The best way to improve your ranking in Google search results is to give your users something they care about. I’m a big believer in being smart about SEO but anytime you start doing things that don’t benefit users to boost short term search rankings, you’re headed to dangerous territory. This doesn’t mean that you should ignore SEO best practices. Quite the opposite in fact. Making sure search engines can make sense of your site is critical.

Seth Godin has a great post about this on his blog:

It seems to me that in the SEO arms race, shortcuts have a shorter shelf-life than ever before. Building 43 is obsessed with them, and they outnumber whoever you might hire to beat the system. Organic success, on the other hand, is a clear path. If you want to be on the front page of matches for “White Plains Lawyer”, then the best choice is to build a series of pages (on your site, on social sites, etc.) that give people really useful information. Not just boilerplate information you stole from a legal website, but really useful stuff about you, the local courts, the forms people need… the things you’d want to find if you were doing that search.

Once you’ve done everything you can… once you’ve built a web of information and once you’ve given the ability to do this to your best clients and your partners and colleagues, then by all means apply the best SEO thinking in the world to your efforts. Hire the best consultants and use the resources you’ve got left to be sure you’re playing by the right rules.

I think Seth is spot on with one exception. I think you need to be smart about using best practices for search discovery from the outset. Google organic traffic is like gold and having a good knowledge of SEO best practices (or working with someone who does) from the start is incredibly important.

P.S. Seth also points to a NYT article by Saul Hansell that takes a look at Google’s Search Quality group. It’s a great read and I highly recommend it if you’re interested in search.