DN Journal weekly sales newsletter & some other sites about publishing and online marketing. Some of these broader reads are mostly reserved for the weekends when things have slowed down a bit.

A lot of what is put out is echos or rehashed stuff, so I think most people who have been in the game for a few years would be best off keeping the information consumption to an hour or two per day.

I almost never login to Facebook & rarely look at Google+. I also try to keep Twitter below 15 minutes a day. But part of the minimizing social media stuff I do is a reflection of us already running a community where there is generally a lot of the stuff getting hashed out & discussed.

I think it helps to focus so that you can become synonymous with a topic. Online is a game of leverage & ideas. If you come out too broad then you come out competing against everyone in your market. Whereas if you are much more focused then after you gain awareness you can always broaden out later.

I don’t think links will lose their value across the board anytime soon. And I also think social is an over-hyped fad. :) But on a category by category & keyword by keyword basis the layout of the search results may change drastically, due to things like larger ad units, product search, YouTube, Google Places, Google+ & other Google verticals inserted into the organic search results.

Search engines are becoming portals that preferentially rank their own content. Success not only depends on the quality of your strategy, but also on not being unlucky enough to be in one of the verticals that search engines decide to enter in a big way.

Search engines are currently in the process of becoming AOL & using search as the front door to their various verticals. Search is a zero sum game, so every inferior Google listing that is over-promoted comes at the expense of someone with an existing business in the space getting displaced.

While brands are riding high on the hog right now, when Google is the merchant of record everyone becomes “just another affiliate.”

Without web analytics you are flying blind. And if you give someone else all your granular analytics data for free (in an alleged purchase offer or some other) you are likely selling yourself short. The lesson in that part b there is that almost everyone is a competitor (especially true for the search engines themselves) & there is no risk in exercising caution!

I am a big fan of Excel & web analytics. A few weeks ago I did 1 hour consult calls with a couple different customers & both of them were not tracking their analytics data as granularly as they could have. As search gets more complex, tracking granular analytics data not only helps you isolate issues, but it also helps you plan budgeting for potential investments.

Excel is great because there are so many features baked into it & you can tie in all sorts of data: including things like traffic, rankings, visitor value, and links data.

While some sites pitch SEO as lifestyle, we like to look at SEO from a “business impact” perspective & track how ideas spread online. We tweet @seobook, but our main outlets are our community forums and the SEO Book blog.

I like reading & learning about economics. I also liked to play basketball a bit, but haven’t done so in a bit. Recently I have done a bit too much Mariokart on the Nintendo 3DS. I just bought a copy of the game for my wife too, so hopefully she will like it as much as I do. ☺

They should read the Beginner’s Guide to SEO by SEOmoz and attend one of the SMX conferences.

I recommend that you spend 80% of your time working and 20% of your time reading/researching/testing… The reason being is that if you spend too much time doing things like reading, you won’t ever get any work done. And if you work too much, you won’t stay on top of the current trends.

I don’t like the concept of sticking with a few trusted sites or sources as new places pop up all of the time. I am constantly on the hunt for more good information.

I also don’t pay to receive any news/information, instead I just continually network and talk with other SEOs and we share information.

You can be successful as a one man team. You just won’t be the best at everything verses if you specialized.

If you are a multiple person team you can potentially make more in the long run because you start becoming experts in specific areas and charge more for services, but your overhead will go up and in the short run it maybe hard to bite.

I think it will as it is very difficult to manipulate link growth unless you use shady tactics which you can be caught for. I think social will also start coming into play in the future, but I still feel links will make up a large part of the search algorithms.

Legitimacy. It is really hard to just pop up a site and achieve high rankings. You now have to have good content, create a good business, and most importantly solve customers problems. If your business can do that you are more likely to rank compared to if you just popped up a spammy website.

Clients are misinformed on what is best for their business. They like dictating what they want, even though it always isn’t best for their business.

Most SEOs aren’t able to make a good living selling services. It is easier to make a living working for a large corporation as selling services is not easy. It doesn’t matter how good of a SEO you are, all that matter is how good you can sell if you want to make money in the space. This is the reason companies like iProspect or iCrossing do really well… they are great salesmen.

If you build spammy/irrelevant links to your website, sooner or later you are going to get caught and your rankings are going to drop. You have to build really good quality links to stay at the top.

I don’t really use too many tools. The one I really miss is Yahoo Site Explorer.

I mainly focus on link building. That is my speciality and I try not to focus on anything else.

I love basketball, watching TV and just hanging out with friends.

They should start with Google's SEO starter guide and the SEOmoz beginner's guide, but after that, they should start creating their own sites. Even though I've read about every link building post known to man that's been published in the last 3 years, more than half of my link building knowledge has come from experience with clients, a few experimental sites, and now my blog.

If you're looking to be as time efficient as possible, really only 30 minutes a day, max. I use Feedly for my iPhone and in my browser to digest 20-30 RSS feeds a day; not having to go to each individual blog has saved me a ton of time.

When I'm tight on time like I have been for the last few weeks, I only read posts at 6:30-7:00 in the morning. This schedule makes sure that my reading doesn't overlap. If you have a set time like this, and if you don't try to read everything the moment it gets published, you can easily cut your reading/learning time in half.

Definitely, but you have to understand what part of the process you're responsible for, and what that requires of you. For example, I'm a link building consultant. All I do is build links, but I understand that in order to do that, I have to work with in-house copyrighters if I want to create linkable assets, something that's becoming increasingly important to link acquisition. If I didn't understand this requirement and didn't work with them, I wouldn't be nearly as successful with my efforts.

Of course they will. They'll have to.

For those who argue in favor of social, know that social signals only work for certain niches. For example, who would tweet about a plumbing article? Who would share a post about air conditioning vents on Facebook? While some niches, like Photography, Music, or Travel, can be measured using the social graph, others can't, and that's why links have been the staple of rankings since the dawn of search.

