Whatever happened to good old SEO?

I've been in the search marketing / SEO industry for quite a few years now (7 to be exact!) and as such I've seen things move from fairly straightforward onsite optimisation to complex link building and social media strategies.

When reflecting on this the other day, I started to feel nostalgic about the days when SEO was all about keyword research and making sure that your site was as optimised as possible avoiding black hat techniques. Call me old school, but to me, this was real SEO where you were rewarded for your hard work by good rankings.

The rise of link building

Now that link building has taken prominence in search engine algorithms (60 to 70% of rankings are based on this) the SEO game has completely changed, and agencies with a network of blog/forums/websites can guarantee you improved links and rankings in a very short space of time. While there's no denying that this strategy works, I've got to say that as an experienced SEO I find this slightly disappointing and very close to a grey hat technique.

I've got nothing against link building if it's done cleverly with good anchor text, relevant keywords and page rank analysis, but I think that by not assessing relevance of links Google is skewing its own results therefore providing searchers with inaccurate results.

So basically, a business with clever agencies (and big budgets) can reach top rankings for specific keywords and get more traffic than a potentially better company with less understanding of search marketing. And to me, that goes against the basic principles of SEO which are providing searchers with relevant results.

What about relevance?

Despite a lot of talk about relevance, LSI (latent semantic indexing) and contextual searches in the past few years, the major search engines still have to implement a lot of these theories into their algorithms. To Google and co, a link to your site with targeted anchor text from a website with a high page rank still matters, even if the site is not relevant to your activity. And until the engines start looking at the relevance of the link, keyword and website content in relation to your website, then there will be ways to fool them by creating thousands of irrelevant links.

Onsite SEO still matters

Despite all of this, onsite optimisation with good keyword research, internal links, metadata optimisation, alt tags, title tags and all the rest still matters. These elements should remain a priority for all SEOs out there, so keep flying the flag!

A the industry evolves, so must I, but I'll never forget my SEO roots as they are what I enjoy the most in my job.

What's your experience with SEO? are you frustrated with link building? How do you feel about the industry changes?