Fruition’s 2007 statistical analysis of SEO has produced some surprising results and some results that were anticipated.

1. Dollar per dollar SEO is still the best way to invest your advertising or public relations budget online. However, only if you take into account the lifetime value of new traffic and sales generated from the SEO campaign, this holds true today (sort of).
2. For example, Fruition’s statistical analysis of SEO took into account sites that had been online for at least 2 years and had at least minor ongoing SEO activities. New pages for these sites were indexed, on the average, within 7 days. All sites utilized Google sitemaps. Thus, the lag time for an SEO campaign to produce new traffic has shrunk significantly since 2000, when three months was the norm for new pages to appear. Ethical SEO firms have always said that a good SEO campaign takes three months to get off the ground. Fruition now contends that results can be observed within a few weeks.
3. Social networking does matter.
4. Inbound links and proper title tags are still the most important components of an SEO campaign.
5. The use of link farms has a very low correlation to lasting traffic increases.
6. Thin affiliate programs are going to suffer a significant drop in revenue and traffic during the next year based on their decreased relevancy. A thin affiliate program is just a site with links, providing no added value to the visitor. Blogs with good reviews will pick up the slack.