Site promotion is beginning to turn into a process of developing and improving the site itself.

Buying links is becoming too expensive a method of optimisation.

If a couple of years ago you could limit promotion to buying 100–200 links, today companies are purchasing up to 1,000 links. Naturally, the promotion budget keeps growing.

Currently we’re seeing the importance of purchased links decline. Why?

First, budgets can’t grow forever alongside the rising minimum link count. Second — there’s a shortage of quality links. Third — when ranking, search engines place ever greater weight on the site’s trust level.

This means companies now need to think about promoting their site during its construction. Only well-built sites can earn a sufficiently high trust rating. Navigation, design, and site structure need careful work. Many sites approach promotion in reverse: first build the site, later do the promotion. Clearly, with that plan, site optimisation will require major spend.

Sites also need to pay more attention to text — many site owners today don’t plan to place substantial text on the homepage. As a result, optimisers have to bolt text blocks onto finished pages that don’t fit the design at all. And most often such texts are written for search engine robots — readers find them boring due to awkward layout, unfortunate font choices, and dull content.

A trend toward long-term investment will emerge soon. To order site promotion, annual contracts will be signed with serious client-acquisition campaigns.