Even if social becomes a huge part of ranking, most signals only deal with authority, not relevance. The beauty of links is that the anchor text and co-citations help determine the relevance of the content. Social signals can't do this. A +1, Tweet, or Stumble can tell you the authority of the page (i.e. how many +1's, Likes, Tweets), but it's much harder, if at all possible, to derive relevance. That's why links will always be a factor.

To not concern themselves with most of this talk over change. If there is change coming, it's coming slowly. If it does ever come, you won't find any shortage of news & details on it, and you'll have a lot of time to adjust.

What you need to concern yourself with is staying focused. All this talk & future predictions is meaningless until some of it actually happens, and as we've seen lately with Google, there main concern isn't search right now (if it was, most of the paid links out there would be ineffective).

So, in 2012, stay focused and keep shipping.

Making them understand that everything ties in with one another. Within SEO, on-site, content, and links are all becoming one, and within their entire marketing plan, SEO is tying into social, conversion rate optimization, and even offline marketing.

Emphasizing that ranking in search engines is not a stand alone, disconnected practice is the most essential, and sometimes the most difficult, thing to pitch with new clients.

Figuring out what's worth your time and what isn't. Really, it's a huge challenge that everyone's completely overlooking.

People tell us we need to be on every platform, provide the best content in our industry, and build relationships with each of our customers (i.e. answering every email or every question we get on Twitter). It's not only overwhelming, but it's the wrong course of action. We need to figure out what we're great at, and run with it. Everything else will come once we do.

For example, everyone says you need to be on Google+, actively posting & sharing new things everyday (not to mention responding to every comment and interacting with other people and pages). Yet, the second most popular SEO Google+ page is SEO Book, a page that's posted 3 times, most recently the first of December.

The reason they have over 2,700 fans is because they did something great (blogging & their software). Their influence, marketing plan, and popularity all came when great posts were written and when their software was some of the best in the industry (and still is).

My point is, don't be on Pinterest because "you have to be". Don't write 2 blog posts every day just because an "expert" recommends it. The biggest challenge is finding what's worth your time. Find what you do best, do it to the best of your ability, and everything else will follow.

People won't give a crap about you unless you give a crap about them.

When I first started doing outreach for link building, I'd find a few relevant pages that I wanted links from, then I'd contact each person seeing if I could get one (the page said to suggest a link if I wanted, so I thought that's all I had to do). As you might guess, the success rates sucked.

Then I started doing things for webmasters (I dedicated an entire section to helping them out in my link building strategies post). It's ridiculous how awesome people can be if you do something great for them first.

This idea goes beyond link building. If you're in PR, get to know the person/company you're pitching and what they're likes and dislikes are. If you're in charge of user experience, find out your audience's taste by simply asking them. When they know you're listening, you've built up trust.

Ontolo is freakin' epic for prospecting. If you do a lot of link building, you NEED to check this tool out.

I've also started to really like Buzzstream. If you're an in-house or someone who spends a lot of time with fewer clients, this is a must have tool.

I live, eat, and breathe links. I blog about link building on my blog Point Blank SEO, and I share my favorite link building posts, tools, and news on Twitter and Google+.

I'm a huge sports fan. Since I'm from Tampa, I'm a die hard Buccaneers (no matter how bad they are), Rays, and Orlando Magic fan. If you ever want to bribe me, tickets to Raymond James Stadium is your best bet.

I think a little education and a whole lot of elbow grease is the way to go in SEO. Take a training class or three from people who have been practicing for a while and then get your domain online. Sign up with one of the SEO forums and participate, you learn so much from the people there, I really can't stress this one enough. Keep in mind any SEO training company offering "certification" is doing so under their company name; there is no governing or regulatory body in the SEO community. I'd also budget for conference attendance; you will learn the basics and network with others in the industry.

I spend a tremendous amount of time each week reading, surfing for sources and trying new tools I find. Being an early adopter is smart marketing and sometimes it's just about being first. But sometimes it's also about having "more" or "better" so it pays to constantly be on the lookout for new sources and ways of doing things. I do read trusted sources every day like Search Engine Land and the forums but I also have hundreds of alerts set bringing me back information I go through. Some I farm out to my VA but most I decipher and test.

Links will always be important; they are the fiber of the Internet. Links connect pages, social signals do not, that fact alone will always insure their dominance when it comes to ranking. I do think Google will step up its game eventually and have G+ be more influential since it's their toy but for now, you can still rank pages the way you always have. How much longer that will last is anyone's guess but until the general public embraces G+ the way they have Facebook, I think it will be business as usual.

For me it's figuring out how to trump universal search entries more than anything. I can deal with "regular" sites and even brands but Shopping, News etc type results? Not so much. SEO is no longer about optimizing your site; you now need to optimize your presence so your pages pop in universal result categories as well. It's not impossible but it takes much much longer now and is forcing SEO companies to become marketing companies if they want to survive.

Biggest lesson I've learned is not to make assumptions as it pertains to market research. You may *think* you know who is interested in your products but I guarantee you don't know it all. Market research before implementing any link marketing strategy is a must; otherwise you will be looking for links in all the wrong places. For example, many years ago I had a client selling wheelchairs who wanted a link campaign. Sounds like a slam dunk for the senior market right? Wrong. I focused on the 65+ market and failed, couldn't get the campaign to take off. After a little research into the type of customer buying the chairs, I realized I should have been focused on the military veterans market. Once I switched, the campaign took off and we met our goals. I didn't take time to research stats and past customers to find out what segment of the senior market was buying chairs. Dumb on my part but lesson learned :)

I can't live without my alerts services. I use paid and free versions, if you search on the term "web alerts", you will find them. No matter what type of tool you use, be sure to use more than one. None of the free or commercial tools on the market return the same results because all of them collect and analyze data differently.

My company, Alliance-Link offers website marketing training to companies with in-house SEO staffs. We focus on training your staff how to promote your site through strategic link building and social media campaigns. I tweet under @debramastaler on a wide range of online marketing subjects plus an occasional funny/snarky quip. I am a columnist on Search Engine Land and write about link marketing tactics and also review link building tools.

