Incoming links

There are two main forms of Search Engine Optimisation (SEO).

The first is known as on-page SEO. This basically means adjusting your content to make it search-engine friendly. It's all about using keywords in the domain name, the title, description and body text. Get the ratio of keywords to other text too high and you get penalised for "keyword stuffing". Get the ratio too low and you lose out on relevancy.

The second is known as off-page SEO. This is a lot more difficult to achieve because it's basically about other sites having relevant links to your site.
It is preferable if these links are one-way, otherwise you get accused of simply trading links specifically for SEO purposes.
Last night I discovered that one of my sites, Dryice Computing, has 14 incoming links. I knew about one or two of them, but the others were somewhat of a surprise. However, 10 of the links were all from sub-domains of the same site, so it probably only counts as 1 link in Google's eyes.

There are several factors to consider when getting incoming links set up. The first is that the linking site is on a different C-Class IP address. This is to make sure that the site owner is not simply linking in from all his other sites.
The next factor is relevancy. The site that links to yours must have some relevancy in terms of content. If your site sells dog biscuits, it's no use having links in from a company that makes radiators.
Another important factor is Google PageRank. If you can get links in from a high-ranking page, your own PageRank will grow.

The site that links to my site 10 times has a Google PageRank of 5, which means it carries a lot of weight.

It will be interesting to see if my site's PageRank grows from its lowly 0 as a result of these links.

Keeping Google-friendly

Whenever I change or update any of my websites, I always go to Google's webmaster tools to keep everything up to date.
It's a site worth visiting anyway because if you use Google sitemaps, you really need to ensure that they are up to date. If they are not, Google reports an error and stops indexing the site. You then need to update the sitemap and re-submit it.
When you do that, it can take a while for Google to go and check the site out again, but you really mustn't forget to go and look at the results. If there are still errors, your site's changes won't be updated in Google's database.

Google likes sites with Google sitemaps, so it's worth investing the time to create one. However, creating one by hand is not a lot of fun and prone to error unless you really like writing XML.
There are plenty of tools out there for generating Google sitemaps.

Another advantage of using Google sitemaps is that submitting your sitemap to Google is a much faster way of getting your site indexed by Google than simply by submitting its URL.

You can visit Google's webmaster pages at http://www.google.com/webmasters.