With any luck, the days when SEO experts could manipulate search engine rankings will soon be history.

If you’re a local business person, you probably know how difficult it is to get good ranking for your most important keywords. Even if you focus your site on a local keyword like Leisure World homes for sale or Vancouver Real Estate you’re in for a battle.

That’s because search engine optimization (SEO) experts set up bogus re-direct sites that are in direct competition with yours for rankings. The purpose of these sites is to capture search engine rankings (and therefore search engine traffic) so they can send that traffic to pay per click ads or other money-making websites. The owners of these websites have no interest in actually providing services or original information about the markets they pretend to serve.

The little guy – like a local real estate agent, for example – doesn’t stand much of a chance against these “experts”. They usually own a large nest of sites where they can plant links that boost the rankings of their money-making redirect sites.

As I’ve said many times before, the blame for skewing search traffic like this has to be laid directly at the feet of the search engines themselves – especially Google – who makes tons of money from pay per click advertising that runs on these re-direct sites. They have always talked a good game when it comes to criticizing link farms, purchased links, etc. But have usually turned around and rewarded the practitioners of these techniques with rankings that resulted in healthy advertising returns.

Changes at Google

According to some observers Google is finally doing something about this. For example, see this blog post (and video) that discusses some of some of the changes coming to how Google ranks sites.

The big changes coming in the near future have to do with the importance of targeted traffic, the use of rich content such as video, and the gradual introduction of personalized search results based on user patterns and interests.

I’ve been doing SEO for a few years and concluded about two years ago that chasing after rankings using old-fashioned link building techniques is a mug’s game.

Instead, it gradually became obvious to me that the content of specific web pages should be what determines their position in the search engine pecking order. Not only did I consider it a bit dishonest to try building links the old-fashioned way, but I felt it was inevitable that the major search engines would eventually figure out better ways of ranking sites.

Right from the beginning the original developers of Google certainly agreed that “content is king”. But unfortunately they cashed this idea out in terms of inbound links. They assumed that a page about, say “dog training”, with many inbound dog training references (links) from other web sites is an important “dog training” resource, and deserves to be ranked higher when people search for “dog training”.

But as we all know, links can be manipulated. In the not so distant past an enterprising link building specialist could build a network of sites – especially blogs – and fill them with links to other sites they wanted to give a boost in the rankings.

For the most part it didn’t matter whether anybody ever looked at those sites, or whether actual traffic ever came from them.

Traffic a much better indicator

Of course search engine experts always claimed that the ultimate reason for link building was to generate traffic. But the focus for the last six or seven years has been on manipulating search engine rankings to generate traffic from search engines. Whether traffic came from the actual links on the linking sites was of secondary importance.

Getting traffic from the search engines has always been the rationale for spending time, energy and money on search engine optimization.

Having been involved in this game for a few years I find it interesting how many website owners now just take it for granted that search engines should be their primary source of traffic.

For instance, I occasionally suggest to a client that a better way to generate higher quality targeted traffic is to develop a client and prospect list and do regular emails to the list. The email messages can be used to drive traffic to an article, squeeze page or blog post. But often enough the response I get makes me wonder if I am talking Chinese.

Whether website owners understand it or not, many experts (myself included) think this is the way Google must go in the immediate future. As time goes by Google will be giving more and more credit to sites that already have targeted traffic and use interactive components that demonstrate visitor involvement. Things such as video content and blogs – both of which do a good job of tracking views and reader comments.

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