When I'm not carting my two kids all over Northern Virginia to some school/AAU basketball/volleyball/cross-country or church related function, I love to spend time in my garden and in the Smithsonian. I am a museum rat and can spend hours in them, we're lucky we live minutes from some of the best in the world. I am also a trained hospice volunteer, since moving to Northern Virginia two years ago I have not volunteered in a hospice but I plan to resume this fall. I know it may seem an odd choice of community service but I strongly believe we should respect death as we do birth.

My first recommendation would be to read SEOmoz’s beginner’s guide. From there, I would suggest starting a blog about a topic of great interest to you, no matter the cash incentive, and then attempt to do SEO through that process. You’ll learn what works, what doesn’t, how to improve rankings, how to hurt them, and how SEO tweaks can make a big difference without having to work in a hyper-competitive environment and/or need money to really move the needle. Once comfortable there, it might be worth thinking about additional avenues/diving into more complex affiliate and/or client sites.

There’s no hard and fast answer to this - but the best suggestion I have is to constantly iterate on your own process of reading and curation. You will begin to notice when you’re actually using some of the things you read - if you’re simply not, why are you reading? Sometimes it’s worth reading just for motivation and a break, even if you do nothing with it - which is a worthwhile tool, trust me - but as always, there’s a balance between learning and productive breaks and essentially skimming Facebook in work form.

Personally, I reassess Twitter feed constantly, and let things that get constantly pushed each day by many of the people I respect inform whether or not they’re worth reading. But that’s not to say I won’t read stuff that simply won’t get implemented - I enjoy SEO, and sometimes just reading content from people that are smart in the industry is enough to indirectly help my efforts elsewhere.

You can be a successful 1 man team in many niches, but by “one man team” that often means a one man team with capital - that is, the ability to pay people well to do things you simply can’t, like programming, design etc. As verticals get more competitive and more complex content becomes required, it simply isn’t possible to go about it on your own. However, I do totally recommend building yourself a “niche” in SEO - are you the SEO audit king for e-commerce sites? Capable of taking on complex architectual issues for large publishers? Content promotion for social friendly verticals? Or how about moving the needle in the darker, financial services verticals? All of these specializations can add to your value. My big niche is “link building” - my more targeted niche is “scalable link building” - and my true niche is “scalable link building in financial services verticals”.

You should utilize this same kind of narrow specification to develop career value and also make you stand out in a wash of other SEO agencies and analysts. It might turn you off to some potential clients or jobs, but the people who want to work with you will end up doing so at a much larger rate.

SEO will always be how the web connects itself. Even through Twitter, Facebook or Google + - these interconnections that form a giant web are the true indicators of a website. How search engines must adapt to evaluate these connections of the web will change, but the totality of that idea never will. Because of this, “links” on this higher level will never change. Will links of the more traditional sense change? Yes, I do believe they may see some diminishing value, because there are many other of these other “connections” that come to light. However, each vertical is different, and where many pieces of the web are necessary for say, technology news, they simply aren’t for many redundant subjects such as caskets or, say, rotary telephones. It’s a self-fullfilling prophecy, really - you should be already constantly leveraging social media for promotion in verticals where it could possibly be a signal - and you shouldn’t

I would keep doing the same things. Build content, go where your customers are. If your customers aren’t congregated anywhere (insurance, payday loans), keep doing the stuff that moved the rankings. They’ll still move the rankings. Aim to have the best, cleanest link profile in your vertical. Find ways to generate traffic and conversions from your links - yes, it’s possible. Test, test, test. Mess around on Google +. See if it does something for you. Build a Facebook profile if it looks like it can do something. The only way you get left behind is if you’re stuck in your ways and continuously operate in a vacuum.

I think many markets have moved to maturity, even in the medium-sized sectors. This means that it’s getting harder and harder to rank, which drives the marginal benefit of each subsequent link down. This can hurt. It can drive down profits. It causes us to think differently, forward-think about our link profile, and make sure link rot doesn’t cause attrition with our efforts. Or forward-profile link targets, knowing that they will gain or lose value over time.

Attention to detail - period. SEOs should schedule timed audits of our link profiles, site profiles, and the like. Is there anything that seems off? Something that clearly isn’t conducive to users? One anchor text that’s too heavy? If so, correct it. I’ve been penalized in the past by ignoring some of our smaller profile sites (notably the above the fold penalty), even though we had corrected the issue on every single other site in our portfolio.

Besides the usual suspects (SEOmoz and Raven Tools), my favorite new tool is Citation Labs link prospector. Next to (and combined with) Open Site Explorer, it has been an invaluable source for us in house and expect it to be a huge part of our efforts moving forward. I recommend it to any serious link builder.

I am most known for link building, specifically scalable link building. I'm an in-house SEO for Full Beaker, Inc, which works in lead generation in the financial services space. We own a large portfolio of websites, so my main job is to help develop them, funnel links in, and drive traffic in very competitive verticals. On the side, I like blogging about SEO and marketing on my link building blog.

I love Hacker News, and recently Inbound.org as aggregators of great, smart content. My second passion behind SEO is Crossfit - it's another great challenge. Get better every day, run faster, jump higher - it's great fun and good for happiness and balance. I also like to write, which helps inform my SEO and blogging, which is a nice balance.

