It would be fair to say that pretty much every major change to the online environment is greeted with the same two questions by the vast majority of the SEO community - What is it? How can I use it to boost my SEO campaigns? So with adoption of the next major evolution of HTML becoming more common, and having a growing feeling that it was about to come up in more client meetings, I decided it would be a good time to check how I can potentially make the most of HTML5.

Last year, during a chat with one of the @seoptimise twitter followers, they mentioned a post on SEJ about how it is a myth that bad links can get your site penalised )a position that the author later changed after feedback( and asked my opinion on it. The strange thing was that a few months earlier I had to sort out the exact issue for one of our clients. So I thought it would be an idea to write a post it.

* 2011 has been another very busy year on the SEOptimise blog, with nearly 400 posts generating over 400,000 visits and well in excess of half a million pageviews )oh and one best blog award (. With the year drawing to a close, and Christmas just round the corner, I thought it would be a great opportunity to try and summarise the best and most popular posts of the year, and hopefully give you a few early SEO Christmas gifts. While I am personally not a fan of list posts,

For anyone who missed it yesterday, Google announced on their Blog that they would be "protecting personalized search results" by encrypting search queries made whilst signed into your Google account. Which, they go on to explain, means that "websites you visit from our organic search listings will still know that you came from Google, but won't receive information about each individual query".

If you have worked in SEO for any period of time, I'm sure you will be familiar with a number of the better known tools around, tools such as SEOmoz Pro Tools, Majestic SEO and the Google Keyword Tool. For a lot of SEOs and situations these tools can provide all the help you need, but there are a number of awesome low profile tools that can take SEO campaigns and agencies to the next level. Tool: Linkdex Use it for: Competitor analysis, back link analysis,

Anyone who attended Brighton SEO earlier in the year )and didn't succumb to the lure of the pub before the last session( would have sat and listened, with varying levels of interest, to the panel debate on 'is there such a thing as ethical SEO'. While I sat and took in the tennis-like back and forth discussion of a topic never likely to be fully covered in 45 minutes, I began to ponder my own views on both ethics and where they sit with SEO.

I have been working as a full time SEO Exec for just about a year now and a few things have become apparent in that time, most notably that SEOs love tools and are always on the lookout for that elusive competitive advantage to give them a ranking edge. So it strikes me as odd that every agency already has access to a free tool that will )amongst other things( get them high quality links, improve their keyword research,