Once again, I'm going to look at my list of keywords. Since people are going to use these words to search and I've used them to write my "keyword focused" content for each page of my site... it only makes sense that products and services I want to represent should also be related to these keywords. That will help me to seamlessly recommend product within my content and really use my content to presell.

There are several ways to find merchants.

Search Engines: The most important thing I need to do is submit my pages to major search engines. They will deliver, by far, most traffic to my site. I'll submit to AltaVista, Excite, Google, HotBot, Lycos and NorthernLight. Each has it's own policies, which I need to be sure to follow. Then I'll check my site's log files, to see which of their spiders have visited, and which pages they took back to engine. If I don't see an engine's spider within a certain amount of time after submitting, I'll resubmit, according to each engine's acceptable limits. Next, I'll watch for when each of my pages has been indexed (listed by engine). All this takes a lot of effort and time, so I might consider a service like Position Agent ... http://www.positionagent.com , although it's not cheap and not all engines are covered. Or I could try AgentWebRankingSuite... http://www.aadsoft.com/agentwebranking/ranks.htm , which is free and runs on my computer. Or, if I've built my site with SiteBuildIt!... http://buildit.sitesell.com/assist3.html , it will do all submitting, spider-spotting, index-checking and rank- tracking for me.