Add a lot of content. Preferably in serviceable English, well written, and cogent. You want to get about 10-30 pages of new content a month and get this content linked to. If you write scholarly papers, you can get yourself linked to by .edu and high PR sites, which will sharply boost your site. Finally, by honing in your articles on specific keywords, you can target new areas and reap niche searches.

Remember, niche searches - as a group - are usually worth more than the major terms. This is for two reasons: a niche search indicates that the searcher is relatively more sophisticated. He or she knows what they want. They tend to buy product at higher rates. Secondly, around half of all searches are 2 or 3 words. Considering the vast amount of possibilities this creates, there is a world of marketing opportunity.

A spin on this is adding articles to other sites. While it may be hard to create an interesting article based on your subject, if you do so, and make it snappy, you may get some Digg or del.ico.ous love.

Also, many of the midrange keywords are not heavily contested. A lot of websites still think that a good search engine strategy is just repeating keywords, something that was true in the early years of 2000. Worst of all, because they may have OK search engine results, they may be complacent.

Often their good results come from a lack of competition, and an adept campaign can eat away at their share.

SEOs who promise to submit your site to thousands of search engines are misleading you. There are only a few major search engines, the top three of which are Google, MSN, and Yahoo for the US. For marketing in Asia and Europe, other engines hold reign, but again with a few industry leaders. The top search engines of every single country put together would be far less than 100.

There may be some special cases where your content is very, very specific, and you'd want to target quite selectively. In that case, submission to a specialized search engine would be fine. But in general, a promise to submit your website to thousands of search engines is meaningless.

Worse. After submission to thousands of search engines, your website may end up on a link-farm. Even if Google has not already devalued the links from that page, hurting your site, it may do so at will later.

Legit link building submission techniques are, of course, a component of online marketing. But ignore offers that sound too good to be true. Know what is happening with your information.

Your competitor is out-ranking you. You check their website out: two things stand out. They have hundreds of keywords stuffed on their page, and they use two titles (repeat the title tag). Thinking this is their key to success, you quickly copy that technique, or request your tech guys to do it for you.

Don't!

Try this instead. Use a PR checker tool to evaluate their website. Analyze their backlinks. Most likely you'll find that their position is not the result of high quality SEO - the competition is simply just doing a worse job.

Using Black Hat techniques to try to trick search engines won't work in the long run and, in the worst case scenario, will result in your page being removed from the search index entirely. Car giant Mercedes Benz once had their site removed from Google due to such violations.

Optimize everything. Google is increasing its use of Universal Search, but is doing so subtly. It's not hitting you over the head with images in every search. Search for Monet. First you'll see "Image Results." Search for Bird Flu. First you'll find a prompt to refine your results, then, scrolling down, perhaps a news entry. Then, on the bottom, images. Images, video, and news articles are now mixed in with regular search results. This is a cutting edge shift, and some laggards have yet to realize its potential.

You need to have every part of your website optimized.

What this means is giving images accurate titles. Instead of "02303212.jpg," have "widget-doing-dance.jpg." The better image title has some impact on search engines. Also, make sure to give your images alt text (by simply adding alt = "text-here" in the html that adds the image). This does three things: makes your website accessible to people who can't see your image and helps your search engine rankings.

Your alt text should be pertinent, add mood, and if possible contain keywords.

Do not put your company name in your page title. Keep the titles short and focused on the keyword content. If someone searches for your company name, they will find your website. What about when they search for keywords related to it? Search engines value very highly the page title.

Also, having your company name repeat over many pages can negatively affect the behavior of search bots. It may seem like duplication. The page title holds a lot of weight with search engines. Don't waste that power!

Write a Wikipedia article if your website is big enough. If not, keep pumping out the content until it is. Although Wikipedia itself will not add much to your ranking, it is almost a search engine in and of itself. If and when a potential client/customer wants to look up your information, many times they'll just plug it into Wikipedia and see what pops out. Also, many other websites copy the Wikipedia information, and those links to your website may add value.

In writing your Wikipedia article, make sure to be balanced. In general, try to create some conflict or story. Give free product to less well-off people. Start a scholarship. Find a celebrity to siphon attention from. Who knows?

Create a YouTube video!

Consumers are very good at figuring out what is an ad and what isn't, at least in the conventional sense. Online videos, however, can easily slip under the radar as long as they are entertaining. Take advantage of this by creating a few videos that deal with whatever it is you do.

Make the videos funny. Make them good-sized but not too long. Make sure to include a URL in the video itself. You probably won't reach the fame of the Star Wars kid or the John Kerry girl, but you may make some more sales and increase awareness. Which should be enough, at least for your accountant.

Type in http://yoursite.com, where yoursite is, well, the URL of your site. Does it resolve? Does www.yoursite.com also resolve? Unless you are doing this on purpose, this could be a problem. The two URLs are treated as separate websites, and can confuse Search Engines.

In the worst case scenario, the Search Engine flags the two different pages as being duplicates of one another. Being flagged as duplicate material will, at the least, hurt your rating. At worst, it'll send your site to the Supplemental index, which is like a garbage dump for websites.

To fix this problem, use this .htaccess code: (without the >>>:)

This will redirect the http://yoursite.com to www.yoursite.com. The opposite can be done to redirect http://www.yoursite.com to http://yoursite.com, if so desired.

Make it very easy for your users to spread the word. Include "Tell a friend" functionality where and whenever possible. Also make sure to make it really, really simple. Everyone likes it when something works without too much thinking.

Another form of this is to add Social Bookmarking (SB) capability. SB is relatively new by real world standards and old stuff by internet standards - what it is, basically, is sites like Digg, Del.icio.us, and others, that let users compile their website preferences with others. You want to make it easy for you users to SB you.

In addition to spreading the word, Social Bookmarks have tremendous influence on Search Engines. Expert SEO-ers have recently done experiments where, by using the power of Social Bookmarking, they were able to gain top ten positions for very, very competitive search terms.

Quite recently, though less by standard SB sites, a Google search for "Miserable Failure" would lead to George Bush's as a first result. This was an orchestrated campaign that worked by having many people link to George Bush's website with the link text "Miserable Failure." Their success in manipulating the results only underscores how important SB is.