Link submission services typically do not work.  The best way to get your new website noticed to to get some high quality links from respected sites.

Write and Submit articles to news sites and social sites.
You can go a couple ways with this; slightly off the wall, interesting stories will get attention.  People will link to your article or in article database-type sites, your content could be displayed on another person’s web site, with your bio intact (the bio is the little blurb about you, typically with a link back to your business site).

Another way to go, and my preferred method, is to write informative articles about your business niche.  This works in a couple of ways; first off, you’re getting your name out there in relation to your business.  Work hard and establish yourself as an expert in your field and that will bring in extra benefits.  Second, it works in the typical article fashion - either people link to your site and it’s excellent content, or your content is used on their site, with your bio intact.  Either way is a great way of link building, as well as getting traffic to your site.

Using forums.
There are TONS of forums.  Now, if you want to join these forums to learn and share information, by all means, add a link back to your website in your signature.  But don’t post about how wonderful your business is, what a great product/service you have, etc.  Forums get tons of these spammy (maybe not to you, but to the forum) posts and they really don’t do anything to endear you to the members.

It used to be that a signature link in a very popular forum would pass some nice link love to other sites.  Nowadays, I don’t believe it works quite as well, however, if you’re a respected member of a forum and your business is in your signature, people may very well click on it and become a customer.  Nothing wrong with that!

The F R E E Giveaway
People love f r e e stuff, especially if it’s good, valuable and has no strings attached. They will share it with friends and send your link around.  It really works.  To determine the best thing you could give away, you have to consider your niche.  For example, if you are an internet marketer, trying giving away some new and useful tips to improve your ROI.  A web designer might give away free templates.  Getting the idea?

Contests

People love contests.  Either to win the prize or just to test the waters, people want to participate.  They don’t have to be pushed into it.  That’s the best kind of buzz for your website because people will talk about it, blog about it and link back to your contest.  A couple things: be sure to make the contest worthwhile, interesting and have (and award) prizes.  I’ve been involved in a few online contests where the prizes never materialized.  That kind of buzz you do not need!

These are just a few ways to build links but I encourage you to really think outside the box.  If you brainstorm, you’d be surprised at the ways you can get your information out there!

Ok, to the general public, the Google Algorythm is computer-based, not human-based.  Otherwise, how could it possibly be objective?  Well, it can’t and so it was inevitable that Google would need to step in and ‘help’ the SERPs along.  Does it bother designers and SEO-professionals to think that all of their hard work is open to the interpretation (assisted by these handy guidelines) of some underpaid, english-as-a-second-language workers outside of the US (no proof of this, however, how else could Google afford it?)…yes, I believe it does.  And here is why:

After reading the document, it seems that it is assuming that the Quality Rater assume a lot - about intent, specifically.  What is the user intending or hoping to get when they enter a particular search string/query?  Humans are to a large degree the sum of their experiences - what I am hoping to get when I type something into the search engines is going to be a lot different from what my neighbor hopes to get.  It’s insane to think that it could be otherwise.

Now, I understand the intent behind this - to reduce the spam and crappy results that were beginning to plague Google.com.  However, is this the best way to do it?  I don’t think so.  Also, there has been quite a lot of talk of how Google is always protecting Google’s best interests.  SEO Book puts it nicely here.

Ignoring the hub-bub, how does this apply to designers?  I think there is a lot to learn based on the private document, first of which would be what Google has been saying all along:

• Provide excellent, relevant content and don’t try to spam the search engines
• Use the guidelines Google puts out to build your site to the best search-ability

If you want to read the entire document, it can be found in several places online.  I’ve summed up the most relevant points here:

Query Types:

• Navigational: Looking for a site, such as a search for IBM.
• Informational: Looking for information
• Transactional: Looking to make a purchase

Quality Rating Scales: This seems straight forward when managing navigational queries but when faced with the other 2 (informational, transactional) it seems way too open to interpretation to me.

