(by Brian Harnish)

It has become common throughout the SEO industry to find more and more head-shaking scams full of false promises.  Not all SEO companies will scam you, but there are quite a few out there, that you will want to keep an eye out for when you’re looking for SEO suppliers (or even outsourcing partners).

On a personal level, the majority of these scammers also give SEO a bad name, it’s no wonder that SEO is sometimes referred to as a snake oil laden industry.  Anyway, before I get too worked up, let’s move on to the scams;

Or any variation of the above c-r-a-p.

The fact of the matter is, this is NOT true.  Google does not currently sponsor any work-from-home programs.  They do not hire people to work from home, and they do not offer money to people looking to make a quick buck.  Google is like any other company out there.  You have a hiring process – you have a background check – you have to work in an office. 

The unfortunate thing is that these scammers are banking on the bad economy.  They don’t have any remorse or care about the individual they’re hurting.  Quite simply, these scammers are banking on the economy and people’s desperation to quit working and become their own boss.  The problem with that is that building a business takes years. 

The one thing these people are counting on is your ignorance – that you don’t know that Google as a company doesn’t do that.  Well, take it from me as a professional in the SEO industry – they do not.  These lame advertisers are banking on the Google affiliation, and the fact that you’ll open your wallet without thinking to purchase the latest, greatest get rich quick scheme.

SEO, however, is NOT get rich quick.  True SEO requires hard work, dedication, talent, and a temperament to deal with hours upon hours of content writing, link building, and other technical work that goes into gaining higher rankings.

(the following is a post from Sarah Goodwin)

A beginners guide to Phrase Based Indexing & Retrieval

Let’s start this post with a caveat: I am not an expert in this area. This post is about how I have taken the information that David has imparted here over the last couple of years to use in my efforts. A starter guide if you will. 

The concept behind PaIR, (phrase based indexing and retrieval) on the most basic level seemed to be to be this; Google would look at all of the pages that mention a particular word, let’s say ‘chocolate’. They analyze what other phrases occur on pages that contain the word chocolate (as well as other related phrases)

…and then use calculations/weights to look at the occurrence on each page, (compared to predetermined sets) and find the “ideal” occurrence ratio which determines the “best” page.

(the following is a post from WordStream's - Tom Demers)

One of the most difficult aspects to effectively marketing online is "getting started". Whether you're starting out as an affiliate, new to an industry, or just launching a product it's extremely difficult to both predict the impact and effectiveness of a new campaign and to determine how best to attack a niche.

This post will aim to help a bit with both.

First, some required reading for those trying to get a new site off the ground, determine which affiliate niche is best for them, or launching a new product line or section of their site:

• The Affiliate Newbies Guide to Finding Niches - Great post by Gab on identifying niches for affiliate marketing (as with a lot of strong content pieces, you can apply a lot of the theory and methodology to other things: like determining which "niche within a niche" is best to target).

• How Predict the ROI on SEO - More from Gab, this time from his own blog. This is a great post on determining what sort of return you can expect from an SEO endeavor.

• What is the Value of a Number 1 Google Ranking - Outstanding in-depth article on evaluating the value of a number one ranking by SEO Book's Aaron Wall. This is another example of something that can be tweaked and pushed out into uses other than just evaluating a number one ranking.

There are some great resources for both identifying which niche you would want to spend your time in, and how you would go about evaluating what you’d get from that niche. But what about once you’ve chosen a niche? What’s next?

We’ve almost got the whole collection…woo hoo!

Ok sure, there are those that called me a total SOSG for getting excited about the patent awarded to Google yesterday, but there is goodiness for every SEO really. Granted it may be a bit geeky, but it is still somoething that needs more consideration in the SEO space... You see my friends, it has always been an odd thing that people in the business can go on and on about Google and LSI (total DUH…). I have seen nothing in Google research papers or patents that relate to it…

On the other hand, we know of at least 9 patents on another semantic analysis approach… namely; Phrase Based IR…