My experience with getting traffic and some hints for newbies
 

The content in this article is based on my own experience over the past 18 months in trying to gain visibility (i.e. traffic) for two gay review websites.

In recent months after visiting many webmaster forums I endlessly encounter the "newbie" totally lost in a jungle of how to get found on the web. Much of the $49 dollar offers to place you on the 1st page of google in 48 hours are total and absolute crap so beware! Below I give the quintessence of what I have learned in ten simple points:

(1) Major search engines are increasingly putting weight on content and quality content at that.
(2) Updating your site on a regular basis is a big PLUS and gets noticed by the search engine bots,
(3) Paying for links in so-called link farms can even damage you. Google and Yahoo for example are onto this and as a result the inbound links are not worth what they were say 2 years ago. Link exchanges have also gone down in value.
(4) In-bound likes from a few sites (say 5 - 10) which have a serious PR i.e. 4 and up are worth trying to procure, but they should come from websites that are relevant to your own site. By that I mean a link from a real estate website to a gay website will not have the weight of an in-bound link from a mature gay website with a respectable Page Rank.
(5) Think of the keywords people would use to find your site. Put these in google and look at the first two pages of results. Why are these sites on the firs two pages and not you? The answer is both simple and complicated enough to write a book on. But think of it this way. If you do what they are doing you must be doing something right, so ......
(6) Take a look at their page source in any browser - look at the keywords, look at the text content, look at their use of html tags, etc. There is even nifty software out there to analyse your site versus the top competitors and it is well worth using. I am not here to advertise so if you want more info on that you will have to email me at kuba@boyreview.com.
(7) Persevere , persevere - there are no overnight miracles. On average now it can take 8 - 10 months to have an initial idea of how google sees you site.
(8) Do not become obsessed with google alone - you can have a low page rank but good traffic, submit to various search engines through bulk submission sites which are easy to find on the web.
(9) Do not try silly things like putting 1000 keywords the same colour as the page background. This might have worked a couple of years back but search engines are getting smart and if they find little tricks like that they get angry and penalise you. Do not do it, believe me.
(10) I just notice I could continue this list well beyond ten but this is enough to start with. I started a new gay site in February and I am still working on a daily basis to see it get picked up by the search engine family - Patience, persevere. Contact me at cmcster@gmail.com if you think I can help you further.
Regards,
Kuba
Webmaster of http://www.boyreview.com and http://www.gayhay.com

Very nice post Kuba, I enjoyed reading it

OK I did that - so I should do what the other sites are doing - lets see -
5 of them are using an expired .org domain they picked up two weeks ago using a snap name service that still have DMOZ links - all 5 have a cloaked page with 2000 words of text - most repeated around 50 times on each page listed - then a redirect to a spam page from a link list that the guy runs (since all 5 pages are from the same guy)
the next 5 are directories that scrape googles index and spam the keywords onto their own dynamically generated pages
the last 10 (11-20) are pages that range from one page wonders with over 200 bought links, to 1 in the 20th place that seems to actually be a real site

Hmmm - for #7 you said not to make them the same color - good point - as long as you make them a different colot Google loves 1000s of keywords repeated on a page - or at least thats who gets listed in the top 10 - just remember to have a good page cloaker

Aside from that I would think you might have a little problem with that review site - since #1 I would expect the mods to take the links down due to the meta keywords you are using on the site
Second - I would think Google would love those 30,000 keywords youve got stuffed on that index page - hidden but visible to bots