From a website promotion point of view 2010 was the year when SEO suddenly became easier to understand and harder to do. Let me explain. SEO, traditionally, was totally geek-speak driven full of technical knowledge and arcane practices some of which were not far removed from the throwing of the bones and spitting in the wind in order to predict which way your site would go in the search engine index.

The big changes started in 2007 (actually) with Google first discounting many of the practices which had led to abuse and implementing a raft of new refinements which sparked off a wave of further refinements which led Google’s competition down new paths and which, in turn, led to further refinements all of which (my current oversimplification excused) brought us squarely into 2010 and the first year when a newbie webmaster armed with a boo like SEO Help and some tenacity could actually make inroads into optimizing their website to rank high on search engines. All of which, you will agree, is really good news for webmasters.

So why is 2011 going to be any different? Well, SEO now has converged with online marketing in such a way that it has become possible for webmasters which know nothing about programming (or indeed, SEO per se) to successfully optimize their websites provided they market them properly. Confused? Don’t be. It goes a little like this: