The days of having a simple list of 10 web pages returned for whatever you searched for are long gone. Now you can expect to have richer results, with maps of local companies and service providers, review information for online stores and lists of events being packed in around the traditional results. This means less prominence for that elusive #1 ranking, but a more even playing field for those who can’t possibly compete with SEO behemoths such as Wikipedia and the big multi-nationals.

So, consider rich snippets. Consider Google Local listings, Google Base product feeds and just about everything else which makes it onto the SERPs offered by Google. You may end up reducing your spend on SEO as a whole.

You will see that your site will become a central resource for your company – not just a page on the web.

Quality of links is a hard thing to measure. Generally you want links from a site which is in a similar area of relevance to your own. Links from a site about body building to your online pet store probably won’t help much, but links from a blog about pet ownership would be very useful. Search engines and users are discerning and will only be interested in a link if it is relevant.

In this way, you could say that 100 irrelevant links could be worth 1 relevant one from a good site. In the end the cost might be the same – weigh it up in your head!

However, nothing beats natural links. Paying will get you so far but the real benefit comes from the snowball effect of good content people want to share. Social networks such as Twitter and Facebook can be especially good for this kind of thing.

I haven’t gone into much detail as there is a hell of a lot of information out there about links and their usefulness, but I just wanted to get the concept of “quality beats quantity” into people’s heads once more.