Creating and deploying strategies to generate traffic via search engines, social media sites and other means is certainly not dead.

Internet marketing is the industry defining term, everything else is a sub category term for a specialized service.

Frank starts off by plugging HotPot.
HotPot is a marketing ploy. It helps increase your local visibility.
While it might be weighed higher in the linking algo, it still falls into the much depreciated “link influence” category.

Optimizing YouTube, FaceBook, and social network pages is about opening your markets, getting those pages top rankings in their search niche. It is not about SEO, it is about the necessity of using SEO.

Twitter is different.
Twitter links fall into the same category as all links, but retweets are counted differently. The more retweets you have the better the link performs in the SERPS. A retweet by several followers moved one of my articles into the #1 spot, (from #24) and it stayed there for 9 days before dropping back to the original position.

A lot of this discussion centers around how much the search results display pages have changed. The only thing that has not changed is that a #1 position is a #1 position. If because of the Google display you move from the #5 to the #8, you still only get the 1% of clicks because of page position.

No matter how much Google changes the display, a properly SEO’d page will place well.
Things like image and vid searches are but another channel to work in.

Dani said:
“Google has been saying if you want to increase your rankings, write for the end users, not the engines. Everything should be designed with the end user in mind.”

This is 100% on the money.
However to do this you have to understand the user, what they are looking for, how they find it, and what they do after they have found it.
To apply this to a webpage is the optimization process.
Optimization is building relevance to satisfy and lead the user through the information silos to an optimal solution.
The page needs to attract, confirm, direct, and convert.

Call me a Search User Psychologist (in)Engine Ranking. (SUPER)

Google is getting smarter in defeating those that would influence their results by means they do not condone.
This is a cause for major concern among those that do SEO for a living.
Linking was a major factor in the indexing of SERPS.
Google changed the linking algos thousands of times in an attempt to defeat the non organic linkers.
In the past, even with the errors, it was still the best method.
The Mayday update saw a major change in the way the algo approached designating relevance.
Google said the Mayday update affected the long tail, bringing them into the same process that they used for the short tail indexing.
What was mostly missed in this update was that not only the long tail affected, the algo that was used for PR was changed also.

SEO, in the true sense of the word, does not change.
It is still the same process of building sites for users.
It is still the same process of presenting relevance for the readers.
It is still the same process of telling Google (in code) what you are telling visitors in the visual display.
I do not think that professionals in this area (or any area), should use “grey tactics). Showing the search engines one thing and showing the visitors another is one of the basic “No-NOs”
A professional should never do anything that *might* generate a penalty.
This is one industry where there is rally no “Grey” areas..
You either stick to the rules or you break them.

If the search engine thinks that a bunch of keywords in a “Tag Cloud” is stuffing or spam, so be it. I am certain it was not an arbitrary decision. They say no because it serves no real purpose and is a source of spam.
I have run eyetracking studies on pages with tag clouds and it is rarely, if ever, a focus point. Saying “People like them” is more of an opinion than a fact. They get about the same attention as generic graphics. They also do not lend any real value to the topic.
It would be much better to include the cloud’s keywords into the content using anchor text than to present a block of related or semi related words.

SEO is getting harder, not because of changes in display, but because of the necessity of understanding the users. We need to understand how Google defines “relevance”.

best,
Reg
nbs-seo.com

Next problem will be to find a way to bring this to our clients…

A-F’n-men! Since the Farmer update, we haven’t really gotten anything but complaining out of a lot of SEOs. Many of which are only complaining because they were gaming the system and can’t do it anymore.