Graywolf (who started SEO blogging right around the time I did) shot over some questions on Friday Night.

1. What are some of the biggest mistakes you’ve made that you feel other people could learn from?

Loaning money to friends: don’t do it. You’re better off just giving them the money or not giving it to them. If they were creditworthy, they wouldn’t be asking you for money.

But that’s probably not what you meant. You mean in the SEO space don’t ya?

That’s actually a tougher question. A few times I’ve been caught using the same or very similar techniques to rank too many of my sites. What happens is that something will work incredibly well for a long period of time (think blogrolling like 5 years ago) and we SEOs will get all excited about it and rely too heavily on that particular technique. Then Google makes a change (that doesn’t bann you), but drops the rankings for pretty much all of your sites.

2. In your opinion what are some of the biggest misconceptions people in the SEO space cling to?

I’m probably not the best person to ask about this, as I probably don’t have my finger on the pulse of the people in SEO space as well as many of the people who go to all the different conferences and whatnot. If I had to answer, it would either be 1. that they over-weight the value of social media or 2. that they do not apply the same ROI standards to Organic Search that they do to PPC.

The Goal is not Raw Traffic or Rankings. The goal is profits and ROI.

3. What are some ways people can push the limits with universal search?

Grab a DB of all the Areas where you niche serves (all cities/states in the USA for example). Make sure you have the results Google is looking for with Universal Search in your network. It’s not overly complicated to make scraper-database NEWSMASTER sites that serve every local area.

Mix and match with modular databases that give local information – including whatever it is you are selling and presume the customer to be searching for with a “area” suffix.

I saw that you turned off comments on your blog. Consider making it so that only registered users can comment; that seems to work better than akismet. In the same post you mentioned you had a lot of haters posting comments: I never realized you pissed so many people off.

You must be doing something right!