With the growth of the SEO-market, which I addressed in the previous post, there is a natural increase in the amount of people who are dealing with this topic. Personally I get the feeling that a few of them are aimlessly chasing the newest trends without an overview of the bigger picture – hence I decided to write down some ideas on this topic.

Google's goal is to supply high-quality results. If we take a look at the development over the past few years we can see that Google is using different methods and rates the importance of certain signals constantly on a different scale. Today they might, for example, deem H2-headers as more important than those marked with the H1-tag, while the day after tomorrow this whole scenario might have changed completely. Now if someone is using a SEO that is strongly oriented on what Google likes and dislikes at any particular moment in time, they will constantly have to follow the “Google-pulse” and will have to adjust all of their pages accordingly. It may be the case that there are a few areas where the competition is in such close proximity that this approach is needed,though in most other areas it seems to cause more trouble than good.

To stay independent of such trends it a good idea to orient oneself on the direction that the development of searchengines is taking. A nice example for this is the “amateur-linkbuilding” of the past few years. While in the beginning there were guestbooks and free-for-all-linklists we later got the web-catalogs and currently article-directories seem to be a hot-topic. All of these have in common that they were and will be useful for a short time only. If we envision now, that Google builds its ranking on voluntary and intentionally placed links, it quickly becomes clear that the searchengine-operator has little interest in honoring this method of linkbuilding for long. If employed five years ago, this deliberation would have saved those who temporarily tried their luck with guestbooks, web-catalogs and blogspam a lot of time and money. Additionally, had they chosen other methods they would be in a much more comfortable position nowadays.

Also: try not to orient yourself on which state of affairs Google is in at the moment but base your decisions on which direction they wish to progress in. In this case it is helpful to read patents and other papers out of Mountain View and to start looking at these sets of questions from a Searchengines' point of view.