With these new changes now in effect, not only are web sites ranked by keyword relevancy, meta tags, title and text, but overall popularity of web site as well. These new changes may have a great impact on effectiveness of some of current techniques used to achieve high rankings.

Establishing quality links to a web site has always been an effective way to build traffic, but now has become a necessity. By obtaining just a few links from high-traffic web sites your traffic will increase considerably. The more high-traffic links you receive, more traffic you will receive and higher your web site will be ranked in Search Engines.

If you have a quality web site, chances are you're already being linked to and don't even realize it. That's a great starting point however, you must build on that by finding targeted web sites that may be interested in exchanging links with you. A targeted web site will have similar content to yours, but will not be in competition. A good way to find these web sites is to visit a Search Engine and type in one of your keywords. Visit some of top ranking sites and gather information such as, owner's name, email address and a little bit about web site. Contact owner personally and discuss a link exchange with them. Mention owner's name, web site and what you liked about his site. In addition, tell him why you think a link exchange will benefit both of you and a little bit about your web site.

Notwithstanding its growth, and growth of new skills around it, I continue to be amazed at daily sight of web sites that have not only been designed backwards, but not even been properly finished. Many such sites have been designed by big design and consulting companies charging mega-bucks for their services.

If you want a web site that builds your brand, creates leads or sells your products, services or ideas, first thing you need to ensure is that you have thousands, preferably tens or hundreds of thousands of visitors flocking to your web site each month.

Unless you have a large budget to market URL of your web site, your visitor traffic is going depend heavily on your search engine listings. Whether or not your web site appears in Top 10 results offered by search engines to visitors searching for kind of product, service or information you offer, is a critical issue.

Even with a big advertising budget, majority of visitors to your web site are going to come via search engines.

> Search engines - one thing in common

Search engines vary in algorithms (formula) they use to determine relevance of web sites. But they all have one thing in common - their search results are based on 'keywords' and ‘keyword phrases’ that searchers type into their search boxes.

Despite vital significance of keywords in attracting visitors to a web site, most designers and their clients insist on choosing keywords as last stage of design process! Effectively, they sort out 'look and feel' of site, insert text and then check their text for keywords. If they remember to do so at all.

The bottom line is that, in terms of effectivness, they are designing web sites backwards!