Internet promotion has undergone quite a few changes over the last five years, with many more on their way in the coming years. One good way to develop your long-term online business plan is to keep an eye on the trends among young people today. When you think about it, the high school students of today will be your target market in 5-10 years. As their search habits change, so will the market share held by the search engines.

Everyone knows that submitting to free web directories is one of the best ways to get quality, one-way links to your site. Unfortunately, it can take several boring hours of filling out submission forms in order to get all those free links. This article will explore a few tools and tricks that can be helpful in speeding up the submission process.

Manual directory submission services are the best substitute to doing it yourself, but they can also be quite expensive.

Will your site be penalized for automatic directory submissions? On the surface, it's almost an absurd question. The search engines only see a backlink from a directory, they have no way to determine that the link was obtained with an automatic submitter. Even if they could identify automatic submissions, why would they care?

While it seems like an obvious answer, there is a lot of misinformation floating around the SEO community regarding automatic submissions.

While most web directories are only good for backlinks and PageRank, there are still quite a few quality directories that will also send some traffic to your site. Unfortunately, most of the sites on this list do charge a listing fee, but they will provide solid value for your money.

Exact Seek: http://www.exactseek.com (Free) The only free directory on this list, Exact Seek still has an excellent PageRank of 7.

Submitting to free web directories is one of the best ways to get backlinks to your website. However, these submissions take time and there are hundreds of web directories out there to choose from, with several new ones being launched every day. How do you decide which directories are worth your submission time?

You want to choose a directory that is being actively promoted by its owner.

By now just about everyone has a blog on their site. If you don't yet, you should definitely look into starting a blog of your own. With easy and free options like Blogger and Wordpress, it's actually a lot easier than it may look.

Why bother starting a blog? Because blogs could possibly be the easiest type of site to promote that has ever been created.

Many web designers fall into the trap of designing a fancy website that looks great but includes elements that will cripple its search engine rankings. It is a huge waste of time, effort, and sometimes money to create a beautiful looking site that does not attract any visitors. What good is all that beauty if no one can find it? Here are some common design elements that should be avoided whenever possible.

Tag and ping is the hot blog promotion method of the moment. You've probably heard about it, but may not know exactly what it is or how to do it. When done right, tagging can bring your site tons of targeted traffic from very active visitors.

The tag and ping concept has its roots in the social bookmarking explosion. More of these sites are being created every day, taking some of the market share away from search engines.