• Vital: The vital result comes from a query that is most likely navigational and the resulting page is the official web page of the query. Search for ‘google’ and the vital result would be google.com.
• Useful: A useful rating would be for results that “answer the query just right; they are neither too broad nor too specific.” One of the examples given for a useful rating would be a search on meningitis symptoms with a resulting web page of http://www.webmd.com/hw/infection/aa34586.asp
• Relevant: The guidelines say the result is often “less comprehensive, come from a less authoritative source, or cover only one important aspect of the query.” So, for example aAn example would be a review of laptop computers, but the review only takes five computers and not all computers within its class. Since it is not a fully comprehensive review, it would be rated as relevant and not useful.
• Not Relevant: This rating is used for pages that are not helpful to the query but are somewhat still connected to the original query. Classifications of a not relevant page would be “outdated, too narrowly regional, too specific, too broad” and so on. One of the examples give is a search for the ‘BBC’ that returns a specific article from BBS; it is too specific and is not relevant to the query at hand.
• Off-Topic: This is the lowest rating a page can receive for a query. If the returned page is completely not relevant to the query, it would be given a rating of “off topic.” An example given is a query on ‘hot dogs’ that returns a page about doghouses.

Spam Labels:
New to this guideline document, this is interesting and relevant:

• Not Spam: Given to a page that “has not been designed using deceitful web design techniques.”
• Maybe Spam: Page might be “spammy,” but you are not 100% convinced of that.
• Spam: Given to pages violating Google’s webmaster guidelines.

Cuil co-founder, Tom Costello stated, “Our significant breakthroughs in search technology have enabled us to index much more of the Internet, placing nearly the entire Web at the fingertips of every user.”  From information taken from the CUIL web site, the search engine will use ‘content and relevance’ rather than the ‘popularity index’ that Google uses (inlinking and traffic patterns).

Personally, I love the look of the site.

the new cool search engine

But, I do have a bit of a problem with the results, probably because the terms I rank well for in Google, are no where to be found in CUIL.COM.  In fact, when checking for our company name in CUIL.COM, we were number 3 in the rankings, something that is a bit hard to understand, considering the number 1 result SHOULD be the company site:

Shouldn't CimmeronStudios.com be number ONE?!

I checked this on a few other sites and found similar results.  By no means is this a large enough sampling to be conclusive, but it does point to something I find interesting.  Across all sites I checked, the site itself did not rank number one for it’s own URL.  Now, this could be seen as a problem because how often does a site mention it’s own name and/or URL?  Is it the content itself, or the lack of it, what is causing the site to not rank well for it’s own URL?

In fact, when I did a CUIL search for Talkism.com, there were 27 results, with the actual site itself ranking last.  Some of the results in the list didn’t even contain the domain Talkism.com, so it’s really unclear how valuable this search would be.

Valuable results?

When I tried this same experiment with Google, the first result was Google Maps and second was Google.com.  Searching in CUIL for Google.com did bring the actual search engine as the first result but why? There isn’t any real content to speak of on the Google.com page….

The point I’m trying to make is this - for sites that are honestly trying to get their name out there, such as Cimmeron Studios, our website design company, if a potential client were to search CUIL for Cimmeron Studios and NOT link to our web site, how is this providing them with the best results?  Perhaps a bit more digging into the science and philosophy behind CUIL.com is needed before this engine will be able to gain some market share in the search engine wars.

• http://www.prolinkdirectory.com/
• http://www.jtrotta.com
• http://www.iwebdirectory.net
• http://www.worldsiteindex.com
• http://www.webdesignplaza.com/web-designers-affordable.html (Web design related only)
• http://www.linkforever.net/

and maybe I’m missing the point but really - would 2 lesser engines = 1 big engine?  I don’t think so. In fact, I would question if this would do anything more than eliminate one member of the competition for the top search engine position.  Think about it: microsoft has in the past, tried to squeeze out the competition…is this what they’re doing with yahoo or are they going to take yahoo’s relatively different approach and combine it with theirs?  That’s, to me, like microsoft taking macs approach and trying to combine it with their pc-based one - it won’t work well, that’s for sure.

however, it’s important to point out that a deal isn’t on the table, or at least that’s what they’re saying.  Read about microsoft’s bid to buy yahoo on yahoo news.