Rand Fishkin is one of the best-known faces in the search marketing industry these days, and with good reason. He can be relied upon to come up with useful information on any SEO topic, even stuff that’s barely hit the news yet. People like him are molding the industry and deserve to be watched closely.

First I’d like to thank you Rand, for taking the time to answer my questions. It’s wonderful to have such an eminent SEO guest on Marketmou!

It was difficult to try and arrive at a set of questions that might elicit some information no one’s ever seen before:
At least I hope that this information will be helpful to search marketing and SEO people everywhere.

Marketmou: Let’s start with a leading question: Do you think the SEO industry is pretty much saturated with great SEO consultants? Or do you think there’s room for improvement here. I know that many people who come in through SEO copywriting (as I did) perceive the potential to make a good living—but in reality I personally see that there are far too many companies out there who underrate SEO and don’t want to pay what it’s worth.

Rand Fishkin: In my view, there’s a huge lack of talented SEO consultants, and a great deal of opportunity for smart folks who can market themselves well. This is a field that’s still filled with gunslingers – it’s the wild west of the web – and anyone with brains, experience and a proven resume can waltz into a company that doesn’t do SEO well and help them to earn thousands, even millions of dollars very quickly.

Marketmou: First a few questions for people seeking SEO help (as opposed to those within the industry): Do you see any benefits in the introduction of industry standards and certification? There are a few places online where you can get SEO certification and some of them are even ISO-backed, but are they any good?

Rand Fishkin: I haven’t heard great things about any of the existing certification programs. I will say this – it’s something that SEOmoz is looking into, but it’s exceptionally hard to rate SEO skill without seeing actual projects from start to finish. Perhaps a basic set of standards would be good to at least vet the folks who are playing a scam role in the search industry right now.

Marketmou: What advice do you have for an online business looking for SEO help? Do you have any tips for picking SEO consultants who do a great job?

Rand Fishkin: Well, we have the recommended list – www.seomoz.org/article/recommended – but other than that, I’d probably repeat what many others have said in the past. Ask for some references, look at the clients they’ve worked with, ask them to explain the process of SEO and how they see the current algorithms operating. If you can at least familiarize yourself somewhat with how the field works, you’ll be able to see through the scammers and find someone who has a grasp on reality.

Marketmou: There’s still a lot of controversy going on about whether it’s best to get a domain name with a keyword in it, or whether you’re better off focusing on your brand when choosing a domain name. What’s your stance?

Rand Fishkin: If you’re going to build a big brand and have the patience to wait 6-12 months to start dominating for particular keywords, the domain name isn’t much of a hurdle (except at Live.com, who loves keywords in the domain). I certainly wouldn’t spend more than $10-$20K buying any domain name these days.

Marketmou: To be successful at search marketing or SEO, it’s essential to track what you’re doing; do you recommend Google Analytics for tracking website traffic and progress? Or do you think it’s better to go with an independent paid application?

Rand Fishkin: I like the Google analytics, but it is a bit basic, especially when it comes to customized conversion tracking. I’m a huge fan of Indextools, but have also heard great things about a program called “Fireclick.”

Marketmou: Are you for, or against the use of meta tags? What do you say to those who insist that they’re not used by the search engines?

Rand Fishkin: The meta description tag is still used as the snippet by every one of the engines, so I don’t know who would tell you to ignore it. It may not be used for rankings, but it is absolutely used to help you push up your CTR (like the copy of your search ads). Meta keywords is basically useless, though. I don’t recommend that anyone use it – it’s giving away competitive intelligence and in our testing, it had no impact on rankings in any of the engines.

Marketmou: Thanks for clarifying that Rand. It’s a complicated issue. One of your main areas of expertise is link development, and you’ve recently stated on SEOMoz that in your opinion one-off link purchases (as opposed to bulk purchase of links) would most likely go undetected by the search engines. What advice can you give to someone looking to purchase truly useful links?

Rand Fishkin: I actually just wrote an entire blog post answering this question today – http://www.seomoz.org/blog/the-art-of-buying-links-under-the-radar

Marketmou: Would you agree that a pay per click campaign can actually help a site’s organic ranking?

Rand Fishkin: In a roundabout way, yes. If you pull in web traffic through paid search, you’re probably more likely to attract some links to your site from folks who might click those links, as well as improve your branding overall. I don’t, however, believe there’s any correlation between paid search and organic rankings at any of the major engines (except Baidu in China and Yandex in Russia).

Marketmou: Everyone keeps screaming that reciprocal links will now hamper your progress with the search engines. Do you agree? Is it still worth pursuing reciprocal links?

Rand Fishkin: We’ve seen Google take some pretty harsh, direct steps against reciprocal linking in specific verticals (like Real Estate). I’d be paranoid to engage in it on any type of large scale at this point – I think you’re setting yourself up for trouble.

Marketmou: Does traffic contribute to page rank? If a site was getting lots of healthy traffic, could it make up for lack of backlinks?

Rand Fishkin: Interesting question – I’ve heard of the search engines in patent applications using traffic as a litmus test for legitimacy, but since none of them can actually monitor a site’s traffic (unless you’re running Google analytics or all your visitors have the Yahoo/MSN/Google toolbar installed) it seem to me a moot point. In an ideal world where they could measure traffic and it couldn’t be gamed, I think they might try to, but for now, I’d say no.

Marketmou: Lastly, is it best to create a subdomain for your blog? Or is it better to have it as part of your main domain?

Rand Fishkin: I’ve seen instances where the subdomain wasn’t treated with the full “respect” and authority as the main domain, so I’d say from a best practices standpoint, keep your blog in a subfolder rather than a subdomain.

Thanks Rand, I really appreciate you taking the time to answer these questions. I’m sure we all agree that there is some really useful information here for beginners and experienced search marketers alike.