“SEO is like traditional marketing.”

That’s the opening sentence of a “secret” I share in an article published tonight on the Small Business Trends web site. It’s always difficult to come up with a secret. One person’s secret is another person’s old news. SBT Editor Anita Campbell told me the target readership is small business owners who “are not SEO professionals.” With that in mind, I stayed away from anything uber-technical about SEO, and tried to present SEO advice in terms that might be more familiar.

What’s crazy about the article is that I’m giving advice next to the likes of Seth Godin, John Battelle, John Jantsch, and others. Ha! Talk about crashing someone’s party…. Anyway, I particularly like Scott Ginsberg’s clever idea, and find Guy Kawasaki’s “secret” both flippant and dangerously wrong. Judge for yourself, and share your thoughts below in the comments.

Meanwhile, I have two other bylines to share:

• Gooruze: SEO Basics: Copywriting for the Web — another in my “SEO Basics” series on Gooruze.com
• Search Engine Land: Why The SEO Industry Needs Small Business — this one generated a really great discussion on Sphinn, too. That’s always cool to see and be part of.

(Photo: “Whisper”, by Brian Scott)