Brian has a free report called Authority Rules.  And anyone, I don’t care who you are, what kind of business you’re in, what you want to accomplish online, needs to read this report.

It’s an easy read, fairly short to read, but it’s the actionable content that will really get your brain cells firing and your fingers dancing along the keyboard at lightening speed.

So, go to the site, read it online or simply download the PDF file.  It can be quite possibly the turning point that you need in your business right now.

So the business owner asks around and eventually finds a website designer (usually a friend or a friend of a friend) that can make their site “look like that awesomely cool site”.  It gets done, the designer gets paid, and quicker than you can say “awesomely cool” their site rankings start a free fall in the search engines that seems to have no end in sight.

Unfortunately, this is a scenario that is repeated over and over again online multiple times a day.

Typically these “awesomely cool” sites are created in Flash or have dynamically generated scripts that run the entire website without an ounce of text to be found.  While it might look great, there’s no doubt about that, the search engines have no idea what to do with it.

The bottom line is, if there isn’t text to be found, the search engines will pass you over.

This does not mean that you should nuke every last one of your images, videos, JavaScript or Flash items on your website…it just means that you need to separate the important stuff; the stuff you want the search engines to find, from the stuff that looks “neat”.

An easy way to do this is to ask yourself  ”Do I want the search engines to find X?” with “X” being a web page, a description, a price, a product, etc.

If the answer is yes, and X is located within an image, within a video, Flash or JavaScript, then you need to be sure it’s also in text somewhere on your page.

Now, this is not to say that you can’t use things like images, videos, or even Flash – as a matter of fact, they do make your web page more appealing; but it should not be the sole item on the page.  Even if you have details about your business for example within an image and “real” people can read it, the search engines cannot…which means that you’re web site will struggle.

Here’s some tips to follow:

• Whenever you use an image on your page, give it a description using the images <alt> attribute.
• Don’t use script to generate navigational links.  Stick to basic text-based navigation and you’ll be just fine.

If you’re concerned that your site might not be friendly to the search engines, you can use a free online tool called a Lynx emulator.

Just visit http://www.yellowpipe.com/yis/tools/lynx/lynx_viewer.php and enter in the URL of the web page you want to check.  Ideally you want to see keywords, lots of text, relevant topical information, etc.

You DO NOT want to see something like “This page requires the use of Flash…get the latest version at…” or something along those lines.  You want to be able to look at the results of the Lynx viewer and know, without a doubt, what that web page is talking about as well as see important keywords for that page.

So the bottom line is, as “awesomely cool” that website is that you stumbled across, you can rest assured that they’re probably not getting the rankings they want in the search engines.  You can keep things pretty and play it smart at the same time.

If you’re trying to establish yourself online, you might have found that locating content to use on your own website is difficult. There are PLR (Private Label Rights) products that you can buy and even full PLR memberships that you can purchase that will give you access to content to use at your discretion, but in many cases, not all mind you, they’re not typically of the best quality.

Aside from PLR products, you can always write the content for yourself which is very time-consuming or you can hire someone to do it for you; the higher the cost of the writer, generally, the better kind of content that you’ll get.

Now, while I will always advocate doing most of the work yourself, or at least having people who are trained by you do the work, even with PLR content, I also understand that writing day after day can suck away a lot of your time, when you can be using that time to create your own products or advertise your business or products your affiliated with.

That’s where a new Google Advanced search feature can work well for you in finding content to use as well as pull double-duty by generating links back to your site.

Here’s how it works.

First, visit Google.com. But before you search on anything click the link to the right of the search box entitled “Advanced Search”.

Next, enter in a keyword or keyword phrase at the top of the list just under the heading “Find web pages that have…”  I suggest that if you’re locating content for use on your own site that you only enter in one keyword or keyword phrase related to the content you want to locate.  When you use this search feature and you have multiple keywords in this area, the search will only pull back sites that contain ALL of these keywords.

Additionally you can also use the second option of “this exact wording or phrase” which will find the entire phrase in any web page or you can also use the third option of “one or more of these words:” where you can specify a variety of keywords and keyword phrases.

