I think we may be at a crossroads where search engine optimization is concerned. There is a growing interest in social media, and more and more social media marketing is becoming as great a necessity as good old-fashioned SEO, and there are some companies and consultants who are calling for regulation of the industry. In the early days of search engine marketing industry, if you could add a handful of keywords onto your web pages and stuff your meta tags with keywords then you’d be almost guaranteed a high ranking in the leading search engines of the time. Penalties for violating search engine guidelines were almost unheard of. Now, they seem common place.



But is all of that an indication that SEO is getting harder?

It seems that in some ways it is. But at the core, optimization is still the same as it was ten years ago. You still have to build a quality website with original content, you still need to focus your pages on on-page factors, navigational simplicity, and crawlability, and you still need to build inbound links to your pages with relevant anchor te