SEO - linking via mini-banners

Linking or off-site SEO is crucial for gaining page rank, and a popular way of doing this is to exchange banners. There is a kind of accepted standard for these mini-banners which are both attractive and unobtrusive.
Munny4Hunny is running a promotion offering free custom-designed mini-banners for links - why don't you take a look at the rules of the promotion and have a banner made up for your blog or website.
Below are a couple of example banners:

You can also click the following graphic to take part:

Adsense pays out...

For all you skeptics out there.. I am pleased to announce receipt of my first ever Google Adsense payment directly into my bank account his morning. I had heard so many people doubting the Adsense scheme, and I have received a warning for using a traffic exchange program (I had no idea that this was against Googles' TOS...) - so I was wondering whether I would get booted before the long-awaited payout. I am very pleased to say that my good behaviour has been rewarded...I should make it clear that the adsense is not for this blog (though a very small part of it did come from here). Read through my posts if you are interested in finding out more about my website...

Have a little patience

I noted that when I first had my website indexed, a google search only got me on the first page if I was really specific ie: 'Livewyre studio' the title of the site (unconnected to the URL www.cassette2dc.co.uk). Just using 'Livewyre' got me nowhere. Time and traffic has rectified all that and if you do a google search for 'livewyre' now, you will find cassette2cd occupying slots 3 and 4. Slot 6 is a free Lycos account that I use, slot 7 is this blog and Slot 10 is me on 'Bumpzee'.
That is a whole lot more satisfying than my first forages into searching for my sites in google... This just serves to demonstrate that the internet is fluid and changes from day to day, week to week and month to month - if you work on SEO, you can get your rankings to the top of the tree. Of course Livewyre is not an important keyword for me as it will not bring new visitors in itself as the word is meaningless, however proof that your site can be on the first page for SOMETHING is a reward in itself.
(Of course, the internet is so fluid that this may all have changed by the time this is published....)

SEO - What's the big deal?

Search Engine Optimisation is talked about that much, I wonder if I forgot to explain WHAT IT'S ALL FOR....??

Well, it's like this - we all treat the world wide web like a massive library conducting search after search until we find the information we require. The search engines are the library assistants who will find the information for you, because I forgot to say, in this analogy, you are blind!

Now some of the library assistants are sponsored by Virgin and Sony and Microsoft - they have football-style shirts with advertising on the front (which you can't see 'cos you're blind..). These guys will try to push you towards their sponsors, but all the librarians are really well-read and have their favourite books. They will point you towards the books that they like because of the way they are written.

Newer books take a while for the librarians to read and categorise the information, but eventually your new book (website) will stand alongside everyone else's.

OK I'm bored with this rather bad analogy now, but the point is that the search engine be it google, msn yahoo etc.. is the means by which most visitors will find your site, and SEO is all about making your book popular with the librarian - get it? (Wow, I used google image search and look at the image I found....!!)