To make the job simpler for you, I would just use the first suggestion, and only search for one keyword or keyword phrase.  If you’re using a keyword phrase, just place that phrase in quotes in the first search box.

Next, click the plus sign next to “Date, usage rights, numeric range and more.”  And then narrow down your choices from what’s listed.  The most important point here is the “usage rights” link.  This allows you to filter content that allows you to do a variety of things with the content (and where all of the magic happens).

You have 5 options from this list.  Here’s what they are and what they mean:

1. Not Filtered – Exactly what it means.  The content you get using this search is not filtered in any way.  Not recommended if you’re attempting to locate content to use on your own site.
2. Free to use or share – These pages are labeled “public domain” or carry a license that allows you to copy or redistribute its content, as long as the content remains unchanged.
3. Free to use or share, even commercially – The same as “free to use or share” but for commercial sites.  So if you have a website that sells products, information or services, this is the option you want.  Note that this does NOT allow you to modify the content.
4. Free to use, share or modify – This search will only pull back those web pages that are labeled with a license that allows you to copy, modify or redistribute in ways specified in the license.
5. Free to use, share or modify, even commercially.  The same as “free to use, share or modify” but for commercial sites.  When you’re looking to reuse content on your own site that you can re-word as you wish, this is the option you want.

Once you’ve entered in the terms you’re interested in and chosen a license, click search and Google will return to you a list of websites that have these criteria.

The one thing I recommend is to double-check the license itself.   The way that Google is able to determine this kind of content is by using the “Creative Commons” filters. So once you’re at a web page that seems to have some content you’d like to use yourself, check for the “creative commons” license on the page.  When you click on the license link, you’ll get more details about the license.  The site may require you to link back to them in exchange for you using their content which can help boost their incoming links.

At this point you have to consider at least one thing – whether or not you want to link back to the site that has the content you want to use.

What this means to you in this instance, is to consider if it’s worthwhile to link out to the site whose content you want to use.  If you don’t feel comfortable having the link on your web page then keep on looking through the search results that Google gave you to see if there’s a site that doesn’t require a link back to them.  While few and far between, this little bit of extra work can mean a great deal of fantastically free content for you.

If you believe that the site will be a good resource for your site visitors, then by all means, link back to them.  If you question it in the least bit, it’s best to refine your keywords and find a better resource.

On the flip side of this coin…you might be wondering “Well, if this is how THESE sites are getting incoming links, how can I get one way links to my OWN site?”

Glad you asked!  Here’s how to do that:

Visit http://creativecommons.org/choose/ and license your own work.  You can also visit a website that is also using the license, click on the Creative Commons link or icon, and then scroll down the page that you’re taken to on the Creative commons site which lists the details of that sites license.  If you’d like to use the same kind of license that the site owner is using, click the link that says “Use this license for your own work”.

My suggestion to you when making use of the Creative Commons license is to be careful what you’re licensing. If you only want to license a single blog post that you made (and it’s entirely your own work), then only place the license on that blog post and choose “text” from your list of choices at http://creativecommons.org/choose/ .

If you license your entire blog, then this allows all of the content on your blog to be used by anyone depending upon the license you chose to use.

The reason that choosing text, audio, video, image, or interactive when specifying your license at Creative Commons is because this allows your license to only be used on your text, or your audio, or your video, etc., not the entire blog as a whole.

Secondly, be absolutely 100% certain that it is your OWN work you’re granting a license for.

Using a Creative Commons license will help you generate links for your site because others will find that they can use your work as content for their own sites and, if you’ve specified in the license that they have to link back to you, can generate lots of relevant links back to your own web pages.

So the bottom line is, when you’re looking to find content to use on your own site, use the advanced search feature in Google to find those sites that allow you to use and modify their work.  Ideally you’d like to find that content that doesn’t require a link back to their site, but, as I said, these are few and far between.  Just keep in mind that if you do want to use someone else’s content, and they require a link back, be sure it’s a site you do in fact want to link back to.