One of the most important steps to getting a real online business up and running is web site traffic. An excellent source of website traffic is search engine traffic. Many people who start a home-based business hesitate to use search engine traffic because they do not think they can compete with the larger websites. They believe it is impossible to outrank them.
You would be surprised at the type of results that you can get. For example, we sell a book with the title of "Thomas Jefferson Education." At the time we wrote this, our website was ranked #3 for this keyword, which places us on the first page on the Google website. Interestingly enough, out of all of the websites that are ranked for this term, we are one of only two web sites on the first page of Google that sells the book.
Do you see how powerful this is? With a high ranking and little competition, this gives us a significant advantage. There are times where we even had a higher search engine ranking than the publisher of the book. Amazon has also ranked well for this book, but they only have used copies.
My students ask me all the time "How does Google determine where I get ranked?" Nobody knows for sure because if they did, they can manipulate the listings and it will hurt Google?s business.
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.
What Google does is look at the types of links that are coming back to your web site. For example, if you have a butterfly web site and another web site links to yours with the keyword "Life Cycle of Butterflies", Google will determine that your web site is about butterflies. The more links, the higher ranking.
Here is the question "how do you get backward links to your website?"
1. Reciprocal Links: This is where you ask someone to put a link to your web site. You in turn will put a link to their web site.
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. Article writing: With an article, you can create back links by writing articles and submitting them to different article directories. Each directory you submit to creates a back link to your website. In addition, ezine publishers and blog owners look for articles that they can publish in their ezine or blog. If your article is selected, this creates another back link to your website each time this happens. One of the best article directories on the internet can be found at http://ezinearticles.com/.
In my opinion, the simplest way to create backward links for your website is to use articles. If you write a single article, about 300 to 400 words and submit it to 10 article directories, you should have backward links for your web site within a short period of time, which is exactly what a real online business needs.
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Copyright Stephen Beck, 2009
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Stephen Beck shows families how to start an ebook business. Go grab his 3 free videos at http://www.8weekstoprofits.com so you can start now.
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