Just to clarify something though before you spend all day and all night checking your site against these terms of service, remember that I have never come across anybody who has any clear understanding of what is good, bad or indifferent. Although the Google Quality Guidelines clearly state what is acceptable and what is not, there are millions of sites out there that bend or blatantly break these guidelines, and still enjoy great rage rankings.

 One question that raises its head because of this is, should you play along with the rule breakers and risk getting banned by Google. In my opinion the answer is a definitive no. You see, although it took more than 5 years for Google to list its guidelines we have to understand that we live in a fast paced and changing world, and these guidelines will also change.

 The Google index algorithms will constantly change, they call it the Google Dance, but over the years some algorithm updates have had more resemblance to a barrage of machine gun fire rather than a strategic implementation of change, particularly if all of your rankings disappear overnight.

 Understanding the SEO on your site is a very important task to undertake, particularly if you are outsourcing the work to a 3^rd party service provider. Examples seen recently showed a site where very little on-page optimization had been done, but upon looking deeper, a huge number of URL’s had been directed to point to the same pages. None of the page rankings the site enjoyed could be attributed to the method, but the point is that the site owner did not even know of this technique, let alone that it was present on his site.

 Sticking with ethical guidelines is always going to be better for your site and your business stability. Google is now encouraging people to report sites and companies suspected of attempting to trick or manipulate natural search rankings. Time will tell if the dob in a cheat system works, but it does show how serious Google is on cleaning up this sector of the industry, and so it should.

 All site owners should be aware that they are responsible for the techniques being used on their site, not the 3^rd party and not the girl next door.

Before I start work I make a point of surfing the major SEO forums, to see if there have been any major developments, every day I see a multitude of new threads based on page ranking. The other day it dawned on me why there is so much interest in a system that has no relation to SERPS

The vast majority of webmasters, have one aim, that being to build their pageranking so they are able to generate revenue from paid advertisements. Of course there is nothing new with this concept, it’s just becoming too popular, I wonder how many none financial websites are actually being built. I personally believe the trend will continue until Google do away with the little green bar, only then will people focus more on the quality of their websites and less on generating revenue off the back of pageranking

Google’s development is welcome news to website owners who now have the option of cataloging all their items on video, like a mini QVC. As long as particular interest is taken with the video transcript it will give uniqueness to each page, which in turn will prevent the use of robots.txt.

So far this method has not been expanded on, however I guess it will not be long before the concept is grasped.

An SEO campaign can take an extended period of time to work, sometimes up to a year, the common tactic in the interim is to use a Pay Per Click programme, Google’s Adwords is the most popular. Be warned PPC can burn a hole in your wallet, far quicker than your wife’s trip to the shops.

People who do well in the world of Internet marketing appear to be the systematic type, people with a fine eye for detail who are not compelled to follow the herd.

Go into any forum on the subject of SEO and you will see the most common topic is based around page ranking, with very few people debating the issue of keyword research. I guess this shows today’s trend of building and marketing a website to simply sell advertising space. I guess the youth of today are drawn to the Internet in the same way the prospectors were drawn to San Francisco some hundred years ago.