Fantastic New year present for one of my clients, who is now on the top of Page 1 for their primary search and Page 2 and 4 for their secondary searches. Tail end searches are all at page 1 as well. All achieved using good design and NO PAID adverts or paid listings..
What was nice also, is that the client has overtaken one of their competitor’s who was using a huge amount of black hat SEO techniques.. It would be nice if Google really did clamp down on these kind of black hat practices, but I still see evidence of their use all of the time.
The other bug bear of mine is the growth of meaningless directories swamping the front page of Google. I can understand how some of the major directories are needed , but REALLY !!! do we need so many? very frustrating for professional companies trying to get up the rankings and blocked by these sites that add very little value.