This is in response to the many who have emailed me, PMed me and IMed me for seo advice in the past 3 years. A lot of people have become successful and I am proud to have been a part of leading them into the right direction. Most however seem to expect a miracle without making any effort and without investing a dime. In order to be successful, you need to have some talent, be dedicated and/or invest some money. There are many ways you can become successful online, but expecting someone to take you by the hand and getting there automatically is not going to work.
Here are some guidelines for you to get started making it on the internet:

- Find out your talents. If you like writing, get a blog. If you like networking, go ahead and exchange links and get free ones. If you are a programmer, create some free tools. Do whatever you can to get yourself out there and have people visit your site regardless of the search engine algorithms.
- Network with the good people of the webmaster communities. You will find out who they are. Look at their posts, contact them if they offer a link exchange or something related to networking in order to help you both. Find some Quality Directories to submit to and don´t be afraid to spend a little money here and there.
- Don´t blatantly imitate. You can add something unique to everyone of your projects. Use other people´s successes as a guideline, but don´t copy. You will go downhill that way. Good webmasters will not reveal every secret for their success, so if you rely on someone else to lead you, you will never be in their league, but remain in the shadow.
- Have fun. Seriously. I recommend a blog, but you can also create pages which express life and show yourself and/or your business in the best light possible. You can get some ideas for blogging on Blogger Talk and find other blogmasters to network with. Exchange blog links only with blogs and bloggers who you personally like, regardless of PR.
- Think outside of the box. SEO is hard work, but many have ranked themselves naturally without putting out too much effort. Talk to the visitor, not the search engines. Don´t try to outsmart Google, because they can recognize your methods and label your site as spam.
- Make your site easy to navigate. Don´t try to get too fancy with your design. The easier a site is to navigate, the better the search engine spiders can read your content generally speaking. If you want to impress, that is fine, but don´t try too hard. Most important is that people find on your site what they are looking for and that traffic turns into sales and leads.
- Research the competition. Their backlinks, everything. The way their site looks, navigates, their blog. Get a feeling for what they do and let it inspire you. Get your hardest desired keywords googled and see what comes up. Don´t try to understand everything that do, just poke around. Use some of the backlink tools on the right hand corner of this blog under Tools.
- Ask questions in forums, in this thread, on Digitalpoint, wherever you feel comfortable. Here is a list of forums. Don´t try to impress with knowledge you don´t have. Impress with effort, improvement and results. We have all started somewhere, what matters is where you´re going. So head to the top and allow others to help you.
- Comment on this blog. Just kidding. Actually no, I am not. Make a comment and ask a question. Add some advice if you have any. I would love to make this something where more people add whatever they have knowledge of.

- Mike

Check it out, submit to 10SitesUp! and ask questions here.

More information is in this thread.

In addition to www.frogengine.net and www.businessblogs.org you can also submit to Premier Webbing Bidding Directory.
It´s the perfect time to get in early!

Mike

check this thread.

Frogengine.net
Businessblogs.org
Premier Webbing

All start at $1.00 and listings are permanent. Check out my list of Cool Directories as well.

Thank you Cindy from Traffic Bunnies for starting this thread. After Rob´s 10k post Pool Party I really didn´t know what could top it, so I forgot about it.
Of course, in hindsight it is all different. What the pool need is some of the
Digitalpoint Girls.
So if anyone has some photoshop skills, add them to this pic with the hottest ones around me.

I will replace the pic with the updated one that has some girls in it as well.

A new phenomenon has risen and every webmaster on DP has one. Never fails. So what does this lead us to? The same old clutter. But this time things are different. People who can afford to outbid others normally can also afford to have a good site. And no one is going to have to spend more money than they believe the front page is worth being listed on.

I have 2 bidding directories
and am more than anything working on my upcoming one which is called
10SitesUp!.

I honestly don’t see how this can work. Webmasters pay for advertising, they also submit to directories. Some directories provide quality traffic, others just give a benefit in the search engines (to some small degree in most cases). So right now I really wonder what it is that Google wants to do. The biggest fish in the link buying/selling business should be easy for them to detect. And most of them enjoy a free ride on the back of Google as well as site owners who pay more attention to building quality than buying their ways on top of Google.

Feel free to leave a comment and your opinion. I think that this is a very bad idea, and unless Google works overtime on doing this right, it will be a disaster, drive-by shooting style.

Mike

Coming up, my new site Blogger Polls.