Love in the late 90's was complicated.  So Carrie Bradshaw would make it seem.

As much as Carrie would toil over an episodes time to finally collect her thoughts for an epilogue of conclusion (or confusion), so have we continued to fight our way through this opaque 2012 in determining where, what and how to create relationships in our content.

The past year we have seen a desertion of Internet marketers from the term SEO toward Inbound Marketing.  Have we given up on the chase of gaining higher traction for our sites, and clients sites, and given way to SE displayed results?  Have we adapted Inbound Marketing as a catchall term to be used within Internet marketing to gain confidence?

Things in the golden age of SEO were simple right?  Well, at least they seemed to be.  Get a web site.  Get some links to point to it and collect the traffic.  More advanced SEOs would cloak or use doorway pages.  You really didn't need Google to be transparent at that point because it was quite simple.  A voting contest.  It certainly evolved though.

Still, moving forward, the new millenium SEO strategy dealt with quantity, quantity, quantity.  How many links and how many pages of garbage could you get out there to point back.  Again, who ever is most popular wins.

Now, more than ever, we are told to curate unique and appealing content for our sites and brands.  We are told that the audience will determine our rankings result pages.  And who better to judge that content than our audience.

So, is Inbound Marketing the true "Mr. Big"?  Our on and off relationship with what we perceive to be SEO continues to challenge what we really want out of the relationship.  What does Google assume of the relationship between publishers and web users?  Samantha Jones (Kim Cattrall) famous line was always, "Practically all the relationships I know are based on a foundation of lies and mutually accepted delusion."

I recently posted on The Mystery of Social Signals in efforts to determine the companies role in identifying a social rank related to trust, content, authority of the user as well as many other variables Google could consider.

New York City has come together once again.  Over the past decade America declined in international trust, but could we now be seeing the the pride in America and the excitement that the capital of the world holds?  Over the past decade America declined in international trust, but are we now seeing relationships between New Yorkers begin to re-flourish.  So many major events running concurrently with the Election 2012, the resurrection of the towers, cable programs highlighting Manhattans glamour such as Million Dollar Listings and RHONY have placed a sentiment back on the city painting a picture of the new New York.

Recognizing that these latest changes truly have shaken us all up this year and pushed us in the right direction is truly an understatement.  Both for us as marketers and especially for our clients.  The quality of work developed and pitched to earn shares.  The time spent researching and building relationships with publishers.  The results given to creative thought leadership in brands.  These are all metrics those of us who were prepared and those of us who have changed continue to see.

So in that, SEO also has a fairy tale ending in which the girl gets the guy.  Our clients get the content they need.  The users get the results they are searching.  But do we really think it's in Google's best interest to facilitate this path?