When I first started developing sites, way back in 2003, all that it took to get your site to the top of your favourite search engine was to repeat the keywords a few times in the meta, the alt of the images and several headers and bold text.
Search engine rankings evolve constantly. Once enough people catch on to the latest hints of what is needed to get to the top of the search engines spammers start to stuff web-sites to force them to the top. So search engines evolve their techniques and move on to newer rankings that are harder to fake.
And that is how we saw the invention of the links directory as Google started to put masses more weight into inbound links than on the web site's content. The next logical step was then to ignore these sites to make the spammers job far more difficult.
So how now do internet marketeers search engine optimise their sites for Google? Well, incoming links are important, but not fram spammy directories. At the same time, the saying that content is king has never been truer.
To get your SEO to work, you need a combination of these. You need ample of outstanding, fresh content on your website along with links coming in from other sites, that are also on fresh, content related pages. Forget building links with sites, if Google and the other search engines have not totally ignored these at the moment, they will soon. And so to future proof your SEO work you need to ensure that what you do now will be relevant in the future.
In my opinion, the best forms of gaining links in the modern SEO environment is to syndicate articles. Write unique articles and post them to suitable article directories. Write more articles and approach bloggers, loads of of which would be happy to include your article as a guest post on their blog if it is unique and guaranteed to stay so.
This is because a lot of people are searching for tons of unique fresh content to fill their websites. It could be difficult trying to write enough posts each day so loads of bloggers instead fall back to these article sites and guest posting.
And this is where you should also take a lesson from the experienced bloggers and if you want to try your hand at improving your position on Google then add plenty of new, fresh content to your site. These days, by having ample of unique content on your web site you are giving the search engines more to read and more reasons to keep coming back to your website. There are therefore a load more opportunities for them to locate search keywords in your web site, which leads to more opportunities to send visitors to you.
If you are interested in internet marketing and want to realize success on Google, forget the old tricks of alt text, using filenames with your keywords in and so on. Instead, write a load of new content and write articles for syndicating to other web sites and you will see far more success.