In a slight shift from the regular advice that I give website owners on Thursdays, I was recently contacted by a YoungEntrepreneur.com blog reader, Stephen Drusano, who works for a SEO company called Blue Fountain Media.

He shared with me what his firm (c/o the company’s CEO, Gabriel Shaoolian) thought were four emerging trends in the SEO world. I agree with the first three for sure and am seeing them increase in popularity. The last one is questionable but I thought I would share the email in its entirety. Thank you for sharing Stephen / Gabriel!

Hello Evan,

I saw your recent post on SEO advice for the guy from the capability events company. I work with a company called Blue Fountain Media that specializes in SEO. A team member at Blue Fountain Media was kind enough to provide me with a list of  SEO methods that have shifted as of recently and I wanted to forward them along to you because they strike me as really informative and valuable. Take a look at these:

Old Method: Tons of Footer Links
New Method: Contextual Linking
Google is placing less and less importance on links in navigational menus, sidebars, headers, footers etc. Now it is very important to embed links within bodies of text  – between the 2 and 4 paragraphs of a relevant body of text using relevant anchor text. What SEO’s used to was place hundreds of keyword-rich links at the bottom of pages to pass link value. Another factor which has led to this is the fact that Google is only attributing value to the first link it encounters on an html document to any one page.

Old Method: Blog Comments
New Method: Guest Posting
It used to be that all one had to do to build links to a website was to go around commenting on hundreds of blogs, leaving a link back to your website. Ever since the “no follow” attribute came along, which stripped these type of links of their value, the strategy concerning blogs is to write guest posts, with a link back to the author’s website.

Old Method: Link Exchange
New Method: Linking Out
Almost every SEO used to create a “links” page with hundreds of irrelevant links to hundreds of other websites with keyword-rich anchor text. Now that Google has started taking a look at the context of links, these pages have become worthless, and many times harmful. When websites link to spam websites they are punished for it by Google. It is important to link out only to quality websites. The new form of link exchanging is by mentioning a website in a blog post, which is reciprocated at a later date by the link partner.

Old Method: Buying Links
New Method: Donations
It used to be (and still is to the most part) that SEO’s would purchase links to their website, with the option of anchor text and placement on a page. This was similar to advertising, however, impressions or clicks were not being tracked – only the value of the link in terms of search engine rankings. What is slowly putting an end to this practice are Google’s watch dogs who look out for websites that sell links, penalizing them by devaluing their links. A better alternative to purchasing links is giving away donations to charities, which often have high-quality domains and add a link to the donor somewhere on their website. These turn out to be better value as well since at least the money is going to a good cause and the link stays there even after one has given a donation, unlike with paid links, which have a monthly payment structure in general.

What do you think of Stephen’s email? What other trends are you noticing in the SEO world?