Are paid links hurting the natural search engine rankings of your website? They may very well be. For those of you who haven’t kept up with all the fanfare, Google has stated their position against paid links, discrediting the paid link industry and indicating that they will penalize sites that purchase inbound links.

By penalize, they are essentially saying that each time they identify a paid link pointing to your website, it will count against you.

So if you cannot buy links, then how can you attract them? This change in direction initiated by Google has resulted a series of questions aimed at how to properly generate links to your website without paying for them.

I was recently interviewed by the popular website, recognized expert on how to improve Google rankings, my favorite topic. Here are the main points to consider when shooting for the top spot on the world’s largest search engine.

1. Begin with properly formatted Meta Tags. The meta tags, including your title tag, description tag, and keywords tag, are important for classifying your web page and communicating to the major search engines the content of your page. Although meta tags are not as important as they once were, they are used for many purposes including how your listing appears in search engine results lists.

2.