As a real online business owner traffic is king. One of the best ways to get traffic to your web site and increase your sales is to get high search engine listings on Google, Yahoo or MSN. One concern many people who are starting a home-based business online have is about competing with larger web sites. They do not see how they can outrank the major web sites.
Here is what you may not realize. You can beat many websites in search engine rankings because there are a number of keywords and phrases these websites are not even trying to get ranked for. We offer a book for sale called “Thomas Jefferson Education.” There is only one other website on the first page for this keyword that sells this book as well. As a result, at the time of this writing, we are listed on the first page of Google for this keyword and phrase.
Do you realize the significance of this? It means most of the people searching for the book buy from us. Sometimes we have even received a higher ranking than the publisher of the book. Amazon ranks as well, but they only have used copies of the book, while we sell new copies.
One of the most common questions that I receive is “How do I know what Google looks for to determine my ranking?” The fact of the matter is Google keeps this information secret so that people cannot manipulate the search engines.
Because of this, it is very healthy to be skeptical to those who claim that they can teach you “all the secrets to getting high listings in the search engines.” The reason why is because they do not know all of the secrets unless they work on the algorithm team at Google.
Does that mean they do not know what they are talking about? No, you can always experiment and discover different things. However, it is always going to be speculation because Google guards their secret algorithm very closely.
So what is the key to getting high listings in the search engines? The key is to increase the amount of backward links you have to your website. A backward link is when another website links to your website. Google uses that to determine if your site is important.
The way Google uses back links is it looks at the incoming links to your website and the keywords used. If you have a link that says “From Caterpillar to Butterfly” and your web site has content about butterflies, Google will be able to determine that your website should be ranked for the keyword “butterfly.”
Here is the question “how do you get backward links to your website?”
1. Linkback exchanges: With a linkback exchange you offer to link to someone else’s website if they agree to link to your website.
2. Press release: With a press release, you write about newsworthy announcements regarding your business. You submit it to a press release website and it gets published all over the internet. When it gets published, as long as you have a link to your website, it will create a back link each time your press release is used by a different website. One press release submission service is http://www.free-press-release.com/.
3. Writing articles: Another excellent way to get back links is to write articles about the topic your website covers. When you write the article, you should submit it to what are called article directories. These are websites where ezine publishers and website owners looking for content go to. You get a back link from the article directory, which is usually a highly valued website in the eyes of Google. You also get a back link from any websites that use your article. One of the largest directories is located at http://ezinearticles.com/.
I believe the easiest and fastest ways to get backward links is to go with the article option. A single article can create hundreds, even thousands of back links for your web site rather quickly. This will result in search engine traffic for your real online business as well as traffic from visitors that come across those articles as well.
______________________
Copyright Stephen Beck, 2009
You have permission to reprint this article, as long as you don’t make any changes and include the bio below.
Stephen Beck shows families how to start an internet marketing business. Go grab his three free videos at http://www.8weekstoprofits.com so you can start today.
Related Articles
1 user responded in this post
You wrote: So what is the key to getting high listings in the search engines? The key is to increase the amount of backward links you have to your website.
Yes, links are important, but it is NOT the real key to high listings. You need to have good keyword-rich content on your site. Google wants to provide the searcher with the sites that provide the best information. You can have 1,000 links to your site, but if your content sucks, Google won’t give you a good ranking. And, more importantly, visitors to your site will be disappointed and will click off. If you can’t convert those visitors into customers, then what’s the point of trying to get all that traffic.
Leave A Reply