Search engine optimization is really not a hard task. You must be aware, though, that guidelines and techniques that used to work years ago are no longer effective.

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 favorite keywords hundreds of times in your meta tags 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 verification that search engines give more weight to one-way links (like links from directories or links to your page from the body of articles).

The recent support of the ‘no-follow’ tag in blog comments by the major search engines has closed yet another loophole: webmasters that used to plant links in blog comment fields (practice known as blog comment spam) now find that those links are not followed or counted by the search engines.

Other way search engines are penalizing unnatural or manipulative linking patterns is by checking the Class C IP Address of the page where the link originates. What this principally means is that search engines give more value to links from pages hosted in a different server. If you have a network of sites linked to each other, and they’re all hosted with the same company, the search engines will get a hint that the pages are somehow related and will discount the value of those links.

Search engines are also becoming good at detecting the speed at which a site acquires links. If you just launched a site and it suddenly shows a large amount of high page rank pages pointing to it, the search engines will think that you are relying heavily on link buying or link renting, and will not give your page full credit for those links.

These are just a few tips that underscore how dangerous it is to rely on outdated information when it comes to search engine optimization. Whether you appoint in SEO for business or just as a hobby, it is always a good idea to visit search engine forums and blogs regularly, or to subscribe to a few good SEO ezines or newsfeeds, so that you are always up to date.