You can't jump up a level without putting something in

When you’re starting off, its a regular phenomenon that you come to a point where you won’t develop any more unless you take a risk by investing more in the business.

Usually at the beginning it could be putting more time in – perhaps you need to cut down the hours on your regular job, or leave it altogether. A scary choice to make – but necessary.

As time goes on the next thing you’ll find is that you can’t develop unless you get more people involved who have new skills to develop your products, or marketing, or sales or … whatever – so that you can expand the business by changing how you operate. And that requires financial investment.

The way to make things easier during these quantum leaps of faith is to make them based on a sound analysis of where you are and what you’re planning to. This is where an up-to date business plan and cash flow forecast come in handy. The process is quite an ordeal, but it’s necessary to give up things in order to make new investments.

Each time you make that quantum jump, you break through the barriers holding you back and rise to the next level …. and the next challenge.

The market is full of tools that promise the top 10 positions in Google, 1000 backlinks in seconds and so on.

Here is a list of things NOT to do in a link building strategy.

1 . Do not submit your site to more than 50 directories in a month. These should be types of directories where are you are sure that your site will appear.

Submit to more and you will get the sandbox effect on your site – that is pages that are in sandbox drop lots of positions and end up on the bottom of the rankings and stay there for a lot of time. (see here for more)

2. Do not make link exchanges site-wide. Site wide means with the whole site. You will see it doesn’t help you more than a link exchange with a relevant page that is positioning good in SERPS (Search engine result pages).

3. Do not place your link in forum signatures.You will see no difference in SERPS.Why? Its like the site-wide link exchange but more irrelevant.

4. Do not make link exchanges with sites that have more than 100 links on a page (internal links and external links). First of all Google will see that page as spammy.

Another reason is that the PR juice (- the benefit of connecting to pages with a high ranking) be divided into 100 pieces and you will have 1/100 of the “cake”.

5.  Do not use stupid anchors. If you submit your site to a directory articles or somewhere else. Only use the Keywords that you want to optimize.

6 . Don’t use the same anchor more than once on a page. In exchanging links, if an anchor is used on a page more than once to different sites, there will be a problem. What should you do? Add a dash “-“ to the anchor if  you can’t use other keywords. Why? If you search seo or seo – in Google you get same results.

7. Do not make lots of backlinks in a short time without them being completely relevant!! You will get the sandbox effect! (see 1. above)

8. Link exchanges or one way links MUST BE MADE only with relevant content to your site. DONT LOOK for Page Rank.You need higher ranks in SERPS not a bigger PAGE RANK.

9. In exchanging links, use URLS that have keywords in them. This is crucial.

10. Do not create more than one site on the same IP just for exchanging links between them. There’s no value in that.

11. Do not just make link exchanges with the home page of the site. Use internal pages from your site.

Source: How to not start link building for a site – mistakes in seo

Here are Some good tips from: The Three Golden Rules of Site Redesigns
by Jon Raasch

2. Avoid Losing Search Engine Rankings
One of the most important things when overhauling a site is to make sure the new site doesn’t lose any search engine ranking. Sure, any restructuring will probably cause an “awkward adolescence” as Google reindexes your site’s pages, but there are a number of things you can do to make it less painful.

First, make sure you don’t lose any of your old site’s title tags or meta descriptions (or meta keywords if you believe in that sort of thing).

Additionally, keep any of the old URIs the same if at all possible. But if you have a really good reason for changing them, make sure to use 301 redirects. Even Google says so.

A 301 redirect tells Google that a page has moved permanently, meaning that it should take all of the search engine mojo it had given the old link and transfer it to the new one.

So make sure to 301 redirect every page that has moved. I would also 301 redirect any pages that have been removed, and point each to a related page on your site.

The easiest way to set up 301 redirects on an Apache web server is with .htaccess. Here’s a quick tutorial.  Alternately, you can set the document header information using PHP or a number of other methods.

Last but not least, make sure to change any rules in your robots.txt and send a new Sitemap off to Google as soon as you launch.

The rumour is that your site's Google rating will go down.

Consumers have very little patience for online stores, e-banks and travel sites that slow down, act erratically or crash during busy transaction seasons, according to a new study from Gomez, a provider of Web performance optimization tools and services.

As the intolerance with clunky Web sites rises, so does the cost of lost e-business for the banks, retailers and travel agencies running these sites, according to the study, which was conducted by Equation Research and will be officially announced next week.

Check out the rest of this story by By Juan Carlos Perez in PC World’s article