The SEO industry is a conflicted industry to work in, in many respects. Much of the public still thinks this is a form black magic, some feel the industry is packed with scam artists and some just totally don’t get it. Let’s not forget the conflict of the struggle between the search engine and the search engine optimizers. Oh, then black hat versus white hat. It makes for a very conflicted industry.

The last thing we need is misinterpreting SEO advice. But it happens more often in conflicted and new industries, then it would happen in other industries.

A HighRanking Forums thread reminded me of just one minor example of misinterpreting SEO advice. Let me quote you the frustration one SEO felt about his boss’s recent SEO discovery:

Now, with Google Universal Search, there were times where specific spots seemed to be set aside for video. But not for all queries and not all the time. Even nowadays, it seems like the specific spots that appeared to be set aside to video, in some queries, are no longer the same spots. A video can now show up in the 1st result or the 5th result or the 4th result or any of the top ten results.

So what happened here? I suspect the “boss” misinterpreted this “SEO experts” advice as to use videos. I personally recommend videos for SEO purposes to many people. It can do very well in the Google results and you can get your message out to a whole group of people through the video. In fact, I did a piece at Search Engine Land named Want To Rank Tops In Google? Do YouTube Videos, Stupid! The summary:

But it is not that simple, you need to look beyond those numbers and use wisdom and experience to know when to use which strategies.

Forum discussion at HighRanking Forums.