It's been an extremely busy year for the good folks at Google, not only did they roll out the game-changing Panda Updates, but now they have increased the stakes by implementing Google Fresh. This recent algorithm update is based on the Caffeine architecture introduced by Google a year ago and supposedly makes Google's listings much fresher.

Yes, you read the title right.  Less traffic from organic search traffic can be better when the site attracts the wrong kind of traffic, and fewer leads can be better when the site attracts the wrong kind of leads.

Sometimes SEOs and site owners encounter the problem of their sites suddenly going down in the search engine results pages for no particular reason, it seems. When this happens, it is often hard to figure out why your rankings nose-dived.

Not a week goes by where a reader or a client doesn't ask me a question based on some bad SEO advice they heard or read somewhere. Most of the time they don't know that it is bad advice. They assume that if they read it in a blog, went to a seminar, listened to a webinar or even discussed it with a company that provides SEO as a service, the advice must be valid.

While many bloggers and the media are calling Google’s search results out lately, most of the focus has been on the somewhat low-quality pages that show up for informational long-tail searches. My concern for Google's search results is different, however. I'm tired of Google (and Bing) returning sites that use anchor text link spam to get on the first page of results.

It's official. Google and Bing include social signals – namely, links that get tweeted on Twitter – when determining rankings in their search results. This was confirmed by Danny Sullivan in his December 1, 2010 post on Search Engine Land, and it was likely a factor for a while before that.

When you begin your SEO (Search Engine Optimization) campaign, it can be difficult to separate myth from truth. It seems everyone has different ideas about what works and what doesn’t, and even someone who’s been in the business awhile can get confused as SEO trends, tactics, and techniques change over the years.

One of my favorite pastimes is debunking SEO myths – and there are many! I could probably come up with 100 Search Engine Optimization related ideas or actions that people think are helpful, but which in reality won’t provide them with more targeted traffic to their websites.

Frankly, the biggest search engine optimization mistake you can make is not doing any SEO at all. It’s amazing how many people believe “if you build it, they will come”. Marketing coaching makes one thing clear. Just putting a site up on the Internet won’t get you the traffic you want or need. By the same token, building a site and then thinking about SEO after the fact is a bad plan too. SEO needs to be at the heart of your Web plans from day one, and it’s a job that’s never “finished”.

If you are new to the world of SEO and SEM, you may not know all of the actual subtleties involved. But, if you are going to hire someone to do your SEO work for you, you better know a whole lot more or you could suffer far worse than you ever would trying to do your own SEO work… even without any real experience. Even if you hire an SEO Professional to promote your site, if they do anything that the search engines decide is unethical, your site will be banned and you will have no recourse, legal or otherwise to get it back in!