Way back there was a paid inclusion thing for $150 I was on in 2 days to Google and Yahoo. It's gone now and I havn't seen any worth while things like it since. I recently ued Altavista - it SUCKED!
Someone also said to install the google tool bar and then visit your page a few times using it. Googlebot has been seen to come by within a few days of doing this but there are conflicting reports. Regardless - it's worth a try.
Optomizing is another deal. I discovered that I was targeting the totally wrong terms. Well, not the wrong ones... it was just that there were terms that had higher search volumes then the ones I was targeting.
Overture.com has a cool search volume indicator that will tell you about 15 - 20 other relavant terms that have a high search volume. Use this tool to determin what terms you should target. You have to have an overture account - then you click "Add Search Term" or something like that. **Post your search terms here and I will use my account to find volumes for you if you don't have an overture account**
Heres a rough diagram of how I am dealing with google currently:
2003-09-19:
Search term primary factors:
1 - URL -
www.[YourPrimaryTerm].com such as
www.food.com
2 - Title - Create separate titles for each page that include your search terms
4 - Links to and from your page to and from pages that also contain your search terms.
3 - Search terms appearing in the actual page text (you can forget about key words and other meta crap)
4 - Create sub directories with search terms as directory names such as
www.food.com/steaks/steak.html. Make sure they are primary links from your home page. This seems to be another way of hitting on the URL factor but I am not sure.
Maybe I got lucky but after using this formula for a month - my google traffic per day has gone from about 56 a day to over 300 per day. That was from August 17th to September 19th.
I was also fortunate in having a lot of quality content that contains my search terms. Do not use your key words in excess without quality content. I've heard of sites getting banned for deceptive tactics. Do not build other sites just to drive traffic to your one site... these too can get banned as well as your primary site
Most importantly - give it time... it took me about a month to get major results after reconfiguring my site (but I was already being spidered daily by googlebot). It seems like forever, I know... but stay at it every week and you'll get up there.
Good Luck