1. Find trusted sources to learn from. Do not believe most things you read about SEO from sources you never heard of, or at least take everything you read with a grain of salt. It's incredibly important to stay objective at all times. Even people who have been in the game along time can, and sometimes do dole out bad information.
2. Read Search Engine Land (I especially Danny Sullivan's, Barry Schwartz's, Matt McGee's & Vanessa Fox's columns), plus other great resources like SEOmoz blog posts, whiteboard videos and webinars, the official Google Blog, the Google Webmaster Blog, Matt Cutts blog, Conversation Marketing, TopRankBlog, Distilled's blog, Vanessa Fox's blog,  and of course the newly launching How's Your Pony blog and tools and templates for marketers from yours truly.
3. Ask questions in SEOmoz's Q&A forums (great community for all kinds of SEO & inbound marketing questions) and in Webmaster World forums (especially good for super techie questions).
4. Use tools like SEOmoz's tools, Hubspot, Screaming Frog, Majestic SEO as a starting point to determine site issues, but remember that site audits need human assessment and strategy on top of what any automated tools can provide.
5. Know your site issues: Make sure your site is set up on Google Webmaster Tools (it's like a free SEO audit from Google). Keep an eye on Search queries performance (for queries and URLs), Crawl errors, HTML suggestions and site speed among other things in there.
6. Don't just focus on ranking: Make sure to focus on attracting traffic and converting it from search, not just where your site ranks for a couple of keywords.

No matter what level you are – from an SEO newcomer to executive level interested in SEO, it's important to understand today's SEO tactics not just for your own site or clients' site benefit, but also so you don't get called out publicly like this SEO agency, this SEO consultant, or this executive (the AOL Way).

Do whatever works for you to stay up-to-date. But as mentioned previously – make sure you're learning from trusted sources, not just anything you read online about SEO (in fact not most of what you read online about SEO). Here's what I do to stay on top of things:

1. Put a bunch of trusted sources in my feed reader, set that as my home page, and whenever I have extra time I go in and pick a few things to read.
2. Follow trusted sources on Twitter for the latest stories, tools, gossip, etc (many of the same trusted people I mentioned previously).
3. Have regular conversations with smart people you trust in the industry. Whether this is going out for drinks or getting together at meetups, having brainstorming meetings or putting together an exclusive email list for bouncing around ideas – it's good to be a part of the conversation, not just standing on the sidelines.
4. Seek out smart people at conferences and make it a point hang out with them and bounce around some topics.

It comes down to what you're comfortable with. SEOs can certainly be successful as a one-man team as long as they can either do all parts needed or hand off everything to a team for implementation. For example, David Mihm is highly focused on local SEO and he is very successful at assessing his clients' needs and providing strategies as a one man team.

Being a part of a bigger team is a lot of fun if you've got a collaborative and innovative group that keeps you motivated and gets things done. I had a great in-house team at Yahoo and we had our work cut out for us + a lot of challenges to face, so it was nice to have the support system of a team of SEO peers. Within the team each person had their own aspects of SEO that we were interested in and good at, so we could lean on each other for help and answers.

I've found that with SEO, the best path for you is the one that you're most passionate about – there's no 'normal'. So finding that area and exploring how to make it work for you and your clients - creating your own situation and your own path - is a luxury we're lucky enough to have.

Links are part of what I call 'popularity metrics'. Links have historically been one of the best measures of a site's popularity, and for that reason they have been a good indicator for search engines of which sites people like, which ones they find valuable, and which ones search engines should rank.

It's obvious that other popularity metrics have been in place for a long time but haven't gotten the kind of attention they should have until Google whipped out Panda and basically forced people to pay attention.

Combine social signals like the quantity and authority of people sharing a site's content on Facebook, Twitter, Google+, along with the time people spend on one site, how they click through and engage with content, and combine that with quality, quantity and context of links to a site and you have popularity metrics. For example, when I compare my site's popularity metrics with other sites that may appear in the SERPs for the same topic, I compare things like:

• The number of Facebook, Twitter and Google+ shares (from Open Site Explorer (it would be great to have the authority of the sharers too, but I don't know of a tool that does that yet)
• The number of external links to the site (from Open Site Explorer)
• The anchor text of those links (from Open Site Explorer)
• The number of domains linking to a site (from Open Site Explorer)
• The time people spend on the site (time on site/TOS from Alexa)
• The page views per visit (PPV from Alexa)
• The bounce rates (from Alexa)
• The traffic (from Alexa and/or Compete)

These are all indicators of a site's popularity and it's ability to attract and engage visitors, which you have to imagine Google is looking for too. You can download a sample of the worksheet I use to compare these metrics to try it out for yourself. Don't get too caught up in the actual numbers themselves since most tools are never actually spot on, but instead look at the comparisons. Who is popular and what are they doing to be so?

So it's not that linking is dead, it's just that there's more to the equation now. And like SEO throughout history, it gets more difficult to game.

I'd like to think that most people who are involved in SEO 'get it' by now – that being the popular kid on the block is very much what SEO is about today. The old SEO – mostly optimizing code – is still as important as it ever was. But if you have any competition at all, it's important more for setting context than it is for ranking well. I can tell you with 1,000% certainty that most of my clients who have high competition will never get anywhere by just optimizing their on-page SEO. In fact that's often why I'm brought in – the in-house SEOs or agencies are just not providing measurable results.

Even years ago when sites like Wikipedia and IMDB launched, their SEO wasn't fully up to par, but they were popular (popularity was likely more link-driven back then) and that was what they needed to propel them to the top of search results.

Google has been giving us very strong hints for a long time that quality sites that provide value to your target audiences are important. They've been telling SEOs this, so you know they've been giving us the heads up that things are still going to change, so make sure you're getting those hints. :)

Most potential clients I talk to either have a decent understanding of what makes SEO work these days and/or are very open to the approach of attracting and converting audiences through search rather than just optimizing meta tags and building links. Occasionally we all get the stick-in-the-mud guy (client or in-house executive) who insists that they just need to build links or that they want to 'win' for a particular keyword, and neglect to see the big picture. From those people I run (and recommend you do too). Nobody wins, including you, when a client is not willing to put the time and effort and love into creating a great product that people naturally want to go to, come back to, spend time on, link to, share, etc.

For the SEO industry the biggest challenge is trust. Clients don't know who to trust since there's so much bad information out there and so many innocent companies are getting burned by spending money on SEO employees and/or agencies that can't provide results. The industry already looks bad as a whole, and it's going to take a long time to change it.

