If you are not keeping up with the latest SEO trends and strategies, you may be falling behind in the race to capture the attention of the search engines, managing your search engine optimization techniques the same way as you did years ago, months ago or even weeks ago, will eventually lead your website to land in the enormous stockpile of `spammy` websites that have lost their flair due to outdated SEO methods. The old method of stuffing keywords in the content and Meta tags of your website is now getting penalized instead of acquiring high ranking scores.

Stop the Link Exchanges, Move to Inbound Links

The recommended strategy of participating in link exchanges is now setting off red flags with the search engines. Unfortunately, this technique was over-used by the cyber industry quickly after webmasters discovered the results that it brought, and the always innovative search engines have caught on to this practice. Continuing this technique with your site might be working now, but sooner than later, your website will take a nosedive in the rankings.

Instead of trading off links, or reciprocal linking, using solid one-way links from ranking directories and inside of the bodies of articles that are posted on quality websites will magnetize the search engine’s focus in your site’s direction. This practice works even better when there are substantial quantities of inbound links throughout the internet that direct web surfers back to your website. Another key to this strategy is to make sure that the articles or directories include keywords that are relevant to your own website.

Beware that posting abundant amounts of inbound links at one time will also create a negative impact on the search engines, as they are now accustomed to detecting this technique as well. Search engines have a keen eye for websites that acquires links at a fast pace, and will quickly discount them. Posting blog comments with links to your site could also return an ineffective result, as spammers have brought negative attention and misused to this practice as well.

Mobile SEO

One of the new SEO measures that website owners and developers are employing to keep up with the pace is mobile web search optimization. Mobile phones such as the iPhone, the Smartphone, the Blackberry and Google Android are the new, compact laptops of yesterday. According to a Nielsen Media Research study, there are over 56.9 million mobile phone users that search the web on their handy devices every day. Now is the time to not only build a mobile web presence, it is also time to design an optimization strategy for the mobile searching applications as well.

On the go, consumers are exploring the internet from their mobile phone to find the services and the products that they want and need, and if your site is not in the mobile ranking or its performance is insufficient enough to keep the visitors engaged, you are losing more than mobile web surfers; you are losing customers. If you have not already optimized your website for mobile searching, it is not too late. There are websites, companies and software that will analyze your site for functionality on the mobile web, and work with your website until it is optimized.

Speed Up to Keep Up

Everything in our world moves fast and everyone is always in a hurry to get where they want while they work on getting what they want. Your website’s speed will rapidly make or break your whole website presence. If your website is loading slowly, web surfers will quickly skip to the next that that offers the information that they want at a faster pace.

Increasing the speed of your site by employing correct HTML and keeping your JavaScript and CSS clean will assure that your visitors do not get frustrated and leave. Get a good website performance analyzer tool to check the load time of your site. There are rumors on the internet that site speed may become a deciding factor in page ranking, and if this happens, you want to be in the mainstream rather than left in the dust.

Staying in tune and keeping up with the latest SEO trends is crucial to the web development and web design markets as well as website owners themselves. As the internet changes minute by minute, the strategies and techniques are altered, enhanced and improved and the only way to stay in the search engine rankings is to preserve a watchful eye for the methods that work and employ, test and maintain them on your site. Practicing the old style SEO techniques or black hat SEO methods is only going to leave your site so far out in cyberspace that web surfers will never find it.