Today I'm interviewing a very well-known name in SEO circles, Mr Barry Schwartz. the news editor of Search Engine Land and owns New York web consultancy Rusty Brick.  He also runs very popular blog Search Engine Roundtable which is known for its coverage of SEO, SEM and all things online marketing.   Your articles on Search Engine Land are the source of truth for my SEO experts and beginners. But whose articles do you regularly read and who are your sources of truth? What are your top five tools that every search marketing or digital marketing business type must use? John Mueller has recently come out saying lots of things don’t influence (or have a very small influence on) ranking as much as we thought. Keywords in URL, reviews on local search, outbound links, title tags. But in practice, lots of these things do seem to influence the results. What are your thoughts on this? Also with all these things not being factors, what still IS a factor; just the content on the page and back links? There’s a lot of confusion out there on page rank; what is it and is it still a thing? There’s also a lot of confusion around HTTPS versus HTTP and whether everyday sites need to make the shift. How important do you think it is to improving your ranking chances? For a small business person, what would be your top three things to focus on when starting out with SEO? Where do you see SEO heading in the next couple of years? You’re kind of the official translator of what Google puts out there, explaining it in normal human terms for the rest of us. Is that a bit of a heavy responsibility? Show notes: http://www.therecipeforseosuccess.com.au/getting-to-grips-with-google-interview-with-barry-schwartz/ Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j0uZAPegkMo Website: www.therecipeforseosuccess.com.au