I've been reading quite a bit of material on Google recently and I've personally come to the conclusion that sooner rather than later, search engines such as google will almost dismiss the current SEO techniques used today with a couple exceptions. I would think that Keyword rich content, Titles, links etc are and will always be very important, but the older Google gets possibly 99.999% of it's results will be based on content and interaction only? Think about the difference from 2001 to 2006 and how much less value h2 tags etc give to SEO now. (this is all of course an assumption).

Question-!

My question is, from what you all know, is it really worth the time to label images and make sure h1 h2 tags etc are labeled with Keywords ?? and if so what % would you give to the "tried and true techniques" ? At this point I think it's still important enough to spend some time on, but what do you all think??

Thank you for your input! =)

In our experience what works the most is a good content and link polularity. However and well built website also is taken into consideration, that includes applying all the "old" techniques such us alternate text on images, clean code, search engine friendly URL's etc.

With the application of Google sitemaps and Yahoo feeds you almost guranteed that the content is viewable to the search engine anyway.

I say why not do it could it hurt you? In my opinion not at all so I keep doing it and it is always fun optimizing a site to see what the effects are on the serps.

I agree with the comment that content is king. I have a couple of sites listed #1 in google and the most I’ve done is use a balance of techniques that I’ve read about. I’m not an expert in search or google, but I do know what works for me. The first thing is content.

The second was when sites started linking to my sites. A lot of “first page” sites linking to your sites can work wonders. Of course, you must have your site built correctly (headers, etc). IMO, it is a total way of building sites and not just “this or that.”

Then again, my domains are not related to hosting, so it may be easier for me to get a site listed in the top than say someone in a market with key players who have more resources.

Recently, I was surprised to see a relatively new domain of mine on the bottom of the first page in a search while checking out competitors. I did not expect to see it there. I purchased the domain name in Oct 06, and loaded some content in Dec. I followed my normal path of letting a few key people know about it… people who visit places like yahoo groups, etc… and I told a couple of webmasters about it.

My thought is, I don’t have time to be an expert in this field, but I can have a plan -- just as I do with marketing or sales. I’m definitely not an expert in marketing or sales either….

I think Google in particular loves fresh contents. So, between labeling the "alt" tags and creating fresh contents, I'd go for the latter. But as Kris mentioned, doing these old SEO tricks doesn't hurt your site. Googles is not the only player in the seo game. Other search engines may still give h or alt tags some weight.

Yes, the current trends in SEO are just two - linking (and again linking, and even more linking) and fresh (of course, high-quality) content.

if you see the seo from 2001 to 2006, you will get a huge difference. difference in search results, difference in logic. now days yo see the google is delivering the specific results to make the search easy for the searchers.

but content has been the powerful object since it's beginining. today link building is the major factor and tomorrow this may lost it's value.

...today link building is the major factor and tomorrow this may lost it's value.
Hm, with such a fast growing blogosphere and the web invasion of social networking...I strongly doubt it. But who knows...;)