Aaron has a brilliant post at SEOBook: The Google Crawling Sandbox.

This sentence struck me as words to live by: “The less your site needs to rely on Google the more Google will be willing to rely on your site.”

Yes, you can pay attention to the search engines for the ranking benefits, but this can’t be your entire site marketing strategy. If it is, your business is doomed.

To gain visibility for your site, you should use as many marketing channels as make sense for you, both online and offline. Use Pay Per Click advertising on inexpensive keywords in your industry, and cheap classified ads in newspapers and magazines. The classified ads don’t need to include more than a headline and your URL.

These marketing ventures should bring you so much traffic that you don’t need organic rankings in Google. And then of course, you’ll get them.

Don’t wash garbage: when “unique” content is garbage, and won’t help you with Google
Recently I’ve had a stack of inquiries about providing articles and other content for Web sites, and in almost every case, the site had many problems that wouldn’t be fixed when you added content, no matter how good and unique the content happened to be.

No sure about what unique content is? Sugarrae has an excellent post on the difference between content which is literally unique, and content which is conceptually unique.

Adding “unique” content which is literally the same (except for the words) is pointless from a marketing point of view. No one will do business with you if you’re peddling the same-old, that they’ve read on a hundred other sites.

It’s very easy to put up a Web site. And super-easy to get it wrong. If you’re relying on Google as your entire business plan, you’ve got it wrong.

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