( To Adam - Help is on the way! I put this in a new thread instead of replying to "SEO for Flash" because I figure more people will read it this way. )

If you haven't seen Borat, you should. He went on The Daily Show the day his movie opened, and during the interview Jon Stewart ( the host ) asked him if they have anything like democracy in Kazakhstan. Borat told him yes, but instead of by voting, whoever can suspend the most weight from his nether-regions becomes the new president. Think about that for a moment - does being able to suspend a car battery from your loins make you a good leader? Not really. In fact, not in any way.

When the internet used to be more primitive, we used the same contest - measure something insignificant. Whoever had the most inbound links ( "IBLs" ) was the #1 result. But does having a bunch of IBLs make your site good, or relevant to a particular search query? Not any more than lifting weights where the sun don't shine makes you a good match for "how digital projects work." The internet has come out of the stone age.

A lot of people think an SEO's job is to go around the 'net collecting links. Everyday someone posts a reply that says just get more links and you can rank for anything. It seems like all a SEO needs to do is smoke something for the boredom, and then work full time at submitting a URL to every directory they can find, put a link in their signature and post "Get more links!", open a dozen Blogger accounts to put links in, join all the link exchanges there are, and after about 60 hours of this, you can rank #1 for anything. That probably won't hurt you if you have 60 hours to waste, personally I'd rather go for a scenic drive with the wife.

It's just like owning stock, where how much each share is worth makes a bigger difference than how many shares you own. In SEO, it's how much the search engines trust the IBLs linking to your site, not how many you have. Because they all figured out you can just build yourself a link farm, or buy a slot in somebody else's. And they're more inclined to trust the links you can't make yourself. In other words a link on a static html page on somebody else's site is worth more than a DMOZ link. All the more if that private site is respected by Google. So what this means is you can't just get links, at least not good ones. You wait for the to come to you.

While you're waiting, you do real SEO. Make your site interesting, attractive to the eyes, and useful. Because if you have an ugly site, people will leave right away, with a bad impression. And probably not come back. You make sure you can navigate really easily. You make sure your information is presented in a natural way, and ideally with "semantic html." Once all this is done and you have content worth looking at, you can drop some links in forums, or even buy advertising, and then people will check you out, and if you have something good, you'll get mentioned, and start to spread like wildfire.

I'm just a newbie, so if I can understand this stuff, you can, too.

It really takes a lot of patience to wait for those back links to come in too.

A software download site I developed back in June, 2006 just started gaining momentum in Jan 2007... now I'm getting about as much traffic daily as I used to have to pay $10 a day to get.

In fact, a few months ago I had completely given up on the site and couldn't afford to throw any more money at it for PPC advertising.

Now I can see through Google Analytics that about half of the traffic I get is from returning visitors.

Good post Learning Newbie. One thing I want to add that differs a little in what you said is that I do think you can work on building links. The issue though is that it's not about building all sorts of garbage links into a site. But I think you can be proactive and gather links to your site.

As an example think of writing articles. A couple of years ago you might write an article, submit it to an article directory, have it downloaded by whoever, and you might end up with a few dozen links. If you repeated it a few times you could build links into your site rather quickly.

Fast forward to today and most of those links aren't going to be worth that much, because your article is generally picked up by low quality sites. You might still end up getting a few decent links out of it, but today there's a better way.

Instead of submitting and having links end up wherever you might find a site within your industry that is an authority on your subject. A site that the search engines trust and one that gets read by many people. Ideally that site publishes the work of others and you would write an article geared for the audience of that site and up to and above the standards of the site.

You'll need to write a better article than the one you would submit to a directory and it will take longer. You'll also only be getting links from the one page instead of many, but those links will come from a much better source than if your article was downloaded by anyone.

That's only one idea, but the point is you can still build links to your site. You just want to be more targeted with which links you pursue.

Oh, mah brutha, TES-ti-fyyyyyyyyyyyyy!!!! And may all the designers on this BOARD-uh listen to the NEW-bie-uh and obey the good WORD-uh! The truth hath been SPOKEN!