For SEOs individually (including in-house SEOs, consultants and even agencies), gaining that trust and proving yourself is important, since businesses will demand this as more and more high-profile flubs make their way into the mainstream news (while smaller businesses are congruently getting ripped off too).

To tell it like it is.

In 2006 worked with a product manager at Yahoo who insisted he was going to forego everything we had been working on for SEO and just copy the competitor's title tags and meta descriptions and that was all we needed to do. So that's what he did. It made not an inkling of difference, wasted a bunch of people's time and looked bad for SEO instead of looking bad for him. Since he was the product manager he set the rules, and in retrospect I should have pushed back harder than I did.

In 2007 a Yahoo property we were working with decided that they could only do the on-page SEO factors. They didn't do any competitive research to determine what it might take to outrank the competitors. They launched and there were zero results from SEO. Didn't move the needle a bit, and in fact search traffic dropped for three months before coming back to just below where it was. I had let them do SEO the way they wanted to do it, and it just doesn't work that way.

Ever since then, competitive strategy and popularity metrics have been an imperative part of every job. If a client insists on taking shortcuts and I can't change their minds I won't work with them. I don't want my name on their disasters.

So glad you asked – tools are fun. I just gave a presentation on competitive research tools that you can download on this page (the Competitive Insights Toolkit). It has screenshots, prices and links to all of the tools. Some of my favorites right now are Blitzmetrics (an awesome competitive social metrics dashboard), NetBase (a consumer insights/social sentiment tool), and a few user testing sites and tools like UserTesting.com ($39 a test and you get video and write ups – this stuff is finally affordable to smaller biz)! I use Cacoo for sharable/collaborative architecture and wireframing with clients, and Screaming Frog and Site Orbiter for crawling sites, finding issues and showing visual sitemaps of a site.

Also check out this mega list of tools for inbound marketing Rand Fishkin put together recently – there are some gems in there too.

I focus primarily on strategies for outranking your competitors. This typically includes looking at who your audiences are, what they want, and how you can attract and convert them through the search channel (and oftentimes other online channels as well).

Most of the clients I work with are big companies in very competitive verticals, so to truly compete we've got to dig in and get at the heart of our prospective audiences and make them love us (aka link to us, share our content, spend time on our site, etc).  There's a lot more of focusing on audience needs and product strategy before getting to the technical SEO aspects.

The future intersections between marketing and technology, like the way chips can be embedded in our bodies for outgoing communication (to use a computer, turn on the lights when I walk in the room, etc) and potentially inbound communication (turn right at the next light, Macy's is having a sale around the corner on those boots you were looking at online last week) – being sent straight to your embedded microchip rather than just your phone which could be lost or stolen. Or at least to your contact lens interface.

I also get excited about snowboarding, mountain biking, racquetball, sports cars, remodelling our 1964 Eichler, and being entertained by public train wrecks like Carrot Top and everyone on Celebrity Apprentice.

1. Start with Google's SEO resources for beginners;
2. Read SEO for beginners from SEOmoz (absolute must!);
3. Join SEOmoz community (it's one of the few SEO communities that work great for both newbies and advanced SEOs). If you are really new, don't go in-depth (i.e. don't try to understand the blog), browse the QA section instead! Another good advantage of SEOmoz is that the newbie is mostly encouraged there.

After going through the above three steps, most people start calling themselves SEO experts

There's no such a thing as "too much" learning (provided you are smart enough to filter out irrelevant suggestions, FUD, etc). So my answer: learn as much as time permits. When I was starting, I was reading for 5-7 hours a day. Now it's like 1-2 hours – not because I consider myself too smart, but because I can't afford the time!

As for digesting, different people have different recipes for that. My way: structure the information properly: this will save your time for finding it later on as well as organize your overall knowledge. My very old post at Youmoz explains my own way to structure knowledge using Google Docs.

I used to read everything, now it's really just the selected "must-follow" resources like SEOmoz blog, Search Engine Journal and Search Engine Land for news, Mashable for overall buzz. I also have the "Top Friends" on Twitter who I follow very closely and they share best Search and Social content daily.

That was the main reason I, at some point, stopped providing "SEO consulting" services.  I didn't have a team, I didn't want to join one and I was unable to provide all-in-one services. To be an SEO you can't just point the client to the weak sides on his site and move on. You should work with the dev team to optimize the site; you must work with the content team to work out the working content marketing strategy; you have to work with the blogger outreach team to create the great pitch, etc.

I found that focus is the only way to go for the independent consultant: let people know you by what you are best at!

The role of links will be steadily diminishing throughout the years. But looking at how strong their impact still is, I don't see them disappear as a ranking factor in 1, two or even three years.

There is nothing new in change. SEO is a very young industry and it's been rapidly changing from the very start. The good thing is, if you focus on providing quality, nothing is affecting you!

I am not pitching my services any longer, but I used to. When I did SEO consulting, my biggest issue was pricing. How the heck should I determine how much I did? Sometimes I was completely driven away with competitor research: browsing sites, links, mentions for hours and even days. Should the client pay for me getting excited? I never ended up with the good way to evaluate my own services.

The biggest challenge is the overwhelming amount of FUD (Fear, uncertainty and doubt) evolving in our industry. People rush to spam, build crappy links, buy links – simply because some "guru" recommends doing those stupid things and sells his own tools to do that. As the owner of the active community, I have hard time fighting those myths myself. We have to deal with those completely lost people daily. And only few of them actually get the proper way to do SEO and secure the safe future for their sites. Others leave to continue that nonsense battle with Google.

Play long-term. Trying to achieve or expecting fast results will ruin your business. Plan your business the way you can afford to wait!

I'd recommend taking a look at Citation Labs, because that's the outstanding contact finder tool. If you are into ethical link building, don't forget our MyBlogGuest as well. We are able to make the whole guest blogging process much easier while maintaining the win-win high-quality approach!

