Matt Cutts- What is Helping is

Talking about a Newsweek Article on SEO Matt Cuts makes some very specific observations about what is really helping and what isn't on a couple of Black/White hat seo'd sites.

Truthfully, much of the best SEO is common-sense: making sure that a site’s architecture is crawlable, coming up with useful content or services that has the words that people search for, and looking for smart marketing angles so that people find out about your site (without trying to take shortcuts). Google will keep working to make SEO easier and spamming harder. In my ideal world, a site owner wouldn’t need to think about SEO at all: Google would always find your content with no help. However, things as simple as a site map can improve how well search engines can crawl (and rank) your site.

This sounds amazingly similare to the things Ken Evoy has been saying for some time now about C->T->P->M. especially in his latest book, Make Your Links Work which you can pick up for free from the Site SellValue Exchange.

You can learn more about C->T->P->M in this free Affiliate Masters eBook Download or with the awesome new eBook Make Your Content PRESell.

I particularly like the part where Matt says of avatarfinancial.com

...But what is helping is good content like the articles about non-conforming loans and the new blog on that site. That’s why when I see strong links from Yahoo’s directory, Dmoz, and Wikipedia to Avatar, I’m not very surprised.

Kind of a glowing recomendation of providing great original content and blogging :). Thing is, if you are running around trying to figure out how to trick Google, Yahoo! and the rest, you are fighting a losing battle. It's time to start paying attention to these guys and giving them what they really want. Original valuable content. Content that is good for your visitors, not just keywords and reprints for the spiders. Long term you will earn more and work less with this approach.