In 2010, when you consider SEO, SEM, SMO: don't be stupid: the rules have changed again:

Beware outdated techniques and services: any methodology that is designed to bring an unworthy site up on the first page organic search results of Google and others, at best, will not work for long; at worst, these outdated, yet still widely offered services will get your website penalized, or even banned. Internet services and techniques, and the professors and self-proclaimed experts on the specific topics of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and Search Engine Marketing (SEM); and now Social Media Optimization (SMO) have always been purveyors and protectors of rapidly outdated skills sets: which is happening now at a much faster rate as the technology moves further into a parabolic curve of advancement.

Fortunatley, a new age is upon us: what we called an "I am a Realtor too!" website in 2001 (when most of our clients were Realtors, and we were able to create rankings for such sites by giving away free ads) simply cannot be ranked for any sustainable period of time if at all now: although many not-so-up-to-date sources of misinformation will tell you otherwise for long enough to get your money. Our free ads sites worked after until 2003, when the search engines decided that any number of links originating from one URL (website address) would be treated as only one link, and subsequently that a database address would be treated exactly the same as a unique domain. Link-farms (web-rings, etc) evolved and adapted with social-bookmarking (Digg.com, Stumbleupon.com, Reddit.com) and user-generated, user-filtered content to compensate for subsequent changes to the algorithms determining that such contextual links needed to be from topic-specific authority sites to do any good, and now, as is always the case eventually, those sites have lost their relevancy because they became spam factories just as you started to learn about how well they worked for a little while. When Google decided that dynamic content was better that static content, and some rocket scientist decided that Blog sounded better than Weblog, or Newsgroup ( as we they were called in the 80's), the blogosphere erupted, and social networking sites really came into their own. Now we all have too many profiles that we never update or use, too many 'free blogs' to keep up with, and 'Splogs' (spam blogs designed to robotically harvest spam and feed it to the search engines) don't work anymore either for any length of time, because people like me (and you , I hope) report them to Google and get them banned. >>more here>>