Setting up a few simple blogs at the big free sites like Live Journal, Blogspot, WordPress is a proven way to get new sites spidered and indexed quickly. It could be good for your site - and your clients.

I often use such blogs to supplement content and point to my other main sites - or to those of friends. I keep the posts short, and infrequent - but make a point to update them, say, once a month to keep them on the radar.

While such blogs are only a fraction of what should be your link-building efforts - You HAVE to toot your own horn, and can do it best with carefullly chosen anchor link text (i.e. "How To Start Your Own Freelance Cleaning Service") to pass critical keywords along with the link.

Don't fall for the PARANOIA about Google thinking you're running some sort of "link farm" - the average Joe leveraging a handful of sites is trivial compared to those who literally own HUNDREDS of domains. Heck, even our benefactor here: iEntry could be said to run 'farms' of free directories - and Forums ripe for link-dropping and clearly Google hasn't banished them to the depths of hell for doing so! iEntry is too big to ignore, and we're small potatoes in comparison!

Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt is part of Google's strategy. Keep 'em guessing. In the meantime I build the best sites I can, promote the hell out of them tactfully with blogs, get backlinks from here there and everywhere -- so that I have a viable set of sites that DON'T NEED GOOGLE AT ALL if push came to shove....