Years ago, during the cold war, "Mad Magazine" used to have a regular feature called "Spy vs. Spy." Each episode revolved a battle of the two sides in a constant effort to outgun and out-maneuver each other, each building bigger and more ambitious weapons systems, while the other side mounted ever-more ingenious defenses against the would-be aggressor. To many companies that offer search engine optimization, the effort to devine and game the search engines' algorithms is like a version of that old comic.

This has given rise to a number of dubious practices, commonly referred to as "black hat" methodologies. These efforts to find the loopholes and outsmart Google and its brethren usually have one of two consequences. Either they are discovered and sites practicing them are given the kiss of death (i.e. banned), or the search engines build in a new tactic which thwarts these efforts.

Don't fall for claims that someone can elevate your standing in no time flat. Except in rare cases, this is impossible. Often these claims are misleading, as they purport to provide you with good organic positioning, but in fact they are just providing Pay-Per-Click ads. And, for the right price, anyone can appear on page one of any Google search.

Obtaining highly ranked pages in organic search is a process. It requires pages that are properly constructed, copy that supports the targeted keywords, error-free coding, internal linking and most importantly the "votes" of other sites that link back to pages on your site. The more highly ranked the referring pages, the stronger the "link juice" obtained.

Nested Strategies is expert at developing these external links, making particular use of social networking sites such as Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter.