Interesting article in Search Engine Land outlining an interview with Google guru Matt Cutts. Google has been working on, and will continue working on personalized search results. The theory is that the results you see on Google will be based not only on the Google algorithm, but also on your past searches. This would seem to sound a death knell for a lot of bad SEO companies and for black hat practices, which is great for good SEO companies and for consumers. The interesting thing that he did say was that;

“the sort of people who have been doing “new” SEO, or whatever you want to call it, that’s social media optimization, link bait, things that are interesting to people and attract word of mouth and buzz, those sorts of sites naturally attract visitors, attract repeat visitors, attract back links, attract lots of discussion. Those sorts of sites are going to benefit as the world goes forward”.

What I take from this is that according to Google, you should be using blogs, social media, RSS and video to promote interest in your site thus generating buzz and back links. Fiddling with your tags, putting new content on your site, and agonizing over keyword density is not going to matter. There may be something to this newfangled “blog marketing” after all.