The search engine industry is currently divided by two differing viewpoints on what matters most: content or links.

The current belief is that anchor text variety is just as important as the link itself.

It is believed that clustering, technology that looks at word associations to determine the meaning of search queries, could eventually replace PageRank, which currently determines the importance of websites on Google.

Google has started looking at factors other than links and keywords. Now, the world's most popular search engine is developing technology that draws meaning from related words on a page.

If it looks like a link and acts like a link, then it must be a link - at least in the eyes of the search engines. Evidence suggests the top search engine Google views links from subdomains just like any other link, despite rumors that subdomain links are weighed less in the eyes of the search engines than links from primary domains.

Does your site contain subdomains? If so, you may be reducing your potential by not taking advantage of something that's being referred to as "the Amazon Effect."

As if link building wasn't already difficult, WebmasterWorld reports that some ISPs now consider link exchange requests to be spam.

Is your website involved in a link exchange program? If not, you are missing out on a great source of website traffic and search engine ranking.

Joining a reciprocal link exchange program helps increase your website's link popularity and search engine ranking. One of the best ways to obtain reciprocal link exchanges is to join a link exchange service such as LinksMaster.com.

Do you ever feel like your new site is stuck in PR quicksand? It may just be stuck in Google's sandbox. Like the Bermuda Triangle of SEO, the "sandbox" effect causes new sites (domains less than a year old) to enter the search engine results pages for a few weeks, then vanish without a trace.

Despite all their efforts, many site owners still find themselves struggling to break a PageRank barrier: their sites seem to get "stuck" at a PageRank (or PR) of 5.

Once you feel your website code is complete, optimized and validated, you can begin working on the most important part of the search engine optimization process: building links.

We all know that the number of inbound links pointing to our sites is extremely important in determining where our sites stand in the search results pages. There are many things you can do to boost your link popularity, and I'd like to share a few of them with you in this article.

Because link popularity helps calculate Google's PageRank, reciprocal linking has become more important than ever to high rankings. One way to achieve a high number of inbound links is through link exchange programs such as LinksMaster.com.