I had the pleasure of speaking with Mike Moran last year on his previous book about Search Engine Marketing and Search Engine Optimization. If you’re readers are interested, they can find the audio and show notes here: http://www.iaconsultants.ca/index.php/2007/04/05/ibms-mike-moran-search-engine-marketing-inc/

Cheers!

I totally agree with you that searchers *want* one place that answers all their questions, but if asked, they’d probably want the Carnac feature where their questions are answered before they are asked.

I understand what they *want*, but I don’t think that site owners can deliver on that desire terribly often. So, I guess what I should say is that there are some queries where a list of content is the best answer that a Web site can give, because there are so many long-tail queries that no Web site can have enough “perfect answer” pages to go around. In that case, we need the search engine to deliver that “perfect answer” page, which itself is a list of other pages. I know what they want, but a list of good results is probably the only practical way to handle queries that few searchers enter.

I totally agree that Web sites can and should have “perfect answer” pages for all popular queries, which I’ve called the top-down approach in the past (http://www.mikemoran.com/biznology/Nov2005.htm). This is really a quibble over one small part of an excellent article, so thanks for the conversation. I’m looking forward to Part 2.