With all the various articles on how “SEO is evil” or “SEO doesn’t work” etc etc news that crop up occasionally (especially Jill Whalen’s “Most of SEO is boondoggle” article) I’ve had the urge to rip apart the monthly promotional/link building tactics some  SEO companies still pitch to clients, especially when they make a big fuss about these crap stupid “outdated” link building techniques, which mislead clients (looking at a competitor’s proposal to a client right now and shaking my head) and any newbies entering  the SEM market.

For example:

Google goals

Google is going to analyse your surfing behaviour in order to derive more relevance to use in serving you personalised search results, for example:

Have you created a personalised Google homepage with feeds? Do you use iGoogle? What have you been searching for? Do you click through results and click back or actually spend time reading? Are there recurring topics or trends emerging from your surfing activities and choice of sites you spend time on?

Reading this, I raise my own question: is Google looking only to show you pages that are similar and related to pages you’ve seen before and are located near you, or do they intend to discover deeper levels of patterns regarding how people find what they need, or perhaps a mix of both?

In a New York Times post, Miguel Helft quotes Google CEO Eric Schmidt:

One of the common SEO link building techniques is commenting on blogs. This may be a bit time consuming, especially when you want to earn lots of incoming links to your site. But is it really helpful? The answer is yes. By generating incoming links to your site, you create a good reputation among other bloggers. Your replies and arguments in blog discussions show that you are interested in the subject; you also attract other bloggers and end-users to visit your site and see what you can offer – which means more organic traffic for you. Try commenting on 2 to3 blogs per day and see what happens.

You may say that excellent content sells itself, but I say that well-written words are just not useful enough, especially if your client is selling non-tech, non-business and non-entertainment based products. One pagers of content distributed on e-zine and review sites are a shot in the dark for high volumes of traffic. Perhaps you can think of a viral idea that`s going to make a local hockey team fly out of the water. But can you think of ideas for window glazing, au pair services, locksmiths and Czech translation services, while you`re at? You may say I`m dreaming, and to that I say: you`re just asleep.

When dodging the slavering jaws of the spambots, it`s best if your site looks like a lousy supper. That means reducing the rewards of getting the spam message onto the site. Even if spammers make the necessary code changes to help their spambots navigate the web, they may simply decide that it`s not worth the extra work and maintenance if the incentives are too low. My assumption is that spammers are in the hunt for a good Google PageRank score; it`s about boosting their results in search engines. The rel=”nofollow” tag when added to links tells Google and other search engines not to index the link. Admittedly the pace of spam has only increased since the rel=”nofollow” tag was introduced by Google and a group of blog software makers a couple of years ago. My optimistic hunch is that new apps that support this tag from the get-go won`t be as big a target. We`ll see.

“Link Value is the perceived value another site will derive from linking to you. The more value they see, the more likely they will be to link.” – Ken McGaffin

Reciprocal links seem to be the order of the day, but very rarely offer significant value to either of the parties involved. Many feel reciprocal links offer the most immediate value to most sites.

One-way links are (obviously) much more productive. One-way links are links created when a webmaster likes your site and wants to encourage his/her site visitors to have a look at your site, for whichever reason that may be. One-way links are really difficult to obtain and need many hours of creativity, hard work, and effort. However, the returns in the areas of site traffic, qualified prospects and sales could be fairly large.

There has been some ongoing discussion about whether or not Google should penalise sites with a large amount of footer links. Footer links are something that we have all come across while surfing the net, and in a link-building environment, web pages are easier to surf using footer links.

In a post I read from Seroundtable, it is said that the footer links wont actually be penalised if your links are relevant and kept under a certain limit. I fully agree with this. If you have over 100 links with all different anchor text, Google might crawl your site and lose what the true content in your site covers. Whereas if your footer links are all relevant, and there are not a lot of them, it might work to your advantage. Relevance to the content would be the key to remember when creating footer links.

Matt Cutts has said that Google considers buying text links for PageRank purposes to be outside their quality guidelines and wants to eradicate all unnatural linking.

Sites that publicly sell links have been penalised by Google on Search engine results pages and on PageRank passing ability.

Nearly all major search engines use links as editorial votes given by choice to the website. If sites buy links to increase their standing on search engine results pages, websites that naturally attract links to rank are at a disadvantage.

It seems evident that Google is getting better at detecting paid links and penalising sites that publicly sell them.

This is great news for Webmasters and users alike because once paid links are removed from the equation, Google can assign trust based on links gained over the past year with much more confidence than before. This results in higher quality with more relevant search results.

PageRank is the online currency, although not the only one, because there are still other search giants that don`t trade in PageRank. However, many webmasters and marketers vest much of their interests in that little green Rank-o-meter in the browser toolbar we all know so well.

Trends, it cannot be ignored, are there to be followed. It was once the place of every marketer to squeeze relevantly selected keywords into all the right slots, and that would be it. No cutting edge marketing campaigning needed – simply juicing the Meta elements would be enough get somewhere in the search engine results. Now it is different. Some years after the turn of the millennium, the goal posts have shifted so far back that your full efforts are usually not enough to rank a highly competitive page.

It is always somewhat stressful to undertake a link building campaign for any given client, in that one needs approach each situation or industry from a completely fresh and unique angle, there is certainly an art to it. It`s not that one needs vast libraries of esoteric knowledge to attain the “perfect” web partnership (which wouldn`t hurt mind you), but rather that online business capitalism is nothing new and the getting a relatively small brand to rank (or a strong offline brand even) normally requires a good solid quantity of work hours. Constantly furthering the web presence of a site over an extended period is what it takes to climb the SERP ladder, as is true in the physical world as well. Get-rich-quick mentality does not apply to organic search engine optimization.