• Original and unique content of genuine value
• Pages designed primarily for humans, with search engine considerations secondary
• Hyperlinks intended to help people find interesting, related content, when applicable
• Metadata (including title and description) that accurately describes the contents of a web page
• Good web design in general

Unfortunately, not all web pages contain information that is valuable to a user. Some pages are created deliberately to trick the search engine into offering inappropriate, redundant or poor-quality search results; this is often called “spam.” Yahoo! does not want these pages in the index. 

What Yahoo! Considers Unwanted

Some, but not all, examples of the more common types of content that Yahoo! does not want include:

• Pages that harm accuracy, diversity or relevance of search results
• Pages dedicated to directing the user to another page
• Pages that have substantially the same content as other pages
• Sites with numerous, unnecessary virtual hostnames
• Pages in great quantity, automatically generated or of little value
• Pages using methods to artificially inflate search engine ranking
• The use of text that is hidden from the user
• Pages that give the search engine different content than what the end-user sees
• Excessively cross-linking sites to inflate a site’s apparent popularity
• Pages built primarily for the search engines
• Misuse of competitor names
• Multiple sites offering the same content
• Sites that use excessive pop-ups, interfering with user navigation
• Pages that seem deceptive, fraudulent or provide a poor user experience

YST’s Content Quality Guidelines are designed to ensure that poor-quality pages do not degrade the user experience in any way. As with Yahoo!’s other guidelines, Yahoo! reserves the right, at its sole discretion, to take any and all action it deems appropriate to insure the quality of its index.

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Hidden text and links

Hiding text or links in your content can cause your site to be perceived as untrustworthy since it presents information to search engines differently than to visitors. Text (such as excessive keywords) can be hidden in several ways, including:

• Using white text on a white background
• Including text behind an image
• Using CSS to hide text
• Setting the font size to 0

Hidden links are links that are intended to be crawled by Googlebot, but are unreadable to humans because:

• The link consists of hidden text (for example, the text color and background color are identical).
• CSS has been used to make tiny hyperlinks, as little as one pixel high.
• The link is hidden in a small character - for example, a hyphen in the middle of a paragraph.

If your site is perceived to contain hidden text and links that are deceptive in intent, your site may be removed from the Google index, and will not appear in search results pages. When evaluating your site to see if it includes hidden text or links, look for anything that’s not easily viewable by visitors of your site. Are any text or links there solely for search engines rather than visitors?

If you’re using text to try to describe something search engines can’t access - for example, Javascript, images, or Flash files - remember that many human visitors using screen readers, mobile browsers, browsers without plug-ins, and slow connections will not be able to view that content either. Using descriptive text for these items will improve the accessibility of your site. You can test accessibility by turning off Javascript, Flash, and images in your browser, or by using a text-only browser such as Lynx. Some tips on making your site accessible include:

• Images: Use the alt attribute to provide descriptive text. In addition, we recommend using a human-readable caption and descriptive text around the image.
• Javascript: Place the same content from the Javascript in a no script tag. If you use this method, ensure the contents are exactly same as what is contained in the Javascript and that this content is shown to visitors who do not have Javascript enabled in their browser.
• Flash: Consider placing descriptive text and site navigation outside of Flash.
• Videos: Include descriptive text about the video in HTML. You might also consider providing transcripts.

If you do find hidden text or links on your site, either remove them or, if they are relevant for your site’s visitors, make them easily viewable.

Cloaking

Cloaking refers to the practice of presenting different content or URLs to users and search engines. Serving up different results based on user agent may cause your site to be perceived as deceptive and removed from the Google index.

Some examples of cloaking include:

• Serving a page of HTML text to search engines, while showing a page of images or Flash to users.
• Serving different content to search engines than to users.

If your site contains elements that aren’t crawlable by search engines (such as Flash, Javascript, or images), you shouldn’t provide cloaked content to search engines. Rather, you should consider visitors to your site who are unable to view these elements as well. For instance:

• Provide alt text that describes images for visitors with screen readers or images turned off in their browsers.
• Provide the textual contents of Javascript in a noscript tag.

Ensure that you provide the same content in both elements (for instance, provide the same text in the Javascript as in the noscript tag). Including substantially different content in the alternate element may cause Google to take action on the site.

