SEO - what's best for search engine optimization?

[Jorge S]

I run my own site, don't have lots of money to hire a SEO company to do my site optimization, I have done relevant links and worked on meta tags, etc... However Google is taking a long time to catch my incoming links, I ranked #7 on Yahoo for a very competitive keyword, MSN somewhere on the second page, I added an RSS page to distribute some articles I wrote and also added a XML site map that I submitted to Google.
What else can I do to boost my search engine ranking?
My site is about 4 years old and at one point I stopped acquiring incoming links and not too long ago I started getting more links. I am so exhausted and loose sleep over this, what can I do?
Comments are much appreciated.
Thanks in advanced!
Thanks for your comments, I did mention that I have some articles and content is not a problem on my site. Besides having plenty of content I also have the rss feeds pointing to my home page, however I control the articles that I want to publish on my home page (usually I publish articles that are relevant to my site).

[HelloWorld]

if you believe Answer is -->
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yes
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even more
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but keep it original and meaningful (relevant) to your website.

good luck

[186]

If you want a gut reaction...I'd say you are online to get increased traffic, but I DEFINITELY wouldn't lose sleep over it. Your question already offers a postscript to my learning on the subject.

Keep in mind, SEO is a constantly evolving creature...like the Internet. Whenever I hear that Yahoo or Google or the many other playahs are tweaking it, I feel like I did whenever Alan Greenspan made a new announcement about the Fed rate and the economy. You never really know what affect their changes will make, but it's always an experience to try to figure it out. And each time business owners learn a little more.

The popular Answer is, pad the search engine pockets with advertising hit cash, but for some of us, that really isn't a present option.

I would be interested in reading any articles you have written.

[Web Maven]

I'd suggest starting a Blogger blog that is directly related to and pointing to your site. Post your site's articles with your site link on blogger. Google indexes all blogger posts pretty quickly.

[tequila09]

I have a good collection of ebooks. Email me for complete list and i ll send you the ones u want. free of course
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[Rick]

Calm down, get some rest, and continue with your linking campaign. Hit the seo forums and learn about backlinks. You want quality, relevant links, but you can get only one or a few a day if they're the right kind of links. 5 quality links is better than 100 non-quality links, so you don't have to spend a lot of time on it.

I usually try to get about 3 or 4 good links per day until others start linking to my site, and I no longer have to bother with it. Visit the SEO forum at http://powerearners.com/

[Chris C]

When it comes to generating incoming links the articles below include quite a few different ideas:

http://www.marketingminefield.co.uk/inte...ideas.html
http://www.seobook.com/archives/001792.shtml

But you need to combine that with page content that actually matches your target keywords. The keyword tool below is very useful for analysing your keyword density:

http://www.webconfs.com/keyword-density-checker.php

Hope that helps.