So let's see what black hats do to get traffic:



1. Go for the long tail - black hats do this because it's easier to rank for a 4,5 or even 6 keyword search that has no direct competition than it is to rank for a search phrase that has hundreds of thousands or millions of results.

Of course, spam sites have the advantage of massive numbers of pages, so even if that page only brings one visitor per month it's still enough - spam sites are created in only a couple of hours and usually have from 30 000 pages and up.

But if you keep writing daily (or even more than once a day), it will add up. This brings us to the next point:

2. The money's in the archives - although some visitors will first see the main page of your site, many more will first see one of the inside pages as these will be the ones that come up for specific, long tail searches.

With each page you publish you increase your chances that at least one more visitor will find your site and more importantly, if it's a good resource, it will more than pay for itself by getting backlinks from many different sites that will diversify your inbound links profile.

3. Small degrees of separation - this is one of the best methods for writing new content: if you have a page on a certain subject just write another that has some differences.

For example: you've just written an article on how to promote a site on Digg - now write another on how to promote on Del.icio.us, and yet another on how to promote your site on Slashdot (of course, don't just change the names and URLs, you actually have to change the article a little bit).

Please understand this: if you have a 30 page site don't put up 10 pages that resemble each other very much. By doing this you'll surely trip a duplicate content filter.

4. Comment spam but without the spam - let's face it: black hats are synonymous with spammers. They rely on comment and guestbook spamming to get their huge websites indexed and this proves one thing that i've tested and found to be true: even "no-follow" links have the power to rank and index your site, although most optimizers say these are useless.

What to do: find 10 or 15 blogs that are on the same subject as your site and start contributing with valuable information. Don't spam, don't say "Nice blog!" every time just to get a link! You must actually participate.

5. Create (legitimate) doorway pages - this is a great method for link building and actually getting customers while your site is in the sandbox or not ranking very good.

A very good example is Squidoo.com: it's a very powerful site with lots of link juice that lets you create pages on almost any subject. Start by creating 10 or 12 pages with unique content on various subjects that match your site and then place various links to your site on the Squidoo pages you have created.

Even better, you can actually create a very big network of pages which you can logically structure as a homepage with categories and product pages - it's allowed, encouraged and in the end very good for you.

Now think of other powerful sites on which you can put your content: Blogger, Google Base, Wordpress.com, Xanga, Livespace and many more.

6. Blog and ping - this is very simple and yet a very good method to get indexed fast. Each time you write a new article go to Pingoat.com, put in the name of the article and the url and ping away. You'll be indexed in no time!

Apply these tips now and just watch your rankings improve and traffic increase!