Anyone involved in SEO has heard google can penalize you for having hidden text on your page, but when it comes down to it, it's really not
anything to be overly concerned with.  Unless you are hiding in your alt tags for images the words viagra cheap or
texas hold em poker, you're usually not going to have an issue with google.  An easy way to see if you have
harmless CSS or any other disguised advertising is to use the Web Developer Toolbar for Firefox. Click CSS then -
Disable Styles - then All Styles and you'll see if you have hidden things the search engines (especially google)
doesn't like on your page. These are things google could potentially ban you for or put your site in the
google sandbox.

Submitting a sitemap is a great way to get some backlinks to your site, even though they come from your own website
and not another site, google will still display almost all of them in the backlinks check on google. 
To submit a sitemap, it must be in XML form.  There are example forms on google you can create if you have all your links together,
just do a search for create free sitemap for google.  To check your backlinks after you've submitted your sitemap,
go to google.com and type in link:yoursite.com replace your site with your actual site name.  This will display around
1/10 of the actual backlinks you have to your site. Google displays the websites that are of more importance and the newest
backlinks to your site, which is the top 10% of your backlinks.  You will be able to find a list of all of your backlinks at
alexa.  In order to keep your page ranked high and not worry about a drop in rankings, make sure to keep a few different
copies of your main index file to your site on hand and rotate those out twice a week.  This keeps your site fresh and
google will crawl it more often as well.  The second thing you need to do in order to maintain your rankings is submit
new links every week, even if it's only 5 or 6.  But of course the more the better. 

If you're looking to gain more backlinks, make sure you don't go with reciprocal linking.  This went out around the turn
of the century.  Google is looking for naturally popular websites, not artifically popular sites that have been linked to reciprocally, it's pretty obvious with that one.
Google doesn't even look at reciprocal linking anymore.  Another thing many folks are still counting as utmost importance
with google is the google PR of their site.  I firmly do not believe in this tool for a percentage of websites anymore, it very
much seems to be no longer accurate.  Again, google wants naturally popular websites, not sites that are trying to
artifically inflate their google PR with article blasting or blog blasting software, etc. 

Blog linking can be a great way to get backlinks, except that it's very time consuming.  Another way to get links is
by article writing.  If you're good at writing and can come up with unique content, go for it.
The more interesting the article is, the more comments you will receive, the more comments you receive, the more
importance google will place on the article page and will then move your article up in rank, so make sure you
choose an interesting topic to attract attention.  Put your important search terms in the title and submit it to either egghead cafe (which
by the way is offering cash for new unique articles submitted, if chosen to be displayed in their article directory)
or xomba.com.  Xomba is a PR 4 article directory which accepts most any articles, so you can rest assured this
will rank fairly high, or at least get you a good amount of traffic on google.  Even if you do not write an article about
the products you sell or the services on your website, you can still write an article completely off topic to your website
if that is what it takes to make your article interesting to readers and gain popularity.  You can always put your link in the blurb
/author info area at the bottom of each article you write.

Some SEO developers will tell you that article writing hasn't been popular since 2005 and will not boost your rankings anymore.
This statement is actually half true.  Duplicate content articles will not get your site ranked higher.  The most common problem
regarding article submission is duplicate content and google duplicate content penalties.
This is taken care of simply by using a unique article wizard.  An example is
 Unique Article Wizard.  This tool actually
submits thousands of different articles over and above the one you have written to over 700 article websites in several categories which you choose.
You will need to do a little work however writing different titles and three different ad copies, but the tool will actually
change your blurb at the end or "about the author" with a find and replace feature built in to the submission area.  Writing even
one article per week can get you 1400 backlinks to your site, as the submission tool will allow two text links in the blurb.
You will then find hundreds of different articles with your website link on google after a few days and you will see a change in your
rankings, guaranteed.

Cyndi Whittel is a freelance writer and technical consultant. She is the author of several technical support books, is the co-owner of TheInternetBiz.com,
a company that specialises in Breitling and replica watches.