^^ this and just wanted to mention that natural links/word of mouth marketing has been the base foundation of some of the largest website's SEO campaigns. Why kill yourself building links forever when you can work on getting SOME exposure for a few month/a year/or two and then all the natural links will start pouring in.
I have spelled it out for folks here more times than I care to recount. It doesn't matter. People still don't get it. Then they go back to linkwheels and blog commenting. "Make your site actually relevant" is voodoo to people around here. Its pretty sad really. Nigel
Well said ! We need to take care of site usability and not only searchability . If you are good in users eye u are good to Searchengines as well.
Backlinking remains a huge part of optimizing for Google, as re-affirmed by case study after case study that is published on the web. The new generation of SEO "case study" blogs have been documenting what actually works for ranking purposes, as opposed to the propaganda line from Cutts. The preponderant findings are that backlinking (including from guest posts and blog comments) remains a major factor in ranking, as the most important objective metric involved in doing so is neither "quality" or "relevancy" (which are secondary factors), but authority (by whatever means so long as it appears natural). PR, PA, trust flow remain the most effective shorthand for measuring the transferable authority or "juice" of web pages, and that is why do-follow linking from high authority pages keeps working. Current generations of SEO software permit marketers to automate the linking from high authority pages as well as "quality" pages, so the bashing of them as "spam" links is unwarranted. It's not magic or voodoo, it's webmasters and marketers scaling objectively verified ranking methods, thereby doing what is most relevant for their business objectives or traffic level goals.
Imagine that Matt Cutts is only trying to manipulate the SEOs into certain directions - SEO is a trial and error by all means until you get it right - it's no perfect science since we do don't know how the algos really work. The best way to go about it is to study what the big fishes are doing and follow the same path. One more thing - Screw Google Sooner or later you'll be ranked high if you have the right audience that's automatically building links for you. Relying on Google alone will drive you nuts.