Sneaky Javascript Redirects

When Googlebot indexes a page containing Javascript, it will index that page but it cannot follow or index any links hidden in the Javascript itself. Use of Javascript is an entirely legitimate web practice. However, use of Javascript with the intent to deceive search engines is not. For instance, placing different text in Javascript than in a noscript tag violates our webmaster guidelines because it displays different content for users (who see the Javascript-based text) than for search engines (which see the noscript-based text). Along those lines, it violates the webmaster guidelines to embed a link in Javascript that redirects the user to a different page with the intent to show the user a different page than the search engine sees. When a redirect link is embedded in Javascript, the search engine indexes the original page rather than following the link, whereas users are taken to the redirect target. Like cloaking, this practice is deceptive because it displays different content to users and to Googlebot, and can take a visitor somewhere other than where they intended to go.

Note that placement of links within Javascript is alone not deceptive. When examining Javascript on your site to ensure your site adheres to our guidelines, consider the intent.

Keep in mind that since search engines generally can’t access the contents of Javascript, legitimate links within Javascript will likely be inaccessible to them (as well as to visitors without Javascript-enabled browsers). You might instead keep links outside of Javascript or replicate them in a noscript tag.

Doorway pages

Doorway pages are pages specifically made for search engines. Doorway pages contain many links - often several hundred - that are of little to no use to the visitor, and do not contain valuable content. HTML sitemaps are a valuable resource for your visitors, but ensure that these pages of links are easy for your visitors to navigate. If you have a number of links to include, consider organizing them into categories or into multiple pages. But in doing so, ensure that they are intended for visitors to navigate the sections of your site, and not simply for search engines.

Google’s aim is to give our users the most valuable and relevant search results. Therefore, we frown on practices that are designed to manipulate search engines and deceive users by directing them to sites other than the ones they selected and that provide content solely for the benefit of search engines. Sites making use of these practices may be removed from the Google index, and will not appear in Google search results.

Automated queries

Google’s Terms of Service do not allow the sending of automated queries of any sort to our system without express permission in advance from Google. Sending automated queries absorbs resources and includes using any software (such as WebPosition Gold™) to send automated queries to Google to determine how a website or webpage ranks in Google search results for various queries. 

Keyword stuffing

“Keyword stuffing” refers to the practice of loading a webpage with keywords in an attempt to manipulate a site’s ranking in Google’s search results. Filling pages with keywords results in a negative user experience, and can harm your site’s ranking. Focus on creating useful, information-rich content that uses keywords appropriately and in context.

To fix this problem, review your site for misused keywords. Typically, these will be lists or paragraphs of keywords, often randomly repeated. Check carefully, because keywords can often be in the form of hidden text, or they can be hidden in title tags or alt attributes.

Duplicate content

Duplicate content generally refers to substantive blocks of content within or across domains that either completely match other content or are appreciably similar. Mostly, this is not deceptive in origin. Examples of non-malicious duplicate content could include:

• Discussion forums that can generate both regular and stripped-down pages targeted at mobile devices
• Store items shown or linked via multiple distinct URLs
• Printer-only versions of web pages

However, in some cases, content is deliberately duplicated across domains in an attempt to manipulate search engine rankings or win more traffic. Deceptive practices like this can result in a poor user experience, when a visitor sees substantially the same content repeated within a set of search results.

Google tries hard to index and show pages with distinct information. This filtering means, for instance, that if your site has a “regular” and “printer” version of each article, and neither of these is blocked in robots.txt or with a noindex meta tag, we’ll choose one of them to list. In the rare cases in which Google perceives that duplicate content may be shown with intent to manipulate our rankings and deceive our users, we’ll also make appropriate adjustments in the indexing and ranking of the sites involved. As a result, the ranking of the site may suffer, or the site might be removed entirely from the Google index, in which case it will no longer appear in search results.

There are some steps you can take to proactively address duplicate content issues, and ensure that visitors see the content you want them to.

