Due to the recent Google crackdowns, do you agree using SEO? Is SEO needed?

Cases/Incidents:
http://increseo.com/blog/search-engi...message-clear/
http://www.ebusiness-strategies.co.u...7paidlinks.htm
http://www.jimkukral.com/google-crac...eefall-begins/
http://www.davidnaylor.co.uk/archive...log-crackdown/
http://www.marketingblog.eu/marketin...s_crackdo.html
http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=380960
http://www.blogstorm.co.uk/blog/text...ked-on-google/

No matter what has been going on about the crackdown on MFA or optimized sites .... SEO still works. As I've reported on another thread..... optimizing for the correct keywords helped to double the number of visitors to one of the site i tested (actually i tested on 2 unrelated sites and got similar results)... and the results can be seen in about 1 week!!

Just do it properly .. target the correct keywords(using the correct tools), don't spam your pages with keywords etc etc ... results are guaranteed!!!

What are the names for the correct tools?

Does "unrelated sites" mean still having the related contents? or just the related key words/head title/meta description plus some key words in the text messages on the sites?

Tested on 2 unrelated sites ... with unrelated contents.

The tools which can be used are Wordtracker, Overture or Keyword Elite etc. Use them to scour for keywords that are related our site but not so competitive. Then weave those keywords into title, h1, description tags ... and also mix into body contents.

Great, genzy, looks like you've been researching a lot about SEO

To me, SEO is actually a knowledge rather than a 'tool', hence I thought the phrase 'using SEO' is quite unappropriate.

Those website that were been banned/penalize their search engines are often the case of overdoing it.

Agree with title, meta description tags - Search engines like it.

don't forget the sitemap as well, very important issue for search engine to find you

i voted NO~

though everybody know that SEO is correct, but if you consider need SEO or not? Its really depends on how rush or how effective on your SEO of the website! Is it gonna be cost-effective, you can always spend your whole lifetime on fine-tuning on your website words by words, tag by tag...

but for me...seo is just a way to get some traffic while there are actually much more other ways more effective besides spedning your time and money on SEO things

Search Engine Optimisation is key to success, if you get all your business from search engines. Like rooter, said, there are other ways, like plain old paid advertising. There's good and bad SEO though. Making sure your site is best laid out and tagged for the crawlers is part of good e-business. You can push things a bit harder by spamdexing, but you always risk the search engines penalising you when they find a way, and it might not impress your customers. While advertising a product as "This product is nothing like Edison Chen Last Minute Make Money Face Cream" might get your site a good ranking, it might turn off some of your visitors.

It's always worth checking your sites against the search indexes, to see what ranking they have for different keywords. Then try optimising them (right words on every page, making sure words in images are repeated in titles etc). Trouble is, you have to wait a while for the change to take effect in the index.

I don't know about the sitemap so much, david. I recently wrote some software to generate a sitemap that was specific to a site, to try to reduce the number of redundant crawls that only differed in some unimportant URL argument. The search engines read the sitemap, and then crawl the same old redundant URLs! Google says on its site that they only use the sitemap as an aid, and it may not have a big effect on their crawl.

Seanie, I agree with you on the idea of SEO being the key to success. I just wanted to add that it's been taken for granted intuitively by most of Internet surfers to "Search" for what they want to find on the net.

Don't we all want to be found? Ok, let them search for us!

I'd like to add one important point to all the previous posts: Let's not forget the importance of Off-site optimization. It plays more important role than optimizing on-site factors to get our sites to the top of search engines.

Need SEO or not is to me like asking need to eat or not, LOL.

I agree. SEO is like the solid standard for an acceptable and successful website on the Internet. If a website isn't SE-friendly, search engines won't show it up at the top two result pages. So, the site owner is in deep problem.

... of course, it's the Organic SEO result which matters the most!