Forced SEO is certainly not anything to look negatively on in my opinion, but often it is a requirement of the situation. Unless your client has a huge budget and time to wait – results are necessary now – not 4-6 months down the road.

Great article & tips for organic results nonetheless.

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Instead, spend a little bit more time and make truly useful articles. An article with intrinsic value makes many of the things you mentioned happen organically.

In my opinion many of the “article marketers” and “content SEO” people are focusing on the wrong things. Great articles will provide free organic traffic that pays for itself many times over. It's such a simple concept I'm not understanding why people don't get it.

As an example, I spent a lot of time writing articles for one of my sites 18 months ago. Even today those handful of articles are the most highly trafficked articles on the site, and repeatedly bring surges of traffic via StumbleUpon, Delicious, and other social aggregators.

My last opinion is the search results of the future will center around content and sites that have activity, discussion, and community. Whether a page has a certain number of keywords or is structured for SEO – while important – will become less and less relevant. So these lame ass articles which look like they were written by robots will just fall off. Meanwhile articles carefully constructed to provide long term value will always continue to provide that value.