No one can better tell you than Google what they consider to be spam and what is really SEO. We get this question a lot: “What can you do to put me on the first page of the Google results?” Contemporary Communications’ answer is that you have to provide people what they are looking for. We take the steps that Google’s Matt Cutts describes in this video:

1. Make sure your pages are “crawl-able.” Google needs to be able to follow your links and find the pages you want indexed.
2. Use the right key words.
3. Verify usability and design.
4. Optimize your site to run faster.
5. Make the user experience good.

In other words, search engines are becoming more and more “human” in the way they rank your site—this is good for the good guys and bad for the bad guys. Matt’s job at Google is to fight spam; if you use gmail or even the search engine you may notice that he’s really good at it! Also notice he does not mention inbound links… this is where the the SPAM begins and the SEO ends in Google’s opinion. We know that this is an important ranking factor but Google does not want you to go buy a bunch of links (see Michelle’s recent blog posting on this topic). This may work today but it is a bad long term strategy that will likely hurt you when Matt figures out how to make these type of links penalize you.

But here it is in Google’s own words: