Tim isolated Google as the only worthwhile ‘optimisation’ target, and introduced some common fallacies. His notable points were:
- Google does not crawl meta data
- Keyword density isn’t important. Mentioning a term once on a page should be adequate
- Content is not rated by semantic relevancy
- Buying links is officially frowned-upon, though realistically, links are very commonly ‘bought’ in one way or another- even from Google themselves
- Markup structures are important, but not as important as most SEOs say
- Google does analyse page structure to discount footers, advertising blocks, etc. (see ‘page segmentation analysis’).
- SEO advice is predominantly [erm...] cobblers.
Both Tim and Dominic (speaking later) recommend SEO Dojo as a (rare) worthwhile source for SEO information.
Tim accepted a few questions, outlining how you might become relisted if Google have penalised you [with a 'reconsideration request']; how problematic penalisation can be [usually 'not very']; some potential hostile SEO tactics and how you might try to recover from them [perhaps employing a 'Reputation Management Consultant', though Tim's general feeling on those in this role is less than glowing...]