Billions of people are surfing cyberspace, many of them wanting to spend money conveniently. If you have something to sell, how can you ensure they will find you before your competitors? The answer is simple - you need to make friends with the search engines and give the search engines what they want. The good news for you is, 95% of your competitors ignore this secret that is hidden in plain sight because it's too easy.

What is the secret hiding in plain sight? Search engines want fresh, quality content! They have always wanted fresh, quality content. They are in business to serve the masses so they are brutally picky about who makes it to the first page of search results. Yes, getting backlinks from quality websites is a factor but it means nothing without quality content.

One of my websites is relatively new. It has a Google PR3. That might seem an envious position. Using my Google Page Rank, I applied to one of those sites that pays for reviews. I was rejected. Why? Very little traffic. My site is generating a measly 300 unique visitors a month (May 2008). I just do not have enough quality content on that site as yet to make it attractive to sponsors.

So, you see, Page Rank is not always an indication of traffic. It simply means I have a number of back links from high quality sites. Google sees back links as votes. The more back links, the more votes, the higher the Page Rank. Quality content, on the other hand, is the secret to generating traffic. Not only that, quality is what leaves you there for years to come. Even if your site goes down, your quality content will still be found on the internet highway!

Quality content consists of profitable keywords and some solid information for your visitors. Don't make the mistake of producing content loaded with all sizzle and no steak. Your visitors can't eat sizzle. They need steak in the form of solid information they can use.

Concentrate on gathering every 'profitable' keyword, whether long tail or short and use them to craft your money terms which ultimately lets you rank high for very highly competitive keywords. Searches that are in the 5 figures a day.

Long tail are keywords of more than 2 words (less people searching) and a short tail is 2 or less words (more people searching). Remember long tail keywords are ONLY typed in by a searcher IF they can't find what they are looking for using short tail keyword phrases. If you provide solutions for short tail keyword searches then people won't leave your site to search on long tail keywords.

This is the secret hidden in plain sight that 95% of your competition is ignoring. They break away from the simple rules and try something extensively different and difficult because the simple methods seem too good to be true to work. That's their mistake that you can use to your advantage!

Stay away from fads. Save your money and make good use of your valuable time and effort doing what has always worked.

The boss of search engines is still Google. Follow what Google wants and you WILL be rewarded. It takes just as much time to cheat the search engines as it does to apply solid, honest techniques. The trickster will see his efforts vanish within 3 months. You will still be around making money.

The simple methods are here to stay and you need to never worry about algorithm changes as you will have the right structured site, with the right set of keywords and the right content that search engines will love. Whether you want to profit from AdSense, affiliates, your own product or service, these strategies will outperform 99% of all your competitors

Want to get ranked on Google within 60 minutes? No hocus pocus ... just plain and simple? Do what I do every other day - submit articles to article directories. When we submit to article directories, the good ones with PR 6 and above, we automatically get their pulling power when Google spiders visits their site. Since Google regularly visits high PR sites, they re-cache (re-index) the entire page. So, when you post an article on a high PR site, the chances are that you could extract Google spiders from the high PR site to yours.

For example: you post an article to a directory site, Google visits it, crawls it and follows the links. Since you have a new keyword optimized article, Google will catch you on that page. So basically you can practically have your page cached within 60 minutes, depending on when Google is visiting.

There is more to know but this should get you started.