The latest trends in Search Engine Optimisation

SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) is a relatively new web discipline (about 10 years old), with standards and rules still evolving. As it concerns search engines, and search engines are ever-changing entities, so the rules of SEO are constantly changing, becoming more and more sophisticated.

There are different schools of SEO; people who belong to those schools, preach different approaches to SEO, have different priorities and act differently. But they all have to continuously adjust to the changes in the way the search engines work, in one way or another.

In this article, we are concentrating on ethical Search Engine Optimisation; so what are the latest trends?

1. Growing importance of search engine-friendly design.

The rules of search engine-friendly website design are simple, but for years search engine optimisers tended to underestimate their importance. In 2003, talk of 'keyword densities', 'title tags' and 'keyword-rich anchor text' dominated the SEO communities. These things comprise SEO basics, and they are still important, but in 2007, more and more SEOs realised that clean code, consistency in URLs and correct use of HTTP responses are no less important for successful SEO than content and meta information. Properly designed sites often outrank keyword-rich sites in the search engines and professionals can't help but notice this.

2. Being very careful with link building.

Link building is a dying art. The engines have developed very smart algorithms to analyse the quality of links, and the "link is a link is a link" principle no longer works. The engines are capable of discovering very complicated link schemes and applying different rankings penalties. The more spammy the link scheme looks to the engine, the more severe the penalty.

That's why traditional reciprocal links are no longer used by good SEO professionals. They are readily detectable as a definitely artificial linking pattern and, in almost 100% of cases, exchanging links means you are already in numerous bad neighbourhoods: and bad neighbourhoods can have a detrimental effect on your whole SEO campaign.

That's why it's now more important than ever to be extremely careful when interlinking sites belonging to the same owner. Before you know it, you'll step over an invisible line and trigger a filter or a penalty, so it's better to underdo the interlinking than overdo it.

When a site has to be submitted to directories, submitting blindly to thousands of directories is not recommended. It's important to do your research well and choose a few good quality ones, otherwise there will be no SEO effect at all or, worse still, a negative one. In terms of sending direct traffic, major quality directories are definitely the best choice.

The engines also have their 'spies' in most link brokering schemes, so it's best to stay away from them and not even try buying links without the rel="nofollow" attribute under Google's radar.  Google engineers are much smarter than we tend to assume.

Earning natural links - and doing so gradually and patiently - is now the only way to go.

One example of what can happen if people are not careful with links is described here.