• Consider blocking pages from indexing: Rather than letting Google’s algorithms determine the “best” version of a document, you may wish to help guide us to your preferred version. For instance, if you don’t want us to index the printer versions of your site’s articles, disallow those directories or make use of regular expressions in your robots.txt file.
• Use 301s: If you’ve restructured your site, use 301 redirects ("RedirectPermanent") in your .htaccess file to smartly redirect users, Googlebot, and other spiders. (In Apache, you can do this with an .htaccess file; in IIS, you can do this through the administrative console.)
• Be consistent: Try to keep your internal linking consistent. For example, don’t link to http://www.example.com/page/and http://www.example.com/page and http://www.example.com/page/index.htm.
• Use top-level domains: To help us serve the most appropriate version of a document, use top-level domains whenever possible to handle country-specific content. We’re more likely to know that www.example.de contains Germany-focused content, for instance, than www.example.com/de or de.example.com.
• Syndicate carefully: If you syndicate your content on other sites, Google will always show the version we think is most appropriate for users in each given search, which may or may not be the version you’d prefer. However, it is helpful to ensure that each site on which your content is syndicated includes a link back to your original article. You can also ask those who use your syndicated material to block the version on their sites with robots.txt.
• Use webmaster tools to tell us how you prefer your site to be indexed: You can tell Google your preferred domain (for example, www.example.com or http://example.com).
• Minimize boilerplate repetition: For instance, instead of including lengthy copyright text on the bottom of every page, include a very brief summary and then link to a page with more details.
• Avoid publishing stubs: Users don’t like seeing “empty” pages, so avoid placeholders where possible. For example, don’t publish pages for which you don’t yet have real content. If you do create placeholder pages, use robots.txt to block these from being crawled.
• Understand your content management system: Make sure you’re familiar with how content is displayed on your web site. Blogs, forums, and related systems often show the same content in multiple formats. For example, a blog entry may appear on the home page of a blog, in an archive page, and in a page of other entries with the same label.
• Minimize similar content: If you have many pages that are similar, consider expanding each page or consolidating the pages into one. For instance, if you have a travel site with separate pages for two cities, but the same information on both pages, you could either merge the pages into one page about both cities or you could expand each page to contain unique content about each city.

Duplicate content on a site is not grounds for action on that site unless it appears that the intent of the duplicate content is to be deceptive and manipulate search engine results. If your site suffers from duplicate content issues, and you don’t follow the advice listed above, we do a good job of choosing a version of the content to show in our search results.

Installing viruses and other badware

Sites that exploit browser security holes to install software (such as malware, spyware, viruses, adware, and trojan horses) are in violation of the Google quality guidelines, and may be removed from Google’s index.

In many cases, websites that install badware have themselves been targeted by hackers, and you may not be aware that your site has been compromised until you receive a notification from Google. If your site has been flagged for badware, we’ll display a warning to visitors, and we’ll tell you about it in the Site summary page of Webmaster Tools.

If your site has been flagged, review StopBadware.org’s guidelines for websites, and then request a review of your site. To request a review:

1. On the Dashboard in Webmaster Tools, click the site you want reviewed.
2. Click Request a review.

Unfortunately, cleaning up a compromised site can be very difficult. Simply cleaning up the HTML files is seldom sufficient. If a rootkit has been installed, for instance, nothing short of wiping the machine and starting over may work. Even then, if the underlying security hole isn’t also fixed, your site could be compromised again within minutes.

Source: Google Webmaster Help Center

What’s a startpage?

Basically, it’s a webpage with a lot of links about a specific topic. The startpages are hosted on a startpage domain and each separate startpage is maintained by an individual webmaster. The links on startpages are usually ordered by categories related to the topic of the page. Besides hyperlinks, startpages often contain text, animations and pictures. Startpages are quite unique to the Dutch market, and offer a simple interface for novice users to create their own web portals, with a unique approach to user-generated content. 

The whole startpage concept began in September 1998 with the launch of Startpagina.nl, which was set up to be an online linkbook for the inexperienced Internet user. Since then, Startpagina.nl has become a huge success, mainly because an enormous number of volunteers created and maintained the different startpages covering lots of interesting and diverse topics. Since Startpagina.nl emerged, lots of other startpage domains have been created, and are still being created today. The fact that there are still new startpage domains appearing and that the number of individual startpages on these domains is still increasing shows the continued popularity of startpages in the Dutch market.

Creating useful startpages

As a search engine, we love to have useful and diverse pages showing up in the search results we present to our users. We thought it would be a good idea to highlight some of the best practices we’ve seen in creating value-added startpages.

1. Create your startpage for users, and not for search engines. This involves making sure that all your text on the page is visible to users, and writing full sentences as descriptions instead of just keywords.

2. Try to deliver unique, informative and on-topic content. The structure of startpages is pretty straightforward and does not leave much room for variation. However, you can make a difference. Try to find a topic you know a lot about that has not been fully covered yet. Create good categories that are related to your topic and give a relevant title to every category. Then, find links that are related to the categories on your page and label every link with an anchor text that is relevant. For example, instead of naming your links ‘link1’, ‘link2’ et cetera, you can choose names that make clear where the link is pointing to. And you can write a short description for every category.

