Rasputin - 12:34 pm on Jan 8, 2013 (gmt 0)

If you're running a good business and an efficient website, Google will want it in their results.

This is true but only with certain provisos including the reality that if a search term can potentially earn money google want to profit from it themselves, not send traffic to other sites, so the amount of ads and 'google product' type links makes it unlikely visitors will easily find a 'regular' site.

That isn't a 'google bashing' statement, it is more or less what Larry Page himself has said.

Sooner or later we will get used to 4 ads at the top of the SERPS, then 5, then 6...because they can't stop their relentless pursuit of money even if it is at the cost of user experience.

Having said that I am are doing just fine, and have done for several years, relying only on free google (and other search engine) traffic, never doing any link building etc, and spending all our time on making our sites as high quality as possible.

Will the traffic disappear tomorrow? probably not. Will it keep getting tougher? Almost certainly yes. But lots of other things will also change before then as well (new search engines, better apps, facebook search engine, new advertising opportunities etc).

In any case, information sites (like our own) earn little per page view, so adwords isn't a viable proposition, and traffic volume and quality from facebook just doesn't repay the effort involved.

So overall I agree with the idea that the most important thing is to make a site as good as possible for users and let other things - particularly google organic traffic - follow, and find that most other activities are just a costly or time expensive diversion (for information sites, not ecom sites).