confessions of the seo marketers

by Kieran WilsonDigital Marketing Director

SEO is a confusing and controversial topic in the marketing world.We tried to get some clarity.

Here’s some of their answers. The full post, “Confessions of the SEO

Marketers,” is published on Marketing Tech Blog.

We reached out to top contributors in the Moz community and asked them:1. What SEO tactic that everyone loves is actually worthless?2. What controversial SEO tactic do you think is truly valuable?3. Currently, what’s the biggest SEO myth?

Currently, what’s the biggest SEO myth?

“There’s a lot of mythology that building good, unique content should be good enough to get rankings. That hasn’t been the case for a long time, and good enough to be crawled and indexed doesn’t mean good enough to rank. If you’re not producing the best result in the top 10, why should Google rank you?”

- Rand Fishkin, Moz

“When someone says ‘SEO my site’ what that really translates to is, I have no idea how to be relevant on the web and need help. SEO is not a stand-alone pursuit any longer. If you have your SEO person in a silo off to the side, every other aspect of your digital presence will suffer. SEO’s Venn diagram now overlaps with writers, graphics, public relations, video and R&D.”

- Phil Buckley, Curagami

“That SEO is all that you need. There is a common perception that you hire a good SEO company, they will help you make millions of dollars within months. Not true. Business growth depends upon several different factors that include quality of service or product, brand value, market changes, marketing, customer services and more. SEO is just one part of marketing.”

- Moosa Hemani, SEtalks

“Something I always say to people new to SEO is to not believe all the hype. That goes for not taking Google’s word as gospel and to not believe every SEO blog post you read.

Truth is, the majority of SEO blog posts are absolute bollocks. Most are theory, a lot are fiction – a lot of SEO bloggers don’t know when to shut up and a lot of them wouldn’t know humility if it jumped up and hit them in the face (you can make your own mind up on whether you see this is as ironic, or meta).”

- Tom Roberts, @tjproberts

What controversial SEO tactic do you

think is truly valuable?

“Page Rank Sculpting is one of those areas that have mixed feelings between those in the technical SEO world. However, this has to be handled carefully because you don’t want to end up with issues when the Googlebot comes along to visit. Get it right, and there are definitely benefits to be had.”

- Andy Drinkwater, iNet SEO

“I have to say guest posting, it’s one of the most valuable ways of getting your brand and proposition in front of a bigger or another audience then you already have. As I work for a publisher I often get terrible guest posting ideas and/or pitches. You should always bring your ‘A’ game, or at least try.”

- Martijn Scheijbeler, The Next Web

“Many SEOs ignore doing things that get them a nofollow link, but I believe there’s huge value in nofollow links that might send qualified traffic.”

- Rand Fishkin, Moz

“While it is only conversationally controversial, I still believe exact match domains (EMD’s) and partial match domains have SEO value. That does not mean you cannot rank ahead of someone with an EMD if you don’t have one. It means there is some value to it if you can get an EMD or PMD.”

- Robert Fisher, drumBEAT Marketing

What SEO tactic that everyone loves

is actually worthless?

“I think one pervasive tactic that does need to die is the unpersonalized, cold-outreach for guest blogging. The vast majority of these requests are poorly done and I suspect that when they do get a response, it’s often from exactly the sites where you don’t want to be guest posting.”

- Rand Fishkin, Moz

“I would probably say Meta Keywords can be a little worthless. Some webmasters still love spamming this field. For Bing they may yield value, yet for Google I’d say very limited value.”

- James Norquay, Prosperity Media

“Link building. It has always been silly to me to spend more time on link building tactics then on creating the content in the first place. Make your page better than any other page on web about the same subject, or don’t publish it.”

- Patrick Sexton, Feed The Bot

“I wouldn’t say that rel=authorship is worthless, it seems it will be tremendously valuable in the future, but I think it not a major factor at the moment. Now is the time to build the foundation, it isn’t yet the time to see results.”

- Danny Dover, Lifelisted.com

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Confessions of the SEO Marketers is published in full at Marketing Tech Blog.