Content sites are a great way to soft sell your way to high conversion. I keep producing content for my own sites and client sites and watching the traffice increase slowly but steadily.

Something I have been noticing recently is sites jump in and out of the rankings for no apparent reason. Reading one of my favorities blogs recently BlueHatSEO, I found an article which goes into all the gory details of how Google handles fresh content.
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Ok so you have a website now and an SEO guy has just told you it will cost $2000 – $5000 to get your site on the first page of Google. And it doesn’t stop there! Even after you have paid that much, it will take a year or more.

Those are unfortunately the facts of life. Probably you can get some traffic from MSN and Yahoo in 4 – 6 months, but generally the traffic from Yahoo and MSN doesn’t convert as well.

So, what can small business owners do in the meantime, without a big budget, that will increase their visibility?
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Surveys and statistics released this week show that Web2 continues to explode and Web1 brochure sites are stagnating and getting left in the dust. Consider:

* Blogger.com is the web’s fastest growing service at 528% over last year.

* Myspace.com grew at +318%

* Wikipedia grew at +275%

* Traditional web1.0 sites are losing ground: MSN.com (+1%), AOL.com (0%), ebay.com (-3%), Yahoo.com (+5%) and Google is still positive at +21% but slowing.

The Wall Street Journal summarizes the ComScore Data in New Trends In Online Traffic
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Here is a great plug-in that I have found for increasing traffic from Social Bookmarking sites. This Wordpress plug-in automatically bookmarks your site to Social Bookmark sites each time you post, including:

blinklist.com
furl.net
del.icio.us
myweb2
shadows.com
simpy.com
spurl.net
ma.gnolia.com
blogmarks.net
rawsugar.com
smarking.com
linkrolling.com
blogmemes.net
markaboo.com
linkagogo.com
feedmelinks.com

This plug-in avoids spam with a clever option which randomly selects ‘X’ sites for submission, so you aren’t spamming.

Check it out Auto Social Bookmarking

Lots has been written about promoting blogs which covers the basics, of pings, submitting, creating content people want to read and all that. In this article I thought I would take it one step further and talk about some of the techie SEO aspects of promoting an blog, and specifically, avoiding penalties.

For the basics of promoting a blog, the best article I found was Margin of Eric – Making Yourself Known.

This is the place to start and covers all of the basics.
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