If you followed the latest developments of the major search engines you will know that there is a huge change in how rankings are calculated. Of course you will never get a straight answer from Google, Yahoo or MSN, but recent chatter in the SEO community and my own observations indicate that something big is happening.

For all of you who don’t know what SEO is or don’t care much about SEO, you can move on and skip this post. Everybody else, pay attention. If you are a webmaster, who pushes SEO to its limits, you might be on the verge to get blacklisted by the search engines.

Sounds too dramatic? Well, read this shocking new report and if you still think that your tricks will never be uncovered, good luck.

The only way to play nice with the search engines is to create content rich websites. But not just any content. You need to categorize and scrutinize your content on an ongoing base. Creating a theme for your website is essential and well organized theme based websites will be favored by the search engines.

Do you need to write all the pages by yourself? Of course not. However the area where you could by a nifty little tool and create hundreds of keyword stuffed chunk pages in minutes is definitely over. I’m not saying that you can’t use software to generate your content pages, but you need to carefully plan this. Create a template that doesn’t look like a generated page helps. Organize content by theme helps even more.

But there are 2 main principles you need to keep in mind.

1. Gradually increase the numbers of your pages over time. Creating hundreds of pages in a single day is not humanly possible and therefore you will get flagged by the search engines.
2. Start working on your back links. These are links pointing back to your website from other pages. Reciprocal links are Ok, but not as valuable as incoming links with no outgoing links. You should follow these principles: “More incoming links + fewer outgoing links = better search engine rankings”.

Based on Brad Callen’s “SEO made easy”, back links are the most important factor to achieve high search engine rankings. Want proof? Go to Google. Type in the keyword ‘click here’. Who’s number 1? It’s Adobe.com. Ok, now check out the source html code (menu->view->source for IE). Try to find the phrase ‘click here’. You will not find it. Why is Adobe number 1? Because they have millions of back links titled ‘click here’.

Back links like this are almost impossible to achieve for a small website. Especially if your main business is affiliate marketing. In this case there’s only one option. Write articles. Articles are the new currency of the internet. The internet exists because of content and articles are content. Lot’s of content. Remember, search engines are based on content. Fresh content is even better.

So why is it so important to rank well in search engines? Every internet business needs traffic to survive. Internet marketing and affiliate marketing are a numbers game. Search engines provide huge numbers when it’s done right. Best of all it’s free. Of course you could pay for traffic, but chances are that you will go broke before you have a chance to make a profit.

Ok, I think you’d agree that articles are pretty much the only way to get decent off-page SEO and subsequent higher rankings. So, what if you are not a writer? No problem. You have the option to research the public domain directories and reuse its content. Repackaging free content is big business these days.

You could hire a writer and pay per article or for a full package. Writers are everywhere and they typically have reasonable prices. Check out http://www.elance.com for a good source of ghostwriters.

Join a membership program. Some membership programs offer original articles that you can use for your own good. It pays big time to take your time and to personalize these articles. This way you avoid creating duplicate content. Which doesn’t help you rankings either.

Now what do you do? You have the articles, but still no back links. Well, you need to publish your work. This is tedious work and no fun at all. Searching for article directories and submitting them manually is too time consuming. Luckily there are better alternatives. I didn’t say free alternatives, just better ones. If you are on a budget and don’t want to invest in your business, keep submitting the articles manually.

For the true entrepreneurs, here are 2 valuable options to consider:

1. ArticleAnnouncer by Jason Potash. This is the article publishing machine itself. This is more than just another piece of software. It is a complete package for the serious publisher. Worth every penny you spend.
2. SubmitYourArticle.com by Steve Shaw. You don’t need to run the publisher on your own computer and your own website. Everything is done automatically. Steve’s service submits your articles to hundreds of article directories. This is a paid membership site. I personally prefer this over software running on my computer. But this is my personal preference.

That’s it. Now you know what it takes to create a content rich, high traffic website that ranks well with search engines. If you are able to achieve this milestone, you will be able to pull massive profits from your website.

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