To me, Google sometimes seems like a big crocodile in a pond, sick of eating the same old catfish every day. Whenever it hears a new sound, something new, it snaps it up, only chomping the occasional catfish when there is nothing else around.

Blogs from the old original blogging engines like Google’s own ‘blogger’ and traditional websites are like the catfish – Google is just not interested. They seem to take forever to get indexed and back-links from link exchanges and directories, sometimes I think I’ll be retired before I see them have any real impact on a listing. But throw a fresh video to the crocodile, 8-10 hours. Indexed and showing on page one within 8 to 10 hours. Social Networking or Web 2.0 too. See the back-links from these sites working within days.

Why?  Well you have to go back to what keeps Google at  number 1 and makes it the most valuable piece of real estate on the planet:  relevance. When you do a search with Google you find what you want and if link exchange alone did that, the results page of any search would look like last year’s Newsweek: The same stale old sites that are accumulating more and more back links.

Web 2.0 content is fresh, happening, exciting. The web 2.0 portals also seem to have successfully kept the lid on spammers to the extent that they haven’t destroyed the experience as they were able to do with forums, blogs  and  earlier social networking tools.

There is still a place in the top 10 for the occasional old catfish, but woe betide any seo company who thinks they will keep their clients in the top 10 with back-linking alone. They will go the way of the dinosaurs.

I really worry about having standard one-size-fits-all “SEO Packs” for clients – because Search Engine Optimization is not a product, it’s a competition and the results you get depend on so many factors, it’s not funny. There is no real deliverable in SEO – the result you want is to beat some other people and get to the front page of the search engines at their expense.

The best analogy I can think of is competitive running. Not every runner can come in the top ten in any competition – of the thousands who compete, there are just ten – and in fact with SEO it’s even worse, one competitor can have five of those ten spots, or all ten.

You could think of generic keywords as being the Olympics – score the gold in ‘websites’ or ‘SEO’ or ‘business advisor’ or whatever is the main generic keyword in your business. And like the Olympics, the competition is tough and it takes some real commitment to get to the top or even in the top ten.

But then there are a whole bunch of regional championships, more specific keyword phrases “SEO company in California”, “Web design, Sydney”, “How to choose the right web design company” and so on. You have far more chance of making it in these competitions – often they are dominated by last years winners who are resting on their laurels and sometimes you’ll find winners who didn’t even know they were in the race – They just stumbled onto the field and were running to get away from the stampede.

And often the more targeted keywords bring good quality traffic with a much higher proportion of buyers than generic keywords.

So having a one-size-fits-all SEO pack is like assigning the same caliber trainers and giving the same training program to olympic competitors as you are to regional ones and allowing them to expect good results. The SEO work that clients need really depends on the race they are in and the competition they are up against.

So the best thing clients can get, is a good assessment from an SEO company followed by a pay per click campaign with good adwords management by an experienced campaign manager to identify the best performing keywords for a long term investment in time.

What’s in a name? Opinions vary wildly in the SEO community, but from what I can see, the answer is “Everything”. I have seen websites rocket to the top of search results on a keyword-rich domain name alone and recently I saw something else that really confirmed the importance of a domain name for SEO rankings.

I was asked by a client to do an assessment on the website of a prominent business that is probably the leader in it’s field. Clients include the Duchess of York and Deepak Chopra among others. There were 16,000 websites linking to this site and if you searched in the name of the business, it was certainly number one. But in the keywords they would like to appear – those that will bring them new business, they were nowhere to be found.

The problem is that most people do not use HTML keyword links when linking to your site – they just use the URL. So if your URL is www.warburton-smith.com and your business is dog grooming, unless you hire a whole lot of clever guys to generate backlinks like Dog Grooming then don’t expect to rank too highly in those keywords. If however you happened to register “www.dog-grooming.com” it would be a different story.

You see, the search engines don’t really know what keywords to count the link against if it does not contain any keywords and peer endorsement – which is really what back linking is supposed to be about – and genuine peer endorsement is really always going to be a description and your URL. And what about back-linking in HTML with keywords? I think that is being cheated to the point that it is about to lose relevance very quickly.