Mmmmm mmmmm MMMMMMMMM!!!

Okay, now that I've gotten the gospel preacher out of my system, it's high time someone fresh came up with a way to word this for other "freshies". Everything in it is totally, completely and unequivocally true.

Backlinks are measured on the sum total of quantity and quality, and a site that has a lot may still not do well in terms of holistic success simply because it isn't designed right, thereby rendering backlinks a band-aid solution.

Well done, dude.

Nicely put, I enjoyed your little spiel and I might have to pass it on to others!

Great post, and I really like the way you brought Borat into this to make your point.

Well, I think SEO is moving more to On-site SEO. Since link building is dying in a slow pace, SEO may become something which is all about on page optimization. I mean, the rest of the work, like making the content good and all is to be done by the owner. Nice Post, learning dude !! Talkupation added.

I'd hardly say link building is dying. Off page factors will probably always count for more in the eyes of search engines than on page factors.

But some of those off page factors might be moving toward tracking user behavior like how often and how long people visit your site and if they bookmark your pages. How often people click on your pages in SERPs and then click back could be another factor.

All those will lead to the necessity of building a good site that appeals to real people and not search engine robots. So in that sense on page factors become more important again.

I don't think links are dieing at all as a way to improve a site's rankings. It's just that bad-quality links are dieing. That alone makes high-quality links more important than they've ever been.

VanGogh - does Google really know when I do a search for "load balancing" and then click #3? I just did this search, and the results are encoded as:

<a class="l" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Load_balancing_(computing)"><b>Load balancing</b> (computing) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia</a>

So even as valuable as that data would be, I don't see how they could collect it? Wouldn't we need to see some javascript instead of ( or embedded in ) the hyperlink for Google to collect this? Something to send that information back to their server?

Originally Posted by astrojith

Well, I think SEO is moving more to On-site SEO. Since link building is dying in a slow pace, SEO may become something which is all about on page optimization. I mean, the rest of the work, like making the content good and all is to be done by the owner. Nice Post, learning dude !! Talkupation added.

Your point makes me think of a guy who hired me about two years ago to give his sites an SEO analysis. The guy ended up really pissed off because I suggested building backlinks as the last thing to do in a long list. I told him to first redesign and clean up his websites (they were all built in 1997 and were only very popular because his content was highly unique) then work on updating his content and then finally to start working on getting links from others. After two weeks of butting heads with him I quit, ironically, his websites now employ many of the suggestions I laid out for him.

Point is though that he was caught up in the same craze that the only thing that really mattered was a sheer quantity of backlinks.

Thanks for the beautiful article!

Good input!

John Google can track a lot. They can certainly know what you searched for and what you clicked in the SERPs since those are pages on their servers. I think they can tell if you hit the back button and came right back to the results page.

If you have the Google Toolbar installed and if you are signed into anything Google while you're searching then they can also track some of your exploits around the web.

I can't find the post at the moment, but Aaron Wall wrote one on all the potential ways Google might be collecting information. We don't know that they are collecting it, but you have to think if they can they are.

Just think of all the products they have and how they might collect info. Have a gmail account? They can read it since it sits on their server. Did you customize your Google Home page? Do you use Google reader? The list goes on.

I wrote a post last week called SEO Implications For Personalized Search about what data Google says they are going to use in personalized search and things you might want to do to help your site.

Search engines really have a lot of ways to track what we're doing now. You can be anonymous if you want, but most people won't be including us. It's a pain to sign in and out of things all the time to do a search and even if you do it's easy to forget. I'm sure Google tracks me through their toolbar, but I find the toolbar has some useful features so I keep it installed.

Also think of the issue for the majority of people. We here know about seo and keep a watch for these kind of things. The average person is never going to know that the search results they see are personalized in any way to them.

great point...well can i say that Content is really KING...IMO Valuable and quality content may result to more quality links as those other sites that are quality and trusted will also trust you...

over and over again. only useful site, people will use it.
and only it can grow.