An Interview with Jill Whalen

Frequent Search Engine Guide contributor Stoney deGeyter had an interview with Jill Whalen featured on his E-Marketing Performance blog last week that I kept meaning to link too, but just am just now getting around to blogging on. The interview has some interesting tidbits in it and is worth a read if you're curious to learn more about how an SEO veteran views things.

A few snippets from the interview:

Jill: If you want your site to show up in the search engines when people type in keyword phrases that relate to what you offer, you have to think like a search engine. What types of pages should show up under any given phrase? What would be the most relevant page you could imagine?

Jill: Certainly, a link that is obtained for no other reason than to subvert the link popularity algorithms, would be deceptive and considered to be search engine spam. But, how is a search engine to know why the link is there? Is it a vote that they want to count? Or is it simply a trade or an ad buy? The difficulty in being able to determine the intent of most links makes it easier for people to get away with deceptive link building strategies than other forms of spam.

You can read the full 10 Questions for Jill at the EMP Blog.