Some search engines today base ranking on popularity, ie. It does pay to have a links page. I have found when submitting most search engines now have directories, so think about it first, go to the directory you want and check out the competition. Look at the web pages, keywords, descriptions, etc and compare it your site. That's about all for now and thanks for listening.
Unique visitors are way up but average pages viewed are slightly down.
I attribute this by the large amount of hits the site is getting directly from search engines. Visitors coming by way of search engines just aren't getting hooked so we're going back to the drawing board, re-evaluate content and resubmit the site over and over. Also, this webnewbie has started coding each page longhand.