The world of search engine optimization is changing fast. Some tricks of the trade that SEO wizards have spent years developing are becoming obsolete, as the search giants are using more sophisticated programming than ever before to help weed those tricks out. And with search engines getting smarter just about every day, it’s a good time to focus on the one thing that can guarantee strong rankings: Strong, popular content.

Google has been busy over the last year, releasing major updates to its search engine algorithm designed to reward high-quality content. The goal, as Google explained on its Inside Search blog, has been to reward “white hat” website designers who use SEO to help sites run better and build great content.

The target of Google’s campaign is “black hat” optimization, which uses loopholes or shortcuts to boost a website’s SEO ranking without improving its value to users. Google specifically singled out techniques such as “keyword stuffing,” when designers cram a page full of keywords with questionable relevance to the page’s actual content, or link referral schemes in which a network of websites link to each other in order to boost all their search rankings.

Google hasn’t revealed exactly how their new search engine deals with these issues, but the effect of these changes would appear to be elevating a website’s content relative to its keywords. Instead of building a web page around certain specific phrases at the expense of readability, Google is encouraging web developers to build the best pages they can, and promising that they will be rewarded if they do.

And they aren’t alone. In March, Bing’s Duane Forester wrote a blog item saying that search techniques have advanced to the point where even sites with poor technical optimization can attract search traffic if their content is good. In other words, SEO is moving away from a series of technical tools that defined search practices over the last decade, and the tricks that could fool previous generations of search engines into finding a particular site are becoming obsolete.

Fortunately, the new regime should be more beneficial for businesses and consumers, at least as the search giants describe it. With quality content mattering more than ever, businesses have the freedom to refocus their efforts on making their pages informative and engaging in a way that will encourage readers to come back for more.

Already, company blogs have become one of the fastest growing SEO tools, because they provide fresh content that can reinforce a company’s message while delivering valuable information to readers. Social networking is likely to become even more important as Google and Bing expand their social networking integration, and direct user feedback could be replacing links as a major gauge of a website’s quality. A strong social media presence to engage with customers could pay dividends for a company’s search ranking, as well.

In some ways, these changes were inevitable. With more websites joining the Web every day, search engines need to become more sophisticated to deliver a meaningful service to consumers, and websites need to push the boundaries to SEO to make sure they stand out. But if search engines are becoming more effective at detecting the sort of content that consumers are likely to value, that can make a business’ job simpler. Now more than ever, good SEO goes hand in hand with a good experience for visitors, and good information they can use.