* SEO is a fast changing discipline . What worked 5 or 10 years ago might be completely unnecessary these days or even bad for your site's ranking. Thus leading search industry publications publish the most probable Google ranking factors each year. Nonetheless many webmasters prefer to stick to the past or follow wrong advice from bloggers who just repeat SEO myths. In recent years,

Google +1 for websites is here for a few days, and while some people are still )or again( skeptical, there are quite a lot of webmasters who have adopted the + 1 button almost immediately. The SEO industry has been especially quick to include the buttons. I am among them, while I still don't use the Facebook like. I'm not going to shout hooray because Google finally released a button,

* Most of traditional SEO link building is still centered around the idea of actually building the links as if on a construction site. The idea or metaphor that links are like bricks and you can use them for building has been successfully contested recently by Ross Hudgens in his essay " Please exit the link building ". It was an excellent write up, but in the end it failed to offer a solution that is not really about building links.

Google have just rolled out a new tool called Google Correlate . It's similar to Google Trends and Google Insights, but it takes the raw data and analyses it. As the name suggests, it's looking for correlations - that is, whether the demand for a given keyword matches the popularity of any other keywords. Sometimes the results are completely random, to the point of being ridiculous and far from useful for SEO. However, after a bit of testing,

* ROI or Return On Investment is on everyone's lips these days. It's become so widespread that you could call it a buzz word now. Although its meaning gets a bit diluted, I have to admit that I use it sometimes outside its strict sense myself. Originally ROI meant the extra monetary return, while increasingly it may mean any value that you get back for something you invest in, be it time, effort or money. With SEO, and especially social media, ROI has become very fuzzy.

* With the recent "Panda" Google quality update one of the key changes was that low quality content and links within it have been discounted by Google. It means that not only so-called content farms got hit by the Panda update, but also sites which heavily relied on content farms for inbound links. Perhaps the most obvious casualty was article marketing. If article marketing was one of your key link building tactics prior to the Panda update,

In recent weeks we have witnessed two overwhelming waves of news I'd like to call 'news tsunamis '. Like real tsunamis you have no choice, you can't escape the news when you are in the nearby area. For this kind of news the whole planet is nearby. Maybe some tribes in the Amazon jungle or a few monks in the Himalayas haven't noticed the death of Osama Bin Laden and the royal wedding, but apart from those lucky few, we have all been drowned in these news waves.

* When it comes to link building one of the most important aspects of it is the optimisation of the actual link. Whether getting the link voluntarily or by contacting webmasters, you have to exert the utmost influence on the link itself. Unfortunately this is also a Catch 22. When you start controlling the appearance of your link it stops being a natural link. Thus Google can use filters on such a link to determine it's "manufactured".

* There are numerous ways of using Twitter for everything from business to fun. The key to using Twitter effectively is the use of tools. Without tools, Twitter can be overwhelming and difficult to fathom. There are numerous tools that allow you to sift through this massive resource of latest news, links and gossip. So what are the Twitter tools that really make a difference for advanced Twitter users?

Everybody is talking about content farms as if they were the only type of sites hit by the latest large Google update. That's a very limited viewpoint. One of the most striking effects of the UK version of Google's quality update dubbed Panda has been the huge losses by shopping search engines and review sites that focus on price comparison. Not all such services have lost though. Among the losers were international heavyweights like: Ciao.co.uk Shopping.com Bizrate.

In late 2007 Google officially announced that so-called paid links are outside its webmaster guidelines, and asked webmasters to report paid links they find on the Web via a special form. Fast forward to 2011 and you'd expect that paid links are long gone, like stuffing meta keyword tags or inflating keyword density on page. They aren't.

A few weeks ago Shark SEO posted an intriguing experiment about multiple meta descriptions . To be more exact, he experimented with adding more than one meta description into a single meta description tag. One or more actual meta descriptions would exceed the meta description display character limit of approx. 165 characters. Why would you want to do it? Well, usually search users are seeking more than one aspect of your site or service.

* After watching the SEO industry debating the Google Panda or Content Farmer update as it was initially dubbed for weeks and now that the update has hit the UK as well I decided to compile a list of the most important resources on it. This update seems to have hit far more SEO practicioners than average webmasters, that might be one of the reasons for the popularity of the topic.

By now I'm quite weary of the manifold failed attempts by Google to enter the social media arena. We had: Google Answers Google Bookmarks Google SearchWiki Google SideWiki Jaiku Google Wave Google Buzz to name just the most known failed or abandoned Google social media services. As with most of the previous offerings, last week's Google +1 started in a clumsy beta or rather alpha version. I didn't even want to test it at first,

* These days the "content is king" and "you need great content" mantras are everywhere. While some people in the SEO industry challenge it by stating that great content is not enough , you need to push, promote or market it as well. I rarely see an article that actually explains what great content is or actually could be. Also, many sites that allegedly offer great content provide mostly big or just long content.

Outgoing links are one of the most underestimated weapons in the arsenal of every SEO and webmaster. After all, you want to get backlinks not give away links by linking out , don't you? So it seems to be a contradiction. Popular wisdom also suggests that you would lose by linking out rather than gain some SEO value.

Probably you haven't noticed yet as I haven't told you yet: starting from 2011 I'm stepping up my efforts on SEOptimise. I write more regularly for the blog and I'll help the SEOptimise team with their blog SEO among others. So I start with the basics: broken links . Blogs amass a record number of broken links over the years as they often deal with short-lived developments or news. The Web deteriorates fast and with it your site quality when you link out.

* Denouncing SEO is a popular sport these days on the Web. It always draws crowds. Over the years the simple "SEO is spam", "SEO is dead" or "SEO has no future" rants have worn out though as they have no basis and have been repeated far too often without any proof. The sport of denouncing SEO has evolved. Bloggers, journalists and entrepreneurs of the aspiring kind denounce SEO while understanding the importance of it.

Recently I noticed that the SEOptimise blog ranks at #1 for the query [seo blog] in Google.co.uk Then it dawned on me why we rank at #1: the single most important factor to getting there was linking out . Yes, it wasn't link building or even getting links; it was simply linking out. You could argue that it's lots of great content etc, but many SEO blogs from the UK have great content. Nobody is linking out like we do though. Just consider my most popular posts,

* Back in the day, SEO was quite a simple process consisting of three parts: Market and keyword research On-page optimisation Link building )off-page optimisation( In 2011, it's not that simple anymore. Depending on what niche or industry you are working in or rather what kind of site and business model you have, SEO can be a lot of things. SEO can or even has to consist of more disciplines. Most importantly,