Rand Fishkin of SEOMOZ put together a great presentation for SMX called “How SEO Blinded Me, Then Opened My Eyes“. Simply put it talks about how SEO works today and how it does not work today.
This is a simple presentation, although it is 72 slides long. Lots of short phrase, 1 sentence slides with a whole bunch of pictures, so don’t worry about crossing your eyes or anything.
Rand does a great job of laying out some of the most relevant trends in search that are upending (again) how SEO (as a tactic) works in 2012 (march 2012). Flip through these slides, don’t over think it, just absorb and digest where things are now. Many, many people I speak with these days are asking questions about how to ‘do SEO’ as if it were still 2008. Things have changed drastically in the last 4 years, even dramatically in the last year alone. Let this presentation be your bridge to the present, and possibly cleanse some of the old ideas so that you can move forward smartly.