Moderation and SEO
As with most things in life, when in doubt, use moderation. It seems that this holds true more in the business world than anywhere else. When you are not sure what you should do, use your gut instict and move forward at a moderate pace. In the SEO world, people are constantly trying to get a leg up on their competition and a leg up usually means a lot more money. So, it makes sense that once people see something work a little, they will try to do as much of that one thing as they possibly can. Take linking websites as an example. One link with a certain anchor text, may improve a website’s ranking for that term by many positions on the major search engines. So, if one is good, 1,000 must be better, right? Wrong, most times this is simply not the case. Many of the search engines are hip to the SEO world and know what the mainstream SEOs are up to. Making yourself stand out from the vast majority of websites out there is simply asking to be singled out in front of the class and punished. In SEO terms, this can mean your site gets penalized (loses many ranking positions) or a ban, where no traffic will come from a particular search engine.
The search engine forums are loaded with people who find out that linking is important, improve their rankings with a few links, and then proceed to get their site penalized or banned because of excessive, un-natural linking pratices. So, if there is one piece of advice I can give to you, it is to use moderation every day. In time, you will find your success and probably find yourself on top. Good luck.