Keeping up with the latest SEO trends

The competition to get noticed in the web world gets tougher by the day. The most effective weapon to gain top search engine rankings remains SEO or Search Engine Optimization.

Times have changed. The clues and tricks that were very functional awhile ago have been badly exposed. Google does not fall for it. Web sites have to necessarily update themselves to be in the roving eye of Google.

More news from Google! Because the keywords meta tag was so often abused, Google years ago began disregarding the keywords meta tag. However, Google does sometimes use the "description" meta tag as the text for its search results snippets. Read more on the Google Blog HERE.

Taking a cue from the Yellow Pages trick of adding "AAAAAA1111111" before the company name to be placed first, there was a time when it was enough to stuff your preferred keywords hundreds of times in your metatags and page copy to rank high with the search engines. Not any more. Search engines now penalize sites that do things like that.

The best way to achieve high rankings today is by getting a significant amount of inbound links from quality pages related to your site's topic, with your keywords in the anchor text.

Link exchanges and reciprocal linking are slowly becoming a thing of the past as this technique has been abused, and search engines have increased their capabilities to detect it. There is strong evidence that search engines give more weight to one-way links (like links from directories or links to your page from the body of articles).

What to do in a nutshell? Create optimized content, build links, engage in social media, and optimize landing pages. The result: lots of new customers, increased traffic and organic search rankings.