SEO is a continuously growing and changing way to help get more traffic to your site. As of 2011, there are a few things to look out for when trying to optimize your site to make things easier for you on search engines.
One aspect to look at is increasing your link popularity. It’s always great to have a number of backlinks to your site, but it matters where you get your links. Directory submissions are good for starters, but too much emphasis on this may be deemed as SPAM to the search engines. This might make your site much less of a priority. Also, article submissions are great for long term traffic. It’s always great to know how to spin your articles for uniqueness, so you can send them out to reputable article directories for great traffic as well as ranking on the search engines.
One overlooked aspect of SEO is website speed. You may have a great site at your hands with quality content, but if your site is very slow at loading it’ll provide problems for you in terms of viewers to your site as well as the search engines considering your site top tier. All the top websites have great speed between coming onto the page as well as going through different pages and links on the site. Search engines want to focus on these sites more for better indexing. There are different ways to speed up your blog, so it’s not boggled down by all the images, videos and more on your site. WordPress users have a great W3 cache that helps to cache files and it speeds up the site navigation tremendously.
A more recent factor as far as SEO is concerned includes web 2.0 blogs ( social networking ). This is very critical because search engines love sites that cater to the social network. A lot of sites like WordPress or Blogger allow you to plug-in social network or social bookmarking buttons. This makes sharing your blog as easy as one mouse click. You’ll be able to build up a whole new set of visitors by linking to sites such as Twitter, Linkedin, StumbleUpon, and Facebook. In fact, Facebook is becoming a lot more powerful than the actual search engine because of it’s wide presence globally. It’s a very cost effective way to build your user base and even set up pages such for solely for your site.
Yes i do agree with your article, nowadays you need to go social if you want to beat the google panda and gain trust from the search engines. I would also suggest that google +1 and facebook likes is a great way also to improve rankings in google.