This is my placement on Yahoo for phrase "increase traffic". There are about 23,876 searches per month of this phrase: http://search.yahoo.com/search?p=increase+traffic&ei=UTF-8&fr=FP-tab-web-t&fl=0&x=wrt

Well to reach results as mine, you need 4 simple steps:

1) Start a free blog - I suggest you to use www.Blogger.com (start it in just 8 minutes from now).

Before to start it, make a research for niche keywords and let me explain a bit more.

In order to catch great traffic for your blog, its title must be composed by keywords, it's very important. Then your future posts will be more fresh keywords (many people make mistake to create blogs without thinking to them, a waste of time).

2) Put feed (.atom feed) of your new blog into Yahoo rss directory (it's free and it requires you 4 minutes only).

You'll find your atom feed with ease by taking a look at your blogger.com settings.

3) Post a new message on your brand blog every single day for 1-2 weeks at all. Be sure to include targeted keywords and your site links in every post (about 6 minutes per day).

4) ping your posts. Use this one: http://pingomatic.com (1 minute per day)

You'll get your site on Yahoo, guaranteed. No need to spend 299 Bucks over and over for inclusion on its database (you are not sure that your site'll be included after fee payment).

* June 4 - Teoma returns and crawls 590 pages! No others.

* June 5 - Teoma returns and crawls 1902 pages! No others. * June 6 - Teoma returns and crawls 290 pages. No others. * June 7 - Teoma returns and crawls 471 pages. No others.

* June 8-14 Odd spider behavior, looking at robots.txt only.

* June 15 - Slurp gets thirsty, gulps 1396 pages! No others.

* June 16 - Slurp still thirsty, gulps 1379 pages! No others.

So we'll take a break here at 5 weeks point and take note of very different behavior of top crawlers. Googlebot visits once and looks at a substantial number of pages but doesn't return for over a month. Slurp finds bad links and seems addicted to them as it stops crawling good pages until it is told to lay off bad liquor, er that is links by getting robots.txt to slap slurp to its senses. MSNbot visits looking for that robots.txt and won't crawl any pages until told what NOT to do by robots.txt file. Teoma just crawls like crazy, takes breaks, then comes back for more.

This behavior may imitate differing personalities of software engineers who designed them. Teoma is tenacious and hard working. MSNbot is timid and needs instruction and some reassurance it is doing right thing, picks up pages slowly and carefully. Slurp has addictive personality and performs erratically on a random schedule. Googlebot takes a good long look and leaves. Who knows whether it will be back and when.

Now let's look at indexing by each engine. As of this writing on July 7, each engine also shows differing indexing behavior as well. Google shows no pages indexed although it crawled 250 pages nearly two months ago. Yahoo has three pages indexed in a clear aging routine that doesn't list any of nearly 8,000 pages it has crawled to date (not all itemized above.) MSN has 187 pages indexed while crawling fewer pages than any of others. Ask Jeeves has crawled more pages to date than any search engine, yet has not indexed a single page.

Each of engines will show number of pages indexed if you use query operator "site:publish101.com" without quotes. MSN 187 pages, Ask none, Yahoo 3 pages, Google none.

The daily activity not listed in three weeks since June 16 above has not varied dramatically, with Teoma crawling a bit more than other engines, Slurp erratically up and down and MSN slowly gathering 30 to 50 pages daily. Google is absent.

Linking campaign has been minimal with posts to discussion lists, a couple of articles and some blog activity. Looking back over this time it is apparent that a listing delay is actually quite sensible from view of search engines. Our site restructuring and bobbled robots.txt implementation seems to have abruptly stalled crawling but indexing behavior of each engine displays distinctly differing policy by each major player.

The sandbox is apparently not just Google's playground, but it is certainly tiresome after nearly two months. I think I'd like to leave for home, have some lunch and take a nap now.

Back to class before we leave for day kiddies. What did we learn today? Watch early crawler activity and be certain to implement robots.txt early and adjust often for bad bots. Oh yes, and sandbox belongs to all search engines.