Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is a constantly changing field of website development. As google, msn (Bing), Yahoo and all the rest develop ever more complex algorithms for ranking websites so the SEO professionals (and amateurs) must adapt their techniques to keep their websites at the top. It used to be the case when the first search engines became commonplace that some well chosen meta tags - titles, keywords and descriptions - could see you ranking well and pulling in thousands of visitors. At around this time the first 'black-hat' search engine optimisers realised that if they stuffed their meta tags with 'Britney Spears' and 'porn' they could pull in all those sex obsessed teenagers, although quite what they expected to achieve with this is anyones guess.
Thus began the great SEO arms race, as the search engine coders improved and developed their algorithms to prevent these black hat optimisers from getting their sites unfairly high in the rankings. Techniques such as keyword stuffing, hidden text, and now backlink spamming gradually became obsolete and 'cheating' SEO became less and less attractive. Meanwhile proper search engine optimisation (White-hat) continued to work wonders for genuinely useful, interesting or individual websites. These started with the meta tags and moved on to checking that the website content contained good, relevant key phrases, to encouraging backlinks via links pages, writing and commenting on external blogs and forums and submitting sites to relevant 'proper' web directories.
Now, in 2010, the biggest factor in ensuring a website performs in search engines appears to be down to its appearance on social networking sites. This means sites like facebook, twitter, del.icio.us, squidoo, myspace and hundreds of others where normal internet users can post links and content are more important than any amount of keyword generators or directory submitters. Which means that finally the power is moving to the people rather than the specialists. Whether this is a good thing remains to be seen, after all just because something is popular it doesnt make it good (George W Bush anyone?).
However these latest changes don't mean the death of either ethical or non ethical search engine optimisation, the 'black-hatters' will happily create hundreds of fake accounts on all sorts of social networking sites, forums, blogs etc and spam them all with links in the hope that some will stick. Meanwhile the good guys will look around for related blogs/forums to make useful posts on which include a link back to their site and encourage others to link to their site by making it genuinely informative.
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