SEO strategy (Search Engine Optimization) is one of my main job responsibilities and I travel a few times a year teaching seminars to real estate companies about SEO and online marketing. It's a fascinating discipline - but it can be boiled down to two very basic things: content and links. But when you tell the owner of a real estate company that all they need to do is write a few articles and add them to their site, and make sure their agents link to their home page, they think it's too simple to be effective. They want the 'magic potion' they can pay a lot of money for or 'have the guys work on'. But any of the 'magic' anyone can promise you, in the form of a forum or salesman, is only temporary, generally negated after some period of time, and it may get you banned from the Index (by Google's auto-discovery or your competitors ratting you out .. more common than you think). So anyone selling link farms or 'guaranteed Google status' is selling a load of crap you can't base a business plan on.

So, if you simmer it down to its roots, Google's sole priority is to return the most relevant content to users based on what they asked it for. They sought to improve on what Yahoo, Altavista, Lycos, Webcrawler, etc were doing in the mid nineties - digest the world of data into a global oracle. But these early engines were easy to scam - I could get a first place rank for anything on Altavista just by pasting white text on a white background a hundred times and mass-submitting to their 'add url' form. But then when I, or anyone, went to the search engine that was easily blasted full of crap by spammers and it just returned junk the natural reaction was to quit using that one and start feeling out the fringes (Momma, dogpile, hotbot, geocities, newsgroups, aol, edited directories) for purity of results. So Google knew from the get-go as they rose from that environment that they needed the best way to filter junk from good, unique content that people would like to read. (I'm feeling lucky = I trust a real, relevant result will be my first option) And they started hiring teams of PHD linguists as they grew to ascertain what's a real sentence, what's relative, what's a natural repeat density of a word in a formatted page, have we seen this anywhere before, etc.

Plus, the core of their patented PageRank algorithm technology, which they wrote in college I believe and effectively started the company, understands a basic concept of popularity: people will link to valuable information. If you buy a domain name and it's crap and nobody knows about it or ever links to it, you're a nobody and nobody cares about you. (firing squad to the wall flowers at the dance ...) So you don't deserve to be on Google. If you have a million friends and everyone links to you from everywhere you must be important. (but the wall flowers with make-believe friends; ie other domain names they own that only link to each other, don't count. nor do people bringing escorts to the dance - ie. buying from link farms. but I digress ...) Let the masses vote for the masses in terms of what they want to see, and in what order. But let the geeks be on top. It also had a nice side benefit of naturally fitting into the design of web spiders, which follow links to discover new pages. Google's spider has evolved to arguably one of the most valuable pieces of code in the world, but still follows links; and when you mix links and site context (linguists + databases) then see which sites link to other sites using what words - you get a powerful combination for systematic sorting of the world's data through word combination.

The algorithm has been evolved to extremes and can't really be followed; it's a waste of time to monitor SERPS incessantly. Play the long tail. You used to be able to watch when it did a Google Dance and you could watch the algorithm update hour by hour around the world's Google Datacenters as they would shuffle the indexes (results change), now it's a constantly rolling revision.

The source of all their money is Google Adwords SEM sales, which all rely on a gigantic worldwide audience of traffic. Very few other Internet companies have survived on advertising alone - while countless thousands have tried and failed. (or adapted, like buy.com). If their organic search results are called into question - for favoritism, manipulation, being evil - then there opens a crack in the market from which a new, more 'pure' solution could emerge; possibly eventually eclipsing them like they have done to the search industry and to some extent Microsoft. Loss of trust = loss of traffic = loss of advertisers ... by the billions.

If you're thinking 'but what about all their other businesses? they threaten MS with GDocs ... there's Google Maps ... other value here!' But how do you pay for your use of their cloud space? seeing ads. How much would you pay if they started charging (you have the Pro version of GEarth, right?); and what if your privacy or ownership of content was ever in question? Will they be happy with a plateau in their strategies to monetize their user base? Hasn't happened yet ... but despite everything that's happened within Google, the organic results have been a sacred ground.

So, I trust them when they say they won't skew anything in anyone's favor (don't rock the boat) and there are millions of watchdogs. I don't touch adwords, but do the hard work of scalable SEO through generating legitimate inbound links with business program design ('link to your blog from your home page'), listings on directories, tons of google sitemaps/rss/url syndication stuff, crazy clean XHTML and interior link structure (skewed slightly to appear to G how would i'd like it to and prettied with CSS) and to do all that you need to be creating a ton of -unique- and valuable content. The big bonus of this is that it'll work for you for 2,5,10 years once you set a good groundwork and content update program. So, my latest product is a blogging platform for real estate agents where we handle all of the infrastructure and SEO and they provide the content. There's a lot to it, but basically if they can email they can blog, and we get them traffic which gets their phone ringing. They do all the hard work once it's set up of just being the market experts they are.

There are a ton of details for managing SEO, but with just the basics - analytics, content gen program (need incentives, continual content growth, improvement, with quality oversight), and solid internal and inbound linking strategy - I was able to get one site from 1200 daily uniques to 15-20,000 daily uniques over a year and a half. (and that's why I love my new juicer?)