3. Don’t create startpages out of commercial intent or for the sole purpose of exchanging links. Of course there is nothing wrong with trying to monetize your startpage, but a page with only banners and affiliate links is not the best user experience and therefore not recommended. The same goes for startpages that are created as part of a link network. For example, pages that have all links pointing to a particular website and to other startpages that are also pointing to that same website. These kind of link schemes have no added value for the user and go against the Google webmaster guidelines.

With this post, we hope to have provided potential startpage webmasters with some helpful guidelines that will help to create the type of startpages the Dutch speaking people love!

On a final note, we would like to encourage you to fill in a paid links form if you come across a startpage that is involved in buying and selling links for the purpose of search engine manipulation. To report other forms of bad behavior, you can send a spam report. We’ll review each report we get and use this feedback to enhance our algorithms and improve our search results. As always, we really appreciate your feedback and your help to provide the best search experience.

By Selina & Jos

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Design and content guidelines

• Make a site with a clear hierarchy and text links. Every page should be reachable from at least one static text link.
• Offer a site map to your users with links that point to the important parts of your site. If the site map is larger than 100 or so links, you may want to break the site map into separate pages.
• Create a useful, information-rich site, and write pages that clearly and accurately describe your content.
• Think about the words users would type to find your pages, and make sure that your site actually includes those words within it.
• Try to use text instead of images to display important names, content, or links. The Google crawler doesn’t recognize text contained in images.
• Make sure that your TITLE tags and ALT attributes are descriptive and accurate.
• Check for broken links and correct HTML.
• If you decide to use dynamic pages (i.e., the URL contains a “?” character), be aware that not every search engine spider crawls dynamic pages as well as static pages. It helps to keep the parameters short and the number of them few.
• Keep the links on a given page to a reasonable number (fewer than 100). 

Technical guidelines

• Use a text browser such as Lynx to examine your site, because most search engine spiders see your site much as Lynx would. If fancy features such as JavaScript, cookies, session IDs, frames, DHTML, or Flash keep you from seeing all of your site in a text browser, then search engine spiders may have trouble crawling your site.
• Allow search bots to crawl your sites without session IDs or arguments that track their path through the site. These techniques are useful for tracking individual user behavior, but the access pattern of bots is entirely different. Using these techniques may result in incomplete indexing of your site, as bots may not be able to eliminate URLs that look different but actually point to the same page.
• Make sure your web server supports the If-Modified-Since HTTP header. This feature allows your web server to tell Google whether your content has changed since we last crawled your site. Supporting this feature saves you bandwidth and overhead.
• Make use of the robots.txt file on your web server. This file tells crawlers which directories can or cannot be crawled. Make sure it’s current for your site so that you don’t accidentally block the Googlebot crawler. Visit http://www.robotstxt.org/wc/faq.html to learn how to instruct robots when they visit your site. You can test your robots.txt file to make sure you’re using it correctly with the robots.txt analysis tool available in Google webmaster tools.
• If your company buys a content management system, make sure that the system can export your content so that search engine spiders can crawl your site.
• Use robots.txt to prevent crawling of search results pages or other auto-generated pages that don’t add much value for users coming from search engines.

Quality guidelines

These quality guidelines cover the most common forms of deceptive or manipulative behavior, but Google may respond negatively to other misleading practices not listed here (e.g. tricking users by registering misspellings of well-known websites). It’s not safe to assume that just because a specific deceptive technique isn’t included on this page, Google approves of it. Webmasters who spend their energies upholding the spirit of the basic principles will provide a much better user experience and subsequently enjoy better ranking than those who spend their time looking for loopholes they can exploit.

If you believe that another site is abusing Google’s quality guidelines, please report that site at google.com/webmasters/tools/spamreport. Google prefers developing scalable and automated solutions to problems, so we attempt to minimize hand-to-hand spam fighting. The spam reports we receive are used to create scalable algorithms that recognize and block future spam attempts.

Basic principles

• Make pages for users, not for search engines. Don’t deceive your users or present different content to search engines than you display to users, which is commonly referred to as “cloaking.”
• Avoid tricks intended to improve search engine rankings. A good rule of thumb is whether you’d feel comfortable explaining what you’ve done to a website that competes with you. Another useful test is to ask, “Does this help my users? Would I do this if search engines didn’t exist?”
• Don’t participate in link schemes designed to increase your site’s ranking or PageRank. In particular, avoid links to web spammers or “bad neighborhoods” on the web, as your own ranking may be affected adversely by those links.
• Don’t use unauthorized computer programs to submit pages, check rankings, etc. Such programs consume computing resources and violate our Terms of Service. Google does not recommend the use of products such as WebPosition Gold™ that send automatic or programmatic queries to Google.

