-------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Thanks everyone here, on the Blogging posts, on the Freebies posts and all other posts in this forum for your help! I just started a website on south Florida Bass Lakes a little over a week ago trying to share information on Fishing Hot Spots and Free Maps. I hope to get revenue from affilliates and Google Adsense. My website is www.floridabasslakes.com. I'm new to SEO and have only created websites in the past for a fishing club I was in and my daughter's softball team with no intentions of building up traffic. However, I wanted to explore how I could make money. Of course I used Google to browse the web and learned about Google Adsense and affiliate programs. I then thought what I have expertise on and what I enjoy and came up with the bass fishing theme providing fishing maps (sketches) with my favorite spots marked on them. I purchased a domain name last week, got a host and started publishing my web pages. I submitted my website to Google, Yahoo and Live very quickly, but was disappointed that my site wasn't listed in Google right away. I tried to find more help on the web and came across this very informative forum. (A note- I was indexed in Live within 48 hours of submission, still not indexed in Yahoo though). Well, I used a free XTML program at http://www.xml-sitemaps.com/ for my sitemap and uploaded it and used Googles Webmaster Tools to look for it (I lreaned that here). I optimized my site primarily using Brad Allens free ebook- SEO made easy. I looked at keywords and saw how competitive bass fishing was, so I also used Florida, lakes, maps, listed all the lakes that I have on my site, etc. Using this forums suggestions I started working on links. I have asked some bass fishing sites for links and have provided ones on my site, but they haven't responded yet. I went to Link Exchange and traded for one just to get a link. Then went to freerelevant links to get some more (they haven't given me a backlink yet). I created a blog in Googles Blogger with a link to my site. I submitted my Blogs to Zimbio (got a couple of links there). I purchased some links from eBay for social bookmarking (15 of them for 9.99) and have links there. I loaded Stumble and stumbled my pages (got links there). I joined 4 different bass forums and got links from my postings there. I have submitted articles (Just copied and pasted my Blog) but still waiting for approval on them. I loaded my website address and blog on a free link page from a posting in the Freebies section with a PR4 rating cgmwebsmiths.com. Probably some other stuff (can't remember). Anyhow I am on the first page of Google with no PR at #6. Type into Google exactly the following: florida bass lakes Now I need to get alot more advice: 1- How can I retain this spot or move up? 2-When will I get page rank? 3- How do I get good spots like this for the other keywords like a: South Florida Bass Lakes b: Florida fishing lakes c: Bass fishing Florida d: Other iterations? I guess I can't get too greedy, but I'm sure to backslide if I don't keep up with the great advice posted here!