After tracking best practices in search engine optimization for six years, it’s safe to say the situation has both less change and more change than most marketers think.
On one hand, the search engines, especially the top four, continue to routinely change their algorithms – sometimes dramatically. The official reason is “to improve user
experience” and that’s somewhat true. Search engines can only hold onto their audiences if they show highly relevant search results. The Web sites and content they
track has changed dramatically over the years especially with rich media (audio/video), micro-media (local) and social media (blogs, etc.)

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Plus, as soon as SEO experts think they’ve figured out how to game the system,
inevitably more sites wind up in high positions they may not deserve, and the system
needs to be tweaked yet again. In that regard, search engines are a bit like email spam
filters that have to constantly change and learn to filter out the crud and only show the
good stuff.

Last but not least, search engine revenues depend on the paid ads. So, they have a very
real business reason to not make it too easy to game the system.
If you surf message boards and insider groups about SEO, you’ll discover endless
discussions about how to tweak your site and/or linking activities to win in the latest
“dance” as Google, MSN, Yahoo! and other search engines’ organic search changes. It’s
quite intimidating for a newcomer. And, for thousands of small sites that live and die
based on SEO, closely following and reacting to these changes means staying in business.
Certainly your SEO firm should also be following changes quite carefully as well.
However, that doesn’t mean you should be changing your site’s SEO tactics radically
every few months, or even every year. The fact is, as top-line SEO firms will immediately
admit, although some details of the dance may change frequently, now-classic best
practices will win in the long haul.
With a few exceptions, such as the launch of new services such as Google Local, search
optimization best practices have not changed very significantly for a few years. If you
have published a truly relevant and user-valuable page of content that’s about a
particular topic, and you’ve used basic best practices to optimize it, and it’s not
competing with enormously better (more linked to, more keyword-related, more spiderfriendly,
more content-rich, older) pages, then you’ll get a high ranking.
Any changes your SEO firm advises you to make should be for the long haul – a better
page layout and structure, more relevant copy and text-links, etc. These are best
practices to buff, polish and publicize your site so it gets the ranking it deserves.