There is a game I like to play often, using my imagination – I call it “If I were Google”, and I do this because Google has the money to buy any expertise it needs to buy and Google’s survival at the top still depends on it returning relevant results to your search queries and they are not necessarily the websites that have put the most money into SEO and link building.

SO, Google came to prominence through having this patented system of counting back-links. I like to call it ‘peer endorsement’, it’s based on the premise that if a website is an authority on a subject and therefore worth listing high in the results, there must be other sites, particularly sites related to that subject endorsing it. This system has worked for Google as it is harder to cheat, but then it has spawned this massive industry called link building who’s sole objective is to cheat it.

I would go as far as to say that ‘Link building’ probably accounts for a visible portion of the annual GDP of countries like India.

But then this link building really is different from genuine peer endorsement in that it is in ‘anchor text’ and genuine peer endorsement usually isn’t.

Anchor text linking means that the keywords themselves are linked to the website using HTML and all SEO people use Anchor text.

Have you ever seen a genuine endorsement of a website linked with anchor text? I don’t think I have and I believe that this is because

1. Most people don’t know how to do it and
2. The point of the endorsement is to tell their readers about that website, not to help it rank higher in Google.

So if I were Google, I would place very little relevance on anchor text links and instead determine the relevant keywords for the link from the nearest sub-heading and the text surrounding the link – and I’m talking about genuine http://www.relevantwebsite.com type links.

And then, I’m one man with an imagination. Google can buy a hundred like me and so they probably did everything I’m suggesting a couple years back. Meanwhile, the SEO industry barrels on like a freight train, impressing traffic hungry business with their ’secrets’ and churning out millions of links that probably have very little relevance in Google’s algorithms.

SEO Tips - Using Web 2.0 tools or social networking sites to assist with your website rank

There has been a lot of hype lately about Web 2.0 or social networking tools and like everything else SEO, people search for the magic formula which is going to unleash the power of web 2.0 and finally give them the online success they deserve.

But really, SEO is like other forms of marketing – it’s common sense. It’s about understanding whatever beast it is you’re dealing with, what makes them tick, what their objectives are and then align your activities with those objectives.

For instance, we know that Google wants to give people the most relevant matches they can for their keyword searches – that’s why people come back and that’s why Google is the most valuable piece of online real estate on the planet.

We also know that Google likes Web 2.0 bookmarks, blogs, posts – Why? Go back to what makes Google important – relevance. So they provide relevance.  Why? Perhaps partly  because they have their own policies of policing and eliminating spammers and let’s face it, the biggest threat to Google’s existence is Spammers – People getting their site listed in keywords it is not supposed to be listed in. And that is easier to do with blogs and websites you put up yourself, than it is in a Web 2.0 environment where people are looking out for suspicious activities.

Even without Google, Web 2.0 sites have huge membership numbers and can generate loads of traffic for your website – but to use them effectively, you have to understand them and that takes time. There are no shortcuts, there is no super software – spam is spam and relevance is relevance. You have to be relevant, you have to be real and you have to be somebody that people want to deal with and then you work the numbers, just like marketing anywhere.