We made our annual visit to the Online Marketing & Media Show this week at the Business Design Centre in London, to check out the latest developments in the world of SEO.

Dealing with our level of clientele it’s essential to stay ahead of the game in order to continually deliver the best results. At Greenmedia we invest a lot of development time into refining our SEO - it’s a constantly moving topic that’s always producing new opportunities - so the UK’s biggest industry gathering is naturally the best place to see the latest advancements on a national scale.

We spoke with some of the best people working in the industry today, and a fair few snake oil salesmen along the way. Seeing the latest and greatest SEO techniques in action and hearing explanations from global pioneers, we once again found that here at Greenmedia we’re at the forefront in terms of search potential. In fact, several of the ‘frontier’ search techniques that were discussed at the show were ideas that we’ve been using for some time to great effect. However, hearing fellow experts extolling the virtues of these methods justified where we’ve taken our SEO in the last year, and invigorated us for some exciting developments in the coming weeks and months.

Transparency is a crucial factor of SEO. If a company can’t - or won’t - tell you what they’re doing with your website then it’s entirely possible that they’re winging it or indulging in optimisation of the black hat variety, with neither being acceptable. With this in mind, it was great to hear SEO-guru GarytheScubaGuy openly delivering his top tips for 2008 at the show. Gary’s presentation has become one of the must-see talks at Online Marketing & Media, and it was once again a highlight.

All in all, this week’s show underlined that the world of search really is evolving faster than ever before, which means that if you (or your SEO provider) aren’t looking at the very latest techniques then you’re likely to be left behind.