• I am not a frequent blogger but I am trying to give some authentically useful advice in each of my posts – so you may want to check me out at SEOsmarty.com (I also guest blog a lot: here are my most active guest contributor accounts.)
• I also tweet quite a lot (be warned! :)) but all of my tweets are relevant – follow me at @seosmarty
• I have also joined Internet Marketing Ninjas recently: and blog quite a lot for them!

I am lucky: my hobby is my profession. I don't have much time for anything except managing my own projects, blogging and doing client work. But I do enjoy spending time with my family. I love travelling and DIY. You can see some of the staff I am interested in on my Pinterest page

I think to be proficient in seo – you need to be directly involved in getting pages to rank and improving traffic to a site in general. I got into it in a big way when I had a hobby site. A few hundred pages – no ads. I worked on it for about a year before I had any intention of monitizing it – it's main aim was to get me web dev work. I would avoid ads on a brand new site if possible for as soon as you start monitizing a site in a particular manner it is classified as a particular type of site – and liable to ranking  peculiarities in Google. There's a lot of good guides on the net these days to help with SEO and many good communities out there to help you. Stick to the basic tenants of good seo – don't try to work out exactly how Google works as you cant hope to understand everything on a granular level. Keep it VERY SIMPLE on site – get as many links as you can off of REAL websites if you want more traffic from Google. Track and collect data on your visitors as much as you can, while you still can.

Well, for me, I have been in this game for years – so I have kind-of-read-it-all-before. But I am actually really interested in SEO – so I read as much as I can in my spare time. I follow Search Engine Land and SERoundtable to get the latest news – and read a lot of different blogs. I usually use my Twitter community to pick out the best stuff – Summify is a good service for this too to get the very best stuff from Twitter emailed through at the end of every day.

I was a one-man-band for a few years and did ok J - if you have a passion for ranking pages and driving traffic you soon become proficient in lots of areas of seo and linkbuilding. A good seo should have dabbled in just about everything. A good seo knows to ignore 90% of the info out there and just hammer hammer hammer the simple stuff.

Ask the link 'spammers'. They will tell you when links don't count anymore. Its not ALL about links for SEO in 2012 – it just MOSTLY is. Will this balance shift? – probably – but it wont disappear overnight. I see plenty of the competition spamming links and getting good results. Social media can drive a lot of traffic – but you really should invest in some decent content on your site – and not just rely on your "mates votes".

There's a lot of new stuff to get into – rich markup etc – which can help with seo in 2012. The basics haven't changed for years – INTERNAL ANCHOR TEXT LINKS, PAGE TITLES, UNIQUE CONTENT, KEYORD IN URL, ALT Text... I like to keep it simple on site and just get as many IBL as possible. In a lot of cases – the old advice is still the best. Conversion rate optimisation is an area which fascinates me at the moment – and one which anyone can benefit from looking into.

We at Hobo don't pitch for business. Usually we rely on referrals for new business. I only work on a few new projects at anyone time - UNDOUBETDLY the biggest challenge in all my years is explaining to people how long seo takes - which is of course dependant on the current state of play with their website. Nobody likes to hear – "This will take a year"..... it is something I still struggle with sometimes – especially with new clients.

Other SEOs :)

Keyword Research - Keyword Research - Keyword Research! Sometimes it takes a lot of effort to get a page ranking only to find out your going for the wrong terms!

Also – spam. Understanding how and why spam works is eye-opening to say the least – and makes some of the "white hat" seo advice out there seem very embarrassing indeed. If you understand how spam works – you can come up with not-as-spammy techniques to help your own seo.

Lastly – Excel. Recently I took something it took 4 weeks for a few people to do and got excel to do it in 10 mins. 'Get the champagne out' moment. If you are not using excel with seo and web developement – you are missing out!

Excel + SEO Tools for Excel. I have written about my other favourite seo tools - http://www.hobo-web.co.uk/best-seo-tools/

My job is to get a site ranking for particular keywords and then get more and more traffic to it (usually with a content creation program and a linkbuilding program). I am not that much of a publicity whore these days. I purposely stay off Twitter as much as I can and try and focus on the work at hand – which can be difficult! I don't blog that much at all these days either unless I have something useful to add to the noise. The only place you'll probably find me – when I am not doing interviews -  is my blog - http://www.hobo-web.co.uk/seo-blog/

There are non-seo related topics?

My work-life balance is unfortunately very out of balance. When I am not SEO'ing I am usually watching alarmist documentaries about PEAK OIL, US & WORLD POLITICS, Food and Energy conspiracies or the rise of Facist corporations making huge profits at the expense of our kids and grandchildrens lives. Lets just say I am quite alarmed. :)

I originally earned my stripes at WebmasterWorld. While there is a lot more noise there now then there was back when I started, I still think the WMW forum libraries are an awesome source for not only current, but historical SEO information (here's is the link building library as an example. I also think Aaron Wall has an amazing wealth of knowledge in his SEOBook subscription based forums. The price isn't cheap, but the information is valuable. MarketMotive is another paid training option. Their SEO training is run by Todd Malicoat who has been in the industry for a long time. If someone is using WordPress, they definitely need to check out Yoast's guide to WordPress SEO.

Most importantly, they should simply do it. Get a site up, start working on it and testing every theory you come across to find out what works and what doesn't. All the reading and studying in the world won't do a damn thing unless you're actually "doing" it.

If you're spending more than half your day reading rather than implementing, you're doing it wrong. I long ago gave up trying to follow every publication in the search world. For insight, I read the SEOBook blog. I get all my search engine related "news" (algo updates, etc) from Search Engine Land. Those are the only two publications I read regularly. I find the rest of my stuff "worth reading" by following a limited number of people on Twitter and reading any retweets that catch my eye.

I think that answer depends on how long you've been in the industry. Those of us who have been doing SEO since the nineties have been able to learn the information incrementally as it came along and keep adding it to our arsenal of knowledge. Someone beginning to learn SEO tomorrow would have a much harder time learning multiple facets of the industry all at once.

That said, I think there's a limit on how much you can really be "advanced" at no matter how long you've been in. For instance, I'm not a specialist in video or mobile optimization. When I have a need to know something, or provide something to a client regarding those industries, I contract help from people who have made it a point to focus on those specific sub niches of online marketing.

I think links will remain important, but what goes into "validating" for quality and "valuing" those links for ranking purposes on the search engine's end has definitely changed over the last few years. It's no longer as simple as a link on a decent site with the right anchor like it was years ago. Anchor percentages, social media signals accrued by the linking page, where the link is on that page added to the social signals, value, trust, age and populairty of your own site - it all plays into the overall value of each individual link. I don't think any of these are new factors though. I just think the engines publicly admitting they're factors is new.

I don't think too much has changed, but I'd say understanding social impact on search rankings is important for an "all around SEO" while those servicing local clients need to make local search techniques and things like learning Google Places optimization a top priority.

It depends on what aspect of SEO they focus on. Small business SEO consultants have different challenges than e-commerce SEO consultants and they both have different challenges than affiliate marketers whose primary affiliate marketing efforts are done via SEO and so on. I think the "biggest challenge" is the same "biggest challenge" we've faced for years. And that's figuring out what information to trust and whose advice is continually worth testing.

On a personal level? That SEO "fame" is bullshit. On a professional level? Always value your time above everything else.

For a long time, I shied away from any commercially available tools. A few years back I tried Raven Tools and was truly impressed. I've been an evangelist for their suite of tools ever since. I use it for both my affiliate business/sites and also have a second account that I use for the agency side of things. I admittedly don't even utilize even 50% of it's features and yet still find it to be the most valuable of all the tools I use.

I started in the industry as an affiliate marketer. I own a wide range of smaller niche sites, as well as a website publishing company called MFE Interactive that focuses on building affiliate brands. I also do a limited amount of consulting through my agency, focusing primarily on SEO audit services, link building strategies and actual link building services. I co-own an incorporation service and also co-founded and co-own a work at home mom advice site with Missy Ward (it's our attempt at "giving back"). I definitely like to keep myself busy. But I'll always have the biggest love and passion for the affiliate side of my business at heart.

I'm a huge football chick and a die hard Tampa Bay Buccaneers fan (I'm still recovering from our 4-12 season this past year). I'm also an avid pool player and an official Golden Tee addict. I even have an official Golden Tee machine in my house.

Much of what's written in SEO (especially the GOOD stuff) is from the perspective of an expert with biases and talents that they don't realize impact their recommendations or suggestions. Further, recommendations that make sense and have impact for a site with 1 million pages might not apply for sites of 100 pages. That's not saying you shouldn't learn from reading, but I'm definitely a believer in taking action – I think the best education is in doing. Get the basics from reading and then go out and do the work for a friend or family member's site. Volunteer to help a local non-profit. Build your own site. Nothing beats having real, concrete goals and objectives.

Read as little as possible, honestly (unless it deals with process enhancements). Your best tool would be a trusted friend who DOES read everything and tells you what you really actually need to know or understand. Barring that I think you should be in a forum or two and be sure to meet the SEOs in your area so you can have monthly beer nights. I do personally watch my twitter stream for news and insights but try not to get sucked down too many rabbit holes!

I think you should specialize, use that as a "wedge" into the market and slowly build out your services as demand requires it. At least... that's what I'm doing. I'll let you know how it works out in a couple of years ;)

I think the impact of links will diminish – namely because the impact of rankings are diminishing with all the 6-packs, 12-packs, customized results and Google properties encroaching on the SERPs. To answer your question though, I don't think we'll see link impact diminish significantly this year.

Conversions. Make sure that your traffic is valuable (are you targeting the right Kws?) and that it's value is being maximized on the site.

I pitch link building services. As an agency (of 1 plus contractors) I'm relatively new (under a year) and the biggest problems are usually in helping connect the dots between my price and the value that comes from my work.

Links can't fix everything.

I'm biased, but I'm definitely enjoying my new http://linkprospector.citationlabs.com :) It's a tool for scaling up your link prospecting efforts. As a link builder I could not live without it (and excel... oh yes and MajesticSEO :)

I work in link building and link building tool creation.

Ask me about my 2 year old son and you'll never get rid of me ;)

It depends on goals. If you're trying to get a job as an SEO, you'll need to set your expectations – if you're brand-new in the industry, look at getting an internship, and assume you'll be putting in a lot of time on link-building and the like. You'll learn a ton at the same time, though, so this is your best bet.

If you're in-house and just looking to learn SEO, read The Art of SEO. It's a great simple-to-super-advanced guide to get you started. Then, get on Twitter and start following folks like Will Critchlow, Tom Critchlow, Rand Fishkin and Wil Reynolds. They'll point you to all sorts of the latest, best content on the subject.

Also, read Ogilvy on Advertising. Yeah, it's dated. No, it has nothing to do with the world of SEO. But SEO is marketing, and Ogilvy's book is the best introduction to the craft you'll find.

I use Google Reader. I subscribe to, at last count, about 1,000 different blogs and feeds. Every day, 4-5 times/day, I zip through the headlines, looking for interesting stuff. If I find something, I either add it to readitlaterlist.com so I can revisit it, or I read it right then and there. I also follow the big SEO brainiacs and make sure I'm up on the stuff they talk about. For the sake of your sanity, I recommend starting with 10-20 blogs, though, not 1,000. Get used to Reader and the routine. Then you can increase your subscriptions a little bit at a time, if necessary.

I also operate 10-15 sites purely for testing. I make tweaks and changes to them to see how those changes affect their rankings for nonsense words. This was more important 4 years ago than it is now. But it's fun to have a laboratory, so I keep doing it.

A true SEO has to know all aspects of the craft: Offsite (links and social media, as well as other citations) and onsite (site technology, content strategy).

