Originally Posted by Jdoughs

I think you are certainly on the right path. As far as search engines go you want to stand out from the other 10,000 sites they chose to show in their results, let alone the million that may mention your keyterms.

One of the best pieces of advice I was given, and have passed on is this little gem.

'It's Google's mandate to spider,cache, and serve up for searching every single piece of information on the internet, BUT the thing to remember is that they only need each piece of info once'

If you hand write your own sites you can ensure that your content is worth them coming for, just because its unique. Once you have them coming for your unique info/insight/text/updates you've got them coming and as long as you keep feeding them UNIQUE, RELEVANT information, they will continue coming and your strength (in their eyes) will continue grow.

Naturally content isn't everything, and if nobody else out there regards you as a source for that content (to back it up) they won't take much notice past that. This is were smart link building comes into play, and also where the other type of site (automated, rss feeds etc) comes into play. Now it would be nice to start backing things up and getting some links inbound from relevant sites.

Now I wouldn't recommend building 30 other smaller sites and linking them all to yourself, instead, follow the plan of building those feeders for link trades.

While a link on a lesser value pr1 rss fed sex machinery blog may not be a 'beauty link' for you, it is for a guy hunting out sex machine links. So this is a great candidate to offer a trade (or get a request) to link trade with this guy, and get a relevant return link to your money site. Your hand wrote site.

As I said above, you can get real strong value and weight behind a handful of feeder sites if you build them with intent to trade links. You dont build weak spammy garbage to trade with either, make some nice blogs, that look sharp and aren't junky at all, submit to a couple of known directories for initial spidering and page rank, and add them to trade lists.

You can generate 15-20 links a year from these feeders and have them all 'boost' your main hand wrote, or money site.

And something that a lot of people are missing out on is this fact, trading links is a way to do something the competitors aren't. A lot of competitive terms seemed to be full up top of strategic link builders. This is something you can do that they aren't, its a way to get your links on sites that they can't.