Anyone who has a business website naturally wants to get more revenue from it. That means having people find it from google and yahoo searches. So of course, it’s desirable to rank higher for the search phrases relevant to you.

That means it can be financially viable to spend money to “optimise” your website pages. And, it is possible, you can do things which will influence where they rank.

But let’s take a step back, and look at Google and Yahoo. What do they want to happen when someone does a search?

They want the results to be good quality and relevant to what the person searched for. They want:

1. Sites which are properly constructed and readable
2. Sites which target the region the searcher is in (geographically)
3. Sites which seem good because they are linked to by what seems to other “authoritative” sites 
4. Information which is obviously highly relevant to what you searched for.
5. Sites which have more than one page about the subject.
6. Sites which are up to date and frequently add new content.
7. Sites which have got some history 

They dont want the results to:

1. contain lots of pages from one site which have similar content
2. be full of spam
3. have results not relevant to your geographic region
4. have sites which tricked them in any way

There is a spectrum of Search Engine Optimisation activity. At one end is tricking search engines - making them think your site is more relevant or important than it really is. At the other end is doing exactly what Google wants - make your site more interesting, relevant, respected and continually update it.

If you are at the bottom end of the scale you will probably get short term good results, but get blacklisted eventually. At the very least you will have to keep changing your tactics, because the search engines will change theirs to weed you out.

At the other end, you are putting your trust totally in google or yahoo to agree that your site is good. You will have poor short term results. In the long term, if you keep doing it, and focus on good practice your site will succed.

A bit below the top of the scale is the zone where most “Search Engine Optimisation” work happens.  A good example of this is importance of backlinks. Google reckons that better sites are linked to by equally good and better sites. That, you would think is a fairly reasonable supposition, but because it gives weighting to this factor, webmasters aim to get as many good quality inbound links to their site as possible - simply because google rates it, not because it will be any use to customers or users of the site.  If your site is good other sites will naturally link to it, but why sit back and wait!

So the upshot is that it is seen at the moment as “white hat SEO” to seek good backlinks to your site - but a waste of time (and potentially damaging) to get links at any cost. What is a good link?…it could be a link from the website of a trade association you belong to, or a link from a well recognised regional directory. But the point about it is, that those are probably the sort of things you would do anyway, even if you weren’t interested in your google rank.

My view is that you should only do something to your site if makes some sense to do it anyway regardless of google and yahoo.

Further reading:

http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/tell-me-about-your-backlinks/

http://www.highrankings.com/linkpopularity.htm

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