Trends Tool

Using some of the TRENDS TOOLS that you'll find at Alexa.com or MarketLeap.com will make you generally aware of how your website is 'trending' vis-a-vis your competitors (here's a few other 'trends tool' sites that may intrigue, if nothing else; alexaholic.com/sethgodin: seomoz.org/page-strength: websitegrader.com)

And, of course, don't leave home without checking out our old friend Google Trends. Google launched Google Trends (google.com/trends) in 2006 with a tool that lets anyone see what the world is searching for and compare the world's interest in your favourite topics. In 2007, they added Hot Trends (google.com/trends/hottrends) which shows what people are searching for right now - the fastest rising search queries on Google, updated every hour. Then in June 2008, they introduced normalised search volume numbers available for export in Google Trends, then added some cool features in Google Trends. Now you can enter a domain into Google Trends and switch to the Websites tab to get traffic information of the respective site. You can compare between two or more websites using a comma between the domains, for example check out a comparison between say, seocompany.ca and webuildpages.com. Please note that Google’s guess of the daily visitors only works for some large websites, and Google also won’t provide you any absolute numbers.

But keeping up with SEO trends generally is also very important. For example, you must be fully aware, that tips and techniques that used to work years ago are no longer effective. There was a time when it was enough to stuff your preferred keywords hundreds of times in your meta tags and page copy to rank high with the search engines. Not any more. Search engines now penalises 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 evidence that search engines give more weight to one-way links (like links from directories or links to your page from the body of articles).

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 assume 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 optimisation. Whether you engage 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 news feeds, so that you are always up to date.