I’m about to create an SEO FAQ and plant it on the HitTail site. It’s going to be different from many of the FAQ’s out there, because our philosophy is different, as many know who have watched us evolve. We agree with marketing guru’s like Seth Godin who say that SEO is becoming less important–but only because the technical factors are gradually going away. Those who write best and have the most valuable content, will be rewarded.

But that’s not the whole story. Behind that is also the emergence of ready-optimized-for-search blogging software, the arrival of a programming practice called “separation of concerns” to Web development, and new ways of thinking about Web publishing forced by new delivery platforms such as the iPhone.

I’ve got a lot of birds to kill with one stone with this document. Eventually, I’ll give it a new home in the HitTail site proper. But until then, you’ll see the “first steps” of as this blog post.

I’m going to title this post the SEO FAQ, because HitTail suggested that I write about it. I might as well start building the traffic now in preparation for re-inventing the entire profession. Apparently, HitTail was found 9 pages in on the topic, and 7 pages in at the time I checked. This is a good sign, because the face of SEO is currently changing, and we are at the forefront of those changes. Without even trying, we’re on the radar. Armed with that information, I have an ideal starting point for driving it to the first page.

This will also be an interesting challenge, because there’s a bunch of heavy-hitter SEO sites at the top of the list. There’s one with a custom domain for the purpose, seofaq.net. Then, there’s Jill Whalen, with whom I’ve had an interesting time trying to explain HitTail and the long tail concept. You’ve got the big StepForth marketing company and the Google Webmaster Central website. There’s About.com and SEOmoz among others. Penetrating the first page will be a fun little experiment.

I’ll start out just with this blog post, but it’s going to grow into an actual document to go with the new Connors ABCs demo. After folks view that demo, they ask for follow-up material. Really, we can’t put much more about the system, or we’re giving away too much. We can’t say much less, because it’s already in demo format, and you can’t get lighter information than that. So basically, I’ll just be putting the demo into written format, and put it into context with the rest of the SEO industry. So, it will probably fit the format of an SEO FAQ very nicely.

I will have to be careful to not write an entire book. I could start out with some broad questions, and end up with an entire book on search engine optimization. So, I’ll start just by getting out the questions.

Why is natural search important?

What sort of companies should pay attention to natural search?

Why is the natural search problem so hard for large companies to fix?

How is natural search different from Google AdWords campaigns?

Is Google the only important search engine?

How long does a natural search campaign take to work?

How do I reconcile all the conflicting information I hear about natural search?

Isn’t it true that natural search can never really be formalized as a profession with guaranteed results, because of the way search engines work?

What made Connors Communications tackle natural search so differently from everyone else?

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