Rand Fishkin thinks a competent SEO firm ought to be able to handle ten questions about the search industry, and an eleventh if they are really knowledgeable about their work.

MarketingSherpa reports that on average consumers are taking 34 hours from click to conversion. That’s up from 19 hours—180% as long as their original study in 2005 indicated. The full report on time to conversion is expected tomorrow from ScanAlert.

As MarketingSherpa President Anne Holland noted, this finding indicates how important it is for marketers to mearsure longer conversion cycles than just click-buy.

People have debated whether content is really king for some time, and for content producers, it seems a no-brainer: create quality content and the audience will come. That’s the way it’s always been, that’s how it will remain. A survey about blog readership conducted by Vizu confirms that mantra, and reinforces the importance of good writing.

Rand Fishkin celebrated a big number showing up in Yahoo Site Explorer, one that plenty of search optimization-minded folks would love to see.

Now that the SMX Advanced conference has faded into memory, Rand Fishkin has posted something for those who may not be advanced enough for SMX topics.

SEOmoz has many tools and information that is extremely useful for SEOs. They have added another valuable tool for your rank building efforts, it is called Rank Checker.

Ready to get more out of social media? The leaders in social media marketing dish on how to get in on the action–everything from why to where to how.

A post from Rand Fishkin from SEOMoz says that Incisive Media (guys who run Search Engine Strategies) wants to introduce a speaker exclusivity agreement.

This week everyone seems to be talking about the debate between Shoemoney and SEOmoz following Rand Fishkin’s post last week about disclosing paid blog recommendations. This continued when Shoemoney and Rand Fiskin discussed their opinions today on Net Income.