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Last week I talked about a recurring theme of mine ... doing your own research and basically testing what others might tell you so that you could see if that advice and information really worked for you or not.

Sometimes you're also going to be testing to see whether the information you get is the truth or just something that the writer read somewhere else and thought it would make him or her sound important and knowledgeable if they regurgitated it.

Perhaps that may sound like I'm being a little harsh but sadly people will tell you things in language that suggests that they really do know what they're saying ... when the fact is that they really don't have a clue. At other times people will tell you things that they know worked last year or the year before that ... and they think it still works ... but it probably doesn't.

An example of that last situation is almost certain to occur if you asked on a webmaster board for advice on how a search engine spider reads a web page. In the past ... when tables were the only page layout tool we had at our disposal a search engine spider would work its way across a page and read each cell in a table row before dropping down the page to the next row.

But is that the case today? If you use tables to set out your web pages then it could still be the way that a search engine spider reads your web pages but what happens if you use CSS to place the various content elements on your web page? How does a spider read that information?

A few years ago what appeared in the footer of a page ... way down at the bottom of the table ... would be the last thing that the spider read and it was common belief that what appeared down there would be seen by the spider as having little relevance.

But does the footer of a page still have little relevance to a spider if it now reads a page differently? That's something that you need to test because it may be that what appears at the bottom of a page is not the last thing on the page that a spider now reads if you've set out the page using CSS.

Google Image Search
A few years ago almost no adult webmaster wanted his pages to turn up in Google Image Search. Most adult webmasters thought that Google Image Search was the ultimate home of the freeloaders and they were people that you never ever wanted to get on your page ... but is that really the case?

Even back then there were a few brave souls who were prepared to reject the popular thinking on Google Image Search and dared to suggest that they actually made money from it. Quite often they would get shouted down in any board discussion and even I wondered whether or not they were just plain delusional.

Recently though I've begun to look at Google Image Search in an entirely different light. A couple of weeks ago Steve installed a stats package on a mainstream client's site that returns stats in real time and it's fascinating to watch all the data unfolding right before your eyes. I was sitting there looking at the data one day when an entry absolutely jumped off the page at me.

Now this is a local client and they get a bucket load of hits from Google Image Search and we were thinking about blocking searches from that search engine until we saw what one query was that had brought one potential customer from Google Image Search. This particular searcher was looking for images that our product sells and had searched for '(product name) for sale'.

So for our client it's worth being on Google Image Search ... but will it be the same for you or are those Google Image Search hits you're getting not worth worrying about? Perhaps once they were ... but is that still the case these days? And even if some people can't convert Image Search traffic is that any reason why you can't?

This is the land of the Internet where nothing remains the same ... everything is in a constant state of flux and what worked last year ... or the year before ... may have changed completely so don't take what other people say as the guaranteed truth ... because it probably isn't.

Instead be prepared to listen to what more experienced people have to say and then go and test it to see if it really is what works today because nothing remains the same on the Web for very long.