First of all, getting page rank, and traffic (the two are not synonymous) takes time. Anyone offering to get it for you in 24 hours, is either lying, or is doing something underhanded that could get your site in serious trouble. Take a page from the old drug war, and "Just Say No".

Search engines prefer domains that have been active for a while, and, they prefer sites that have been active for a while, even if they are small sites, containing minimal information, as long as there are a couple of hundred words with good solid information. If the information is important in the least, it will be indexed. Domains and websites are like fine wines, they get better with age.

It is possible to get to the top of a particular keyword or phrase in a short time, even without page rank. One usually leads to the other. They are symbiotic. This will however, probably not happen with your main keywords, unless, you are in a small niche. One way to do this is to go local. If you have a pizza shop in "Big City" U.S.A., you may want to narrow it down a bit, by narrowing the parameters. Use your part of the city, "South Big City U.S.A.", or "South East Big City U.S.A.", or your street, "Hungry Street, South East Big City U.S.A." Sure, you will be in a smaller pond, but you will be a bigger fish. If you offer the only "mango, pineapple, coconut pizza" in town, use that to help identify the niche. Make your keywords work for your locale, and specialties.

I have one site, that I built soon after the registration by this method that zoomed immediately to the top of a couple of search terms, only to be put into supplemental results a short time afterward. After a quick analysis, I realized that I had used too many keywords (something you should avoid). The horror stories came flooding into my mind, "darkness, weeping and gnashing of teeth"! In actuality, after correcting the problem, it only took a few days to get out, and almost back to number 1 again. This leads me to wonder whether the horror stories I hear, may, in some cases, be a result of deliberate manipulation.

That makes me think of another thing. Is it always bad to have a site in the supplemental? Honestly, no! I know that theory will run afoul of all the other webmasters in the world, but because the categories don't always have an exact spot where you fit, it is better to have even supplemental listings than none at all!

Even if you are not the worlds foremost expert on your subject, your views deserve to be heard, even if they are still developing. That is how we hash things out as human beings. Learn to write about your niche. This will give you content for your site, and articles to publish in venues like blogs and ezines. The duplicate content issue, is not as much of an issue as most people think. Google guidelines suggest, that if you use an article being published elsewhere, that you always include the link back to the original, and that this will avoid that problem. Some th

ings need to be heard in more than one quarter, an article on landscaping can be useful in a landscaping category or a homeowner site, and search engines seem to understand this, and make appropriate adjustments.

This leads me to another thing that I think should be looked at. The search engines are trying to make information available to people. At least that should be the goal. That being the case, it would seem logical that if web sites are designed for people as well, the search engines would like them. Pages filled with lots of good content, should automatically place better. Perhaps we should stop trying to think like spyders, and start thinking like people!

The more involved I become with my websites, the more I realize that building a good website is exactly like building any other quality product. Build it with the needs of the user in mind, and promote it to the people who need it.

8 things that work for me: 1. Get your domain registered yesterday! A mature domain is a better domain.

2. Build a few decent web pages, with some decent content. This is relatively easy to do. Most popular sites, are so low on content, that they can barely be called "Web Pages".

3. Link from one page to another, search engines seem to like internal links.

4. Link to at least one, but only one or two, good informative sites on your subject. A site with no links basically goes nowhere. It might be an oasis in the dessert, but people will die of thirst before thy find it.

5. Make sure your keywords, are ones that will get the sight searched.

6. Submit your site to a few search engines. You don't have to submit it to all of them. Once it is indexed by a few, the big boys will find it pretty quickly.

7. Write about your area of expertise, and publish it on your site, and in ezines. This is one of my favorite methods of SEO. No matter what your area of expertise, there is a group of people out there looking for information about it. To me this is about the most important function of the Internet, the sharing of information, from every angle, from every stage of knowledge. Sometimes the new kid has some great ideas that we can all learn from.

8. Make sure your site is what users need, not what you think search engines want. The user is who you want visiting your site. Search engines don't buy products and services.

The main thing, is to get started. Even if you don't have a hundred pages of content, even if you cannot come up with all the best keywords, even if you have to host your site on free hosting.

Yes, I said free hosting! I know it is looked down upon by some, but it works. I have a fairly large number of sites with page rank up to 3, that are on free hosting, building traffic, building page rank, building longevity, and building value. Some are building traffic with no page rank, some are building page rank, with little traffic When they reach a certain point, I either purchase appropriate hosting, or host them on a subdomain of another site, even if I just forward them using a 301 redirect, and yes, they do continue to build, and it is always better to be moving forward and upward, than to be standing still, or lying dead!