The long term SEO view

If you can't rely on them, then why should you try to rank highly with search engines? Well for a start, if will probably give yougood amounts of traffic, if only in the short term. And if you are able to do these changes yourself - that's effectively free.

But I mentioned yesterday that search engines change over time. How's it best to cope there? Simply subscribe to blogs like this and dedicated SEO blogs. We'll tell you what, in our opinions, are working well. I've tried a few SEO experiments in the past within this blog and they continue to run.

The aim of SEO should be to work with, not against, search engines. People have tried all sorts of spamming techniques in the past and been caught out. If the website isn't banned, then the technique is at the very least ignored.

So instead look at what search engines are trying to achieve. They are wanting to give their visitors the best possible results. These will be pages that give them the answers they are looking for and maybe somewhere to dig further into as the same time. If I'm researching a new fish for my tank I like to find an overview of that fish. If that page is interesting and informative and links to other sites then I'm likely to follow those links.

If the result is a forum, then I take what I read with a pince of salt, especially when the results link to the poster's own websites. Then I frequently ignore the links.

And this is what Google is starting to do. A link on a well structured content page will carry much more weight than a link on a forum page. Why - because in the first page the link has (probably) been loaded by the site owner after they have found the page interesting. In the second case, it's the owner of the linked-to page that has put the link up, not because it is necessarily good, but because they want more traffic.

This shows just one way that search engines are trying to copy what we as visitors actually experience. By thinking through you can see what is really needed.