This morning we hit the Organic Listings Q&A hosted by Detlev Johnson of Position Technologies, and his quartet of SEO panelists were able to share some of their insights – when they weren’t threatening each other with bananas. At one point Bronco’s David Naylor did, in fact, playfully brandish a yellow fruit in the direction of Mike Grehan of Smart Interactive, prompting a near-Pythonesque exchange between the pair of Brits.

But anyway, back to business Can’t Google get some love? Audience members seemed mystified by Google’s Page Rank, and one was downright upset about the quality of the engine’s results for “brick and mortar” businesses. Grehan said that Page Rank was a good idea, but that it worked best when the web was much, much smaller. With the population explosion of sites, many of which link poorly, Grehan thinks now that “page rank counts for poo.” Johnson noted that Page Rank is only one of half-a-dozen factors that Google considers when tallying the final results ranking. He also urged folks to consider that Page Rank data is about three months old. As for the alleged poor quality of results, Grehan surmized that it could be because Google commands a huge user base, but it’s not a subscriber base; Google knows comparatively little about its users, and with search personalization and demographics coming into play more and more, it could be hurting them.

Time well spent One man wanted to know, given search engines’ reluctance to say exactly what drives up a listing, at least what not to waste time worrying about. Johnson advised against obsessing over individual keyword rankings, and Todd Friesen of Range Online Media agreed. He talked about clients who didn’t like that they couldn’t get ranked high enough on a few “pet” keywords, even though terms from their “long tails” – numerous less-popular, more specific keywords that were yielding higher conversion rates – were driving business through the roof.

“Oh! In that case… One man, insisting that he was following all the SEO rules of thumb, wanted to know how he could improve the ranking for a brand new business site. Johnson, Grehan and Griesen all agreed that building desirable content was the way to go. Not only would it give authoritative sites in the same field incentive to link to a new page, but it would also keep consumers interested. Grehan warned that if too many users immediately hit the back button after finding a site, search engines will punish it. Griesen advised starting a blog and getting involved in forums, perhaps getting articles published elsewhere.

The questioner still seemed exasperated, and finally admitted he was talking about a debt consolidation business. Grehan said that due to the aggressive nature of that business, just trying to do things “respectably…it’s like coming to a gunfight with a knife.” SEO Bruce Clay concurred, saying that when all keywords in a certain business are spammy, you almost have to be a spammer to compete. Johnson suggested serving dynamic, punch-the-monkey style ads, saying that if you just try to work with debt consolidation keywords, “you’re gonna get killed.” Griesen told the man to sign up with affiliate programs.

Last words Panelists seemed keen on the future of personalization. Clay said that folks who ignored its ramifications might not even rank a year from now. Grehan (who, for the record, talked up his interaction with the Yahoo! folks quite a bit) stressed the abilities of Yahoo! and other engines to disambiguate searches based on who is searching. And as for Naylor, he wasn’t completely bananas; he suggested that sites should organize themselves according to folders rather than subdomains, predicting that Google would clean up results pages that were littered with similar content from the same site. And if nothing else works, Naylor said, do what the top thirty sites in your field are doing, and offer something extra: “give away a free banana.” He quickly added, “or a camera or something!”

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