I have a great respect for the tried and tested SEO techniques that everyone uses to make sites rank more effectively. We’ll always use them as they’re are useful at achieving relevance. However rankings aren’t the be all and end all of SEO. Natural search is a marketing channel – it is not for just generating traffic its about making sales. Duly all SEO needs to be put in this context. I’ve had a quick look at some systems that sites use to achieve rankings which are just plain ‘old hat’ they get rankings but don’t always do much more to help the website.

After having already disrupted the Web Position gold ability to scrape results Google has now thrown another spanner in the works. Results are now server within H3 rather than H2 tags. Not a big change I grant you – but as everyones scraper is set up to look for these when analysing the pages they’ll all stop working. Can just see loads of wee coders having to try and remember which part of code they’ll have to fix to get it all working again.

God knows how much hand checking will be going on today until they get it fixed. No doubt SEO offices throughout the world will be getting the evil screen at Google telling them that they can no longer access Google as they have some spyware or a virus installed…

I love the growth in these ’social websites’ – I’m never too sure whats considered as being social media these days. Everything that can be used to leverage traffic – sorry I mean friends – seems to be within this field. Here are some that I really like