Neil Patel is the CTO of Advantage Consulting Services, a search engine marketing firm that specializes in web strategy consulting, online marketing, search engine marketing, buzz/viral marketing, social media optimization, and other SEM techniques. Neil is also a conference circuit regular, attending several PubCon and Search Engine Strategies shows a year. Neil sat down with Mike McDonald of WebProNews at this year’s Las Vegas PubCon and talked about some of the trends that are now developing on the conference scene.

Traditional SEO techniques are becoming commonplace; most webmasters understand what internal steps to take in order to maximize a site’s ability to be crawled in order to receive an optimum ranking. So what then gives one site an advantage over another? Links play an important role, but even the process of link-building/link-baiting has undergone its share of scrutiny, especially concerning paid and reciprocal link programs. So how can SEOs use these techniques to achieve a maximum flow of site traffic while maintaining the integrity of the content?

Uniqueness and contextual relevancy are becoming primary factors in building quality links and driving traffic to a site. The question of ‘good links’ vs. ‘bad links’ grows all the more important as advertisers and SEOs alike lean toward this concept of contextual relevancy when it comes to search engine optimization and marketing. The quality of incoming links is starting to outweigh the desire for sheer volume when it comes to getting others to link to your particular site, and SEOs are going to have to use available tools to closely examine the quality of content not only on their own site, but also on the sites linking to them.