As the internet evolves, Vector Informatics Inc. is researching current trends in internet marketing and analyzing potential future scenarios. Any Internet Marketing campaign should consider how SEO changes over time, how current trends may be useless in 3 months, and how platforms like Google Wave i will make any current plan irrelevant once it becomes widely used.

An excellent article was posted about various SEO techniques vs. what Google has actually filed patents over:

There are "over 200 SEO factors" that Google uses to rank pages in the Google search results (SERPs). What are the search engine optimization rules? Here is the speculation - educated guesses by SEO webmasters on top webmaster forums. Should you wish to achieve a high ranking, the various confirmed and suspected Google Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Rules are listed below.ii http://www.vaughns-1-pagers.com/internet/google-ranking-factors.htm

The rules can be summarized as follows: No cheating! Purchasing inbound links, creating ‘link farms’ and other techniques defeat the purpose of SEO. The idea of someone linking to your site means there is meaningful content. Creating inbound links to your site where the overall reviews of the site are very poor is cheating, and the algorithm detects that. The mechanism for detection is simple, Use the internet. A website is not a newspaper advertisement. Companies use the web as an alternative to traditional media, not understanding the power of actually using the internet. Using the internet means calling on Skype vs. a landline, using a wiki instead of corporate extranet, posting specials on a blog instead of on the website. Don’t abuse the system. A casino is a legitimate business, but if you have a system of counting cards, you may be banned! Google bans OOP (Over-optimization) Use Web2.0. Web 2.0 has encouraged proper use of the internet with the concept of user generated content. Sites such as face book try to create an environment where anyone, no matter how tech savvy, can create content. The problem is, like TV, the user interface must be useable by the lowest common denominator. But with proper use, it can be increased and heavily utilized, especially with SEO in mind.

Webmasters should think about ways to create a resource for users. Commercial sites, selling products, should consider sponsoring non-commercial projects to give back to the internet community, and simultaneously creating a reason for sites to link to the project (and thus their website). This is fully legitimate and considered ‘link bait’ by Wikipedia:

The quantity and quality of inbound links are two of the many metrics used by a search engine ranking algorithm to rank a website. Link bait creation falls under the task of link building, and aims to increase the quantity of high-quality, relevant links to a website. Part of successful linkbaiting is devising a mini-PR campaign around the release of a link bait article so that bloggers and social media users are made aware and can help promote the piece in tandem. Social media traffic can generate a substantial amount of links to a single web page. Sustainable link bait is rooted in quality content. Although there are no clear-cut subdivisions within link bait, many attempt to divide them into types of hooks. This is a short list of some of the most common approaches with brief descriptions: Informational hooks - Provide information that a reader may find very useful. Some rare tips and tricks or any personal experience through which readers can benefit. News hooks - Provide fresh information and obtain citations and links as the news spreads. Humor hooks - Tell a funny story or a joke. A bizarre picture of your subject or mocking cartoons can also prove to be link bait. Evil hooks - Saying something unpopular or mean may also yield a lot of attention. Writing about something that is not appealing about a product or a popular blogger. Provide strong reasons for it. Tool hooks - Create some sort of tool that is useful enough that people link to it. Widgets hooks - A badge or tool, that can be placed or embedded on other websites, with a link included.iii

Link bait is encouraging content creators to display legitimate content that people will like, vs. using SEO ‘dirty tricks’ such as 302 Google Jacking iv.

Page hijacking is a form of search engine index spamming. It is achieved by creating a rogue copy of a popular website which shows contents similar to the original to a web crawler, but redirects web surfers to unrelated or malicious websites. Spammers can use this technique to achieve high rankings in result pages for certain key words. Page hijacking is a form of cloaking, made possible because some web crawlers detect duplicates while indexing web pages. If two pages have the same content, only one of the URLs will be kept. A spammer will try to ensure that the rogue website is the one shown on the result pages. In some cases, legitimate web pages can be edited by external advertisers via XSS and redirected to promoting web site[1].

Page hijacking is effective in that it is possible to increase a page rank from 0 to 9 almost overnight. But what will you have really accomplished? Aside from the risk of being penalized, this type of internet strategy usually backfires in a number of ways. Conversely, with months and years of good SEO and a robust internet strategy, the traffic built is built for life, as links proliferate through the internet. This type of long term PR value is difficult to destroy, due to the decentralized nature of the internet. For example, if a PR 9 site is taken down, many webmasters do not do link checking to see if their links are broken and if the sites are still up. Therefore, a PR9 site could be down for years and PR8 sites would still be sending it traffic. Current SEO Resources http://seomoz.org/ Internet Marketing of the Future Resources http://socialnomics.net/

i http://wave.google.com/ http://www.vaughns-1-pagers.com/internet/google-ranking-factors.htm iii http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Methods_of_website_linking#Link_bait iv http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/302_Google_Jacking