Don’t confuse my definition of Ranking with how high you place on search engines. Instead, it is what another rank another site assigns you.

For some sites, it is nearly impossible to win hearts and minds by traffic alone. There are plenty of informative places to go, that may never attain a traffic level higher than a few hundred page views per month. One example would be a site with pictures of German Sheperd pups for sale (I’m still looking for something to replace Murphy).

If we measured by traffic alone, then my site TriumphRat.Net, should command mega-dollar advertising rates. At least enough to buy me a few more bikes

Some folks think that Google’s PageRank feature is a sure-fire way to attain preferred status. In fact, some consultants make handsome sums feeding their clients that garbage.

Then others do the various tricks that involve creative keywords, hidden texts, and jump pages. Yet, with all of the stupid implementations, most of it actually does work when words aren’t abused.

We could go on exploring, but the truth for most sites is that creative effort is needed to be found by your target audience.

Here are some proven strategies:

• Don’t use execessive images – If you don’t know CSS or have a creative design in mind, hire a developer to do it for you.
• Don’t use excessive Flash or Shockwave – Don’t sign off on a project where the site is nothing but a bunch of multimedia unless you’re already spending millions in marketing somewhere else. For example, Ozzy Osbourne can have a 100% Flash Site, Sharon has already done a wonderful job marketing him and doesn’t need help from Yahoo or Google.
• Spend more time on your content – Make sure site informative and resourceful, so many fail to do this.
• Spend less time on your Meta Tags – If your using a language like PHP, ASP, HTML/OS, JSP, & etc. try assigning dynamic variables to your tags that represent the content on the page. I’ve done it before – it works.
• Crosslinking – Allow sites to link to you that need your site as a resource, but not the other way around. If you link to another site with the same content as yours, why would anyone go to your site (or why would search engines).

Simply put, the old idea of constantly changing content only works if it benefits both the user and the indexers & search engines that are looking for the information you have to offer.