Specific guidelines

• Avoid hidden text or hidden links.
• Don’t use cloaking or sneaky redirects.
• Don’t send automated queries to Google.
• Don’t load pages with irrelevant keywords.
• Don’t create multiple pages, subdomains, or domains with substantially duplicate content.
• Don’t create pages that install viruses, trojans, or other badware.
• Avoid “doorway” pages created just for search engines, or other “cookie cutter” approaches such as affiliate programs with little or no original content.
• If your site participates in an affiliate program, make sure that your site adds value. Provide unique and relevant content that gives users a reason to visit your site first.

Read More to learn what Google does not afford...

Source: Google Webmaster Help Center

• “Add link” +"your keyword(s)”
• “Add a link” +"your keyword(s)”
• “Add site” +"your keyword(s)”
• “Add a site” +"your keyword(s)”
• “Add your site” +"your keywords(s)”
• “Add URL” +"your keyword(s)”
• “Add a URL” +"your keyword(s)”
• “Add an URL” +"your keyword(s)”
• “Add Website” +"your keyword(s)”
• “Add a website” +"your keyword(s)”
• “Add your website” +"your keywords(s)”

• “Submit link” +"your keyword(s)”
• “Submit a link” +"your keyword(s)”
• “Submit site” +"your keyword(s)”
• “Submit a site” +"your keyword(s)”
• “Submit your site” +"your keyword(s)”
• “Submit URL” +"your keyword(s)”
• “Submit a URL” +"your keyword(s)”
• “Submit an URL” +"your keyword(s)”
• “Submit Website” +"your keyword(s)”
• “Submit a website” +"your keyword(s)”
• “Submit your website” +"your keywords(s)”
• “Suggest link” +"your keyword(s)”
• “Suggest a link” +"your keyword(s)”
• “Suggest site” + “your keyword(s)”
• “Suggest a site” + “your keyword(s)”
• “Suggest URL” +"your keyword(s)”
• “Suggest a URL” +"your keyword(s)”
• “Suggest an URL” +"your keyword(s)”
• “Suggest Website” +"your keyword(s)”
• “Suggest a website” +"your keyword(s)”
• “Suggest your website” +"your keywords(s)”
• “favorite links” +"your keyword(s)”
• “favorite sites” +"your keyword(s)”
• “favorite places” +"your keyword(s)”
• “favorite websites” +"your keyword(s)”
• “recommended links” +"your keyword(s)”
• “recommended sites” +"your keyword(s)”
• “recommended places” +"your keyword(s)”
• “recommended websites” +"your keyword(s)”
• “cool links” +"your keyword(s)”
• “cool sites” +"your keyword(s)”
• “cool places” +"your keyword(s)”
• “cool websites” +"your keyword(s)”
• “link exchange” +"your keyword(s)”
• reciprocal +"your keyword(s)”
• directory +"your keyword(s)”
• directories +"your keyword(s)”
• exchange +"your keyword(s)”
• resources +"your keyword(s)”
• links +"your keyword(s)”

With many young designers coming from a pre-dominantly web design background the transfer over from web design to traditional design for print can bring with it a multitude of design sins. Images supplied at 72dpi and crunched down to load fast on a website are going to reproduce very badly in print you can get away with small thumbnails but blowing things up to any appreciable size is going to be pushing your luck. There are a number of online sites offering free or very cheap quality hi resolution images which are a good source for suitable imagery. 

2. Forgetting about or not allowing enough bleed.

A very common error is to send to print a document or flattened image that has no bleed at all. Generally speaking you should allow at least 3mm around every cut off edge. Failing to do so will give the printers no leeway and will either crop off the side of the page or give you a white border. It is always a good idea when supplying image files to save layered psd files then if things need extending or cropping you can do this on the background layer and hopefully cut down your work

3. Using obscure fonts and not embedding or outlining them for output.

We’ve all been guilty of this at some point and things are generally fine if you are going to be the only person accessing your artwork or documents. However if someone else needs to amend the files or use your vector logo on one of there publications. Unless you package up the used fonts, they are not going to be able to open the files correctly and some software programs may replace any unknown fonts with a default. This is a particular problem when you need to dig out stuff that was created several years previously and you no longer have your old fonts installed.

