The Hungry Little Spider- An SEO Bedtime Story

Here's a wonderful article about search engine optimization. It clarifies a lot of the "tricks" and gives you an idea of how many ideas are outdated and can ultimately get you into trouble:

The Hungry Little Spider- An SEO Bedtime Story: "The Hungry Little Spider
An SEO Bedtime Story
By Scottie Claiborne© 2004
Once upon a time, in a land called WWWebdom, there lived a little spider. It was a hungry little spider and it liked to munch up web pages and then keep track of which ones it liked best, so it could tell other people just how good they were.
The little spider never ran out of pages to munch because each page told the spider where to find other yummy pages (links). When lots of pages pointed him to one page, he usually found that page to be very tasty. Also, the more links he found to a specific page, the easier it was to remember it to tell others about.
*Incoming links are important to get your site found and ranked well.
Sometimes people tried to tell the spider which pages they wanted him to try and every so often, he'd check out some of the invitations he received. Usually, those pages weren't attached to any other pages, so the spider would be bored and forget they were there.
*Submitting your site to the search engines doesn't do much good without incoming links."

Read the rest of the article here....