If you don't, that's OK, but then you need to be on a team where other specialists can focus on the other stuff.

I don't think links will be as important at the end of 2012 as they are now. But don't count them out. If they become 'only' 30% of the rankings equation, they're still really important.

Google doesn't tell us which components matter how much in their algorithms. Neither does Bing. So it'd be a mistake to try to base strategy on those kinds of numbers. Instead, look at the search engines' intent as indicated by the changes they're making. Both Bing and Google are working hard to filter out spam and deliver personalized, super-relevant results. They're pulling in a multitude of new ranking factors to do that, including writing quality, social media citation, non-linking citations and who-knows-what-else. Act accordingly.

Learn how to write! Learn content strategy. And learn a scripting language or some other way to mash up all the great data that's out there for the taking. These three skills will future-proof any SEO's career, because they're always important, and always will be important, long after folks stop calling it 'SEO'.

The hardest part? Getting them to understand what SEO really is. Most have heard about buying links and meta tags, but that's it, regardless of company size. How do you take someone with that level of knowledge, teach them enough to make a good decision, and then pitch them without going broke in the process? It's tough every time I do it.

Unfortunately, I've learned that the biggest preventer of SEO success is company inertia. The bigger the organization, the more forces there are that resist change. SEOs have to be diplomats, or very forceful advocates, or both. If you aren't, then all the SEO expertise in the world won't matter – you're just providing really excellent survival advice to a ship full of corpses.

SEMRush and OpenSiteExplorer are my two favorite pay tools. Google Spreadsheets is my favorite free tool – I can use it to pull together data from 3-4 different services in a few minutes. It's a fantastic platform.

I tend to tweet a lot about marketing in general, techie stuff and content marketing. I guess I tend to talk about all of SEO, when you really look at my tweet stream. And my cats – you'll probably hear about my cats. Oh, and Dungeons and Dragons, periodically.

I'm an avid, yet eternally out-of-shape cyclist. I own 5 bikes (including 2 tandems) at last count.

I do play a lot of tabletop and pencil & paper games, like Dungeons and Dragons and Battletech. That makes me more than a nerd – I'm an OLD nerd.

After that, ask me about how brilliant my kids are.

I also love to talk politics with anyone who agrees with me.

The first step is to read ... a lot. There's a tremendous amount of material out there that can help someone new understand SEO. This shouldn't be limited to just a few sites or blogs but a wide variety of sources. This will give them a solid foundation of SEO theory. The next step is to actually gain some experience. For this I recommend running a blog or site and experimenting with everything you've read and learned. There's just no substitute for doing it and seeing what happens in the 'real world'.

I spend up to 3 hours a day reading and keeping up on what's happening in search. This is critical for me to connect the dots and continue to see emerging trends. I do this almost solely through Google Reader and an enormous amount of RSS feeds.

I add new feeds when I come across them, whether that's on Google+, Twitter or Inbound.org. At that point it's about quickly understanding how to manage all of that information. Some of the value is in simply seeing trends across all those feeds. What new tools or techniques are being discussed? And like it or not, you don't read everything. You're scanning a lot of those articles. You begin to get good at figuring out which ones deserve more attention and a full read. I think this just takes time and practice.

I still think the solo SEO can be very effective, but clearly each person is going to have strengths and weaknesses. For me, I want to be able to know every part of the SEO equation. I believe that's my job and that's what will make me valuable moving forward. It's also important since I need to assess the expertise of those I do partner or outsource work to.

I've seen specialization work though. Focusing on a certain vertical (eCommerce, Local, Video) can definitely lead to success. I think some of it depends on the type of career a person wants.

I've always believed that links were overvalued by most in the SEO community. That said, they remain important, and will be for the foreseeable future. They will likely diminish in value over time as social signals become more useful. But those social signals will only augment the link graph, not replace it.

I think this is the year that social signals will actually start to matter. In particular I see some sort of Author Rank being attempted by Google to help rank search results based on an author's reputation and/or authority. It could very well be more disruptive than Panda.

Don't ignore Google+. Jump in now and start using it. It's not going away any time soon.

Finally, make the transition from keywords to query intent. Stop targeting solely on what (keyword) and start satisfying the why (query intent).

The biggest challenge I find is establishing realistic expectations and timelines. Many still want to know how much a specific recommendation might impact traffic. Sometimes I can give a ballpark estimate but usually I have to educate clients that it's a combined effort. In addition, many want audits to be complete very quickly. They don't realize the time and due diligence necessary to properly complete an audit while also maintaining a client base.

The next challenge is in showing that SEO isn't just about technical optimization. Getting a client to accept that you're essentially an Internet marketer and that you're recommendations on conversion rate optimization and user experience are valid can sometimes be trying.

The biggest challenge SEOs face right now is the poor reputation SEO has acquired from those both in and out of our industry. That and a general lack of definition of what SEO is right now. Add to that the new buzzword fields of ‘content marketing’ and ‘inbound marketing’ and SEO becomes even more difficult to explain to some clients.

Always do the work. Don’t rely on just reading about it or trusting some SEO expert. Do the work yourself. Every site is different and you might find that some things work and some things don’t. At the end of the day doing the work keeps you connected and grounded. Never lose that.

I don't rely on that many tools. Many tools keep me too far away from the actual site or work. I don't like that. I find SEOmoz and Raven to be good. I love ScreamingFrog and Google Refine. I've been doing more with ImportXML and of course, Excel is always the old standard.

I am an SEO generalist with a focus on understanding how search works and where it's all going. I Tweet approximately 10 times a day on a variety of topics including SEO, PPC, UX, CRO and Entrepreneurship. I try to only Tweet what I think is truly valuable or interesting.

You can also keep up with me on Google+ which is a mix of professional and personal. There you'll get the same content as you might on Twitter but mixed with art, humor and music.

I like literature and am always up for a talk about a good book. Ditto with TV and Movies. Science fiction is a theme through all three of those mediums. I’m a bit of a foodie and also a bicycling fan.