4. Supplying print ready artwork using spot colours or rgb

There are valid reasons for using spot colours in artwork, logos that need to reference particular pantone colours for example. In general design work however most print is sent through on 4 colour presses CMYK with occasional 5th colour for luminoius or metallic colour or for spot UV varnish. It is very common for lazy designers to just place rgb images into files and expect the vibrant colours seen on screen to reproduce in print.

5. Allowing design illiterate clients to lead you round the houses

The customer is always right, goes the old adage. However it is often said with gritted teeth and a sense of patience that recognizes that these morons will at some stage be handing over a fat cheque for your troubles. It is often a good idea when first submitting visuals to throw in a couple of stinkers to hopefully get them to appreciate the design you would like them to accept. There is the very real danger of course of them loving the piece of absolute arsewipe that you knocked up in five minutes to make them think you’ve been earning your money. Still it’s a living.

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Let me start by asking you a question: What’s the number-one business killer on the internet? The answer is obvious, but many people miss it. The answer is: not being found on the first page of Google.

I refer to Google often, since the search engine accounts for approximately 50 percent of search traffic. In February 2007, Google sites garnered 47.5 percent of the U.S. search market, with Yahoo! coming in second place at a distant 28.1 percent, according to comScore. Preparing your SEO strategy around Google makes your plan work for other search engines, as well.

Write Away

So what’s the number-one tip for search engine ranking? Articles. With articles, even a brand new domain - some call this the “Google sandbox hell"--can get updated into the search index quickly. Many sites are spidered or crawled, but not indexed, a major problem for new sites.

Let’s first take a look at recent content strategies you can use to write stronger articles. If you’re not familiar with the next wave in quality content scoring and relevancy for search engines, you need to understand a little bit about search engine technology.

Google contains more than 100 algorithms that make it the world’s most popular search engine. One of those is PageRank, a complex voting system I’ll cover in a future article. Another important secret, which has been around for a while, but not utilized by most webmasters, is latent semantic indexing.

“Context” is the new buzzword for SEO in 2007. While you should still write good, natural, user-friendly and relevant web copy, using some simple LSI techniques can elevate your search engine ranking.

When using LSI, engines try to determine what the content or page is about without specifically matching the search term text. It looks at the document collection as a whole and examines which other documents contain some of those same words. In simple terms, this means that as you write and link to and from other pages and sites, search engines using LSI will look at words and phrases that are contextually related and try to figure out what you’re writing about. So, if you’re writing about bait, poles, lures and tackle, you’re probably addressing fishing.

If you want to be ranked higher in the search engines, you should write content and link profiles that have supportive text and anchor text (links) using this “theme” approach. To find related keywords and phrases, use a keyword research tool, like the Google AdWords Keyword Tool. First type in your key terms into the Google search engine and pick the first site that comes up. Then go to the Google AdWords Keyword Tool, click the “Site-Related Keywords” tab and paste the URL there. Study the results and use groups of related keywords with links on your page to develop strong on-page factors.

Distributing Your Article

Writing an article that is topically related to your business and then submitting it to article directories like ezinearticles.com, goarticles.com and buzzle.com will pay off big.

Imagine the effect of getting a link from the Los Angeles or New York Times. There isn’t a sure-fire formula for achieving this, but providing quality articles and adding your link in the resources box of the article will allow search engines to find and index you faster. If the content is interesting and newsworthy, the journalists may start calling.

Yes, this could be a lot of work. But one option is to find a service that can distribute your articles for little or no cost. I like isnare.com; for a few dollars you can

get your own distribution credits. Once approved, they’ll submit your article to hundreds of directories. Watch your server logs for traffic and spider bots; you’ll see domains and search engine referrers very quickly.

Continue these efforts by writing press releases using similar distribution mechanisms. I use services like prweb.com and marketwire.com. SEO firms have developed a complete marketplace for the SEO compliancy of press releases. They clearly understand the power of submitting and distributing content and press releases. If you don’t know how to write a press release, hire somebody to help you. You can go to sites like elance.com and guru.com to have something written for $50.

If you haven’t pursued these simple tactics for your SEO strategies, you’ve been missing out on important traffic and business. There are a number of resources for traffic acquisition and how-to-books on building an internet presence. Outside of articles, press releases, SEO and pay-per-click, there are social networks, blogs, paid links, affiliate marketing, paid advertising, viral marketing, co-registration and banner ads--certainly enough to keep you busy for a while.

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