They pursue great search engine result placement by looking for “holes” in Google's algorithm or “shortcuts” that will produce ranking bumps.

It's a treadmill. A new strategy pops up. It works. Everyone hops on board. The search engine operators realize that their systems are being “gamed” and they make adjustments to curtail the value of the trick. Lather. Rinse. Repeat.

Look, good rankings are a great way to make real money online. Search engine traffic is the holy grail of IM and if you can get a big flow of visitors through organic results, it's hard not to make money. It's easy to understand the obsession with the “latest and greatest” way to fool Google, et al.

However, it's something of a backwards approach. The best way to secure high rankings that will last through all of the algorithmic tweaks is to step off the treadmill and to start thinking about what search engines really want to accomplish.

People use them because they want to find information to meet their interests and needs. When the search results put them into contact with the right information, those users are happy. When they get a lot of material that doesn't help them, they get annoyed. Annoyed users are less likely to continue using the service.

Thus, the search engines have a vested interest in providing people with the information they seek. They design their systems to broker that user/content connection.

And they're always trying to improve the process. They don't want to serve up junk results just because some savvy SEO found a way to exploit the system. They'll patch those holes as fast as they can while simultaneously devoting a great deal of time to improving their base approach to finding and sorting everything that appears on the web.

So, when you're looking for shortcuts you're fighting against the search engines. You may occasionally lose battles, but you're probably going to lose the war.

There's a better way.

You can make an effort to provide quality information and content in a usable format. You can strive to create the kind of material that people really want. You can make their job easier.

And they will reward you with higher rankings. The best sites, the one the “tricksters” are inevitably trying to pass in the SERPs usually have one thing in common--they provide good content the right way.

You can try to stay one step ahead of the search engines, but it's going to wear you out and a lot of the effort you pour into the process will end up being meaningless after updates and changes.

Create the kinds of sites the search engines want to reward. As the quality of search inevitably improves, those sites are going to benefit from all of that search engine traffic.