Alan Kleymeyer

I’m not sure how accurate these tips for Better Google Rankings are but they are worth considering. See, I used tip #11 for the link in the previous sentence.  I think you can be too clever and some tips may not even work so you may be sacrificing needlessly.  For me, the important items are to choose your words carefully and provide useful information that would make others link to your content.

Search Engines News contains lots of good stuff about how Google and other search engines work.

There are many companies out there that want you to pay them to help you create and maintain a high search engine ranking.  I can’t vouch for them or for the techniques used.  I would pick and implement the "low hanging fruit" techniques, maintain a weblog, and just write about things that customers or your audience would be interested in.

Martin recommends leaving Google Page ranking behind:

As I mentioned above, page ranking has nothing to do with your search engine
success. It (did) have everthing to do with "importance"…So does trying to increase your website page ranking help you? Not really. What
you ultimately want to do is promote your website as much as you can in as many
"RELATED _ RELATED" places that you can and let search engines do their own
thing.

Derik offers Top 5 tips for Increasing Your Search Engine Rankings:

In the past couple of years, many of the major search engines have shifted their
ranking algorithm to give higher preference to those sites that are more popular
by having many links to them or having links from important sites

A few more insights in what get’s Googles attentions

Finally, Google technologye explained by Google itself:

Introduction

Google runs on a unique combination of advanced hardware and software. The
speed you experience can be attributed in part to the efficiency of our search
algorithm and partly to the thousands of low cost PC’s we’ve networked together
to create a superfast search engine.

The heart of our software is PageRank™, a system for ranking web pages
developed by our founders Larry Page
and Sergey Brin at Stanford
University. And while we have dozens of engineers working to improve every
aspect of Google on a daily basis, PageRank continues to provide the basis for
all of our web search tools.

PageRank Explained

PageRank relies on the uniquely democratic nature of the web by using its
vast link structure as an indicator of an individual page’s value. In essence,
Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote, by page A, for page B.
But, Google looks at more than the sheer volume of votes, or links a page
receives; it also analyzes the page that casts the vote. Votes cast by pages
that are themselves "important" weigh more heavily and help to make other pages
"important."

Important, high-quality sites receive a higher PageRank, which Google
remembers each time it conducts a search. Of course, important pages mean
nothing to you if they don’t match your query. So, Google combines PageRank with
sophisticated text-matching techniques to find pages that are both important and
relevant to your search. Google goes far beyond the number of times a term
appears on a page and examines all aspects of the page’s content (and the
content of the pages linking to it) to determine if it’s a good match for your
query.

 

Here’s a plug for not submitting your website to search engines

Ok, so I learned emperically that you can’t expect to copy over files to the iPod Shuffle and expect them to play.  You have to use iTunes.  Also, iTunes can import WMA files but it will convert it to ACC format.  I prefer to maintain one file format and the preferred format is MP3 for me so I found this nifty free program to do WMA->MP3 conversion: dBpowerAMP Music Converter

Here are some helpful posts:
iPod Shuffle file structure
Opensource platform independent GUI for the iPod (Doesn’t support Shuffle yet)

How to Snatch an Expiring Domain

GetNetWise

I wonder how many virtual companies are out there.   With the explosion of the internet, the barrier to start a company has been all but removed.  A minimum requirement could be a web presence. With an online connection and an abundance of workgroup and communication tools, one or more people can start a company overnight without even being in the same town.  Companies don’t need an office building if the people involved are self directed and are disciplined enough to communicate via phone/mail/im and other tech tools.

Here are some more references on the subject:

Virtual Company Advice
Becoming a Virtual Company
Art of running virtual companies
Palmedia-Virtual Company Solutions
Why I started a Virtual Company

The employment needs of talented professionals with home-based responsibilities are not being met despite the low unemployment rate

How to Start a Startup by Paul Graham

Ideas for startups are worth something, certainly, but the trouble is, they’re not transferrable. They’re not something you could hand to someone else to execute. Their value is mainly as starting points: as questions for the people who had them to continue thinking about.

What matters is not ideas, but the people who have them. Good people can fix bad ideas, but good ideas can’t save bad people.

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When nerds are unbearable it’s usually because they’re trying too hard to seem smart. But the smarter they are, the less pressure they feel to act smart. So as a rule you can recognize genuinely smart people by their ability to say things like "I don’t know," "Maybe you’re right," and "I don’t understand x well enough."

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We never even considered that approach. As a Lisp hacker, I come from the tradition of rapid prototyping. I would not claim (at least, not here) that this is the right way to write every program, but it’s certainly the right way to write software for a startup. In a startup, your initial plans are almost certain to be wrong in some way, and your first priority should be to figure out where. The only way to do that is to try implementing them.

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The only way to make something customers want is to get a prototype in front of them and refine it based on    their reactions… In a startup, your initial plans are almost certain to be wrong in some way, and your first priority should be to figure out where.    The only way to do that is to try implementing them.

Other Essays by Paul Graham

Can’t say I would do all the items suggested on managing emails but there are several good suggestions

Scoble offers suggestions how you can leverage the blogsphere to get the word out about your product.

I like how he describes using blogs as they were intended, inobtusive online relationship building on your terms.  You should never ask for links or expect them, just start the conversation via a link or mention in your own blog, and let things go from there.  If your product is worth mentioning it will get mentioned.  If bloggers were to link just because they were asked to, they would lose credibility. 
Just like the established media, bloggers build a reputation and build a following based on it.

Google has so many cool features, I’ve decided to start a post to document my favorites.

• Easily the best web-based map tool.
• Google Earth
• Get local weather. Just type in: weather, city, state
• Find great images
• Desktop Search
• Best free photo manager (I use it to output HTML pages)
• Very cool world mapping tool with real photo images
• Google Print
• Google Video
• Personal Search

Oh yeah, and they do searching too!

Google API

SDK Overview

Display API (Sidebar)

Google Earth KLM Tutorial – The Google Earth KML Document details everything you need to know to create and share information with the Google Earth client