So i went to japan recently…. twas very nice indeed. I went with my mother to Yokosuka Japan to visit my brother and his wife. It was kind of a surprise that i was coming, but his wife slipped a bit, and he knew someone was accompanying my mom.
So i flew out to San Francisco [...]

Dont get stale. One of the biggest reasons that web sites start to slip in their rankings is because they get stale. What do i mean by stale? The content has not been changed in months. The home page still has the same information it had months ago, no new sitemaps, …nothing.

To let the search engines know that you are dedicated to your site, that is fresh and consistent is to keep adding material, content, and changing copy around. I dont mean, just swap paragraphs. Bring something new to the table… let Google and Yahoo know that you are working diligently to keep you site as fresh as you can. Why do you always check Yahoo and MSN every day, or every couple of hours…?

Because its always fresh news, right?

In addition to keeping your site updated and fresh, keep that sitemap up to date as well. If you add pages, or remove them, you need to let the crawlers know.