Getting Your Real Online Business Listed in the Search Engines

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.

That is not necessarily the case. While it might be difficult to outrank them in one set of keywords, with another set you can dominate. We sell a book called "Thomas Jefferson Education." When we wrote this article, we had a very high 1st page ranking on Google and were only one of two websites that actually sell this book. This gives us a significant competitive advantage when it comes down to making sales from people searching for this 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.

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.

This is why you should have a certain level of skepticism if someone claims they are going to show you "all the secrets to dominating the search engines." They really cannot because the only people that TRULY know the secrets work for Google and the specific details of those secrets change all the time.

I am not saying that people are lying when they tell you this. There are certain fundamentals that will typically always hold true. However, no one knows the specific components that you need to know in order to manipulate the rankings.

So what are the fundamentals to getting high search engine placements for your selling information business? One of the main fundamentals is the amount of backward links you have to your website. These are links that other websites have that lead their visitors to your web site when they click on it.

Most search engines use back links as part of their search engine algorithm. For example, if you get a link on a website and the link says, "Butterfly", this will help your search engine rankings if your website is also about butterflies. This is how search engines determine what website should get placed where.

So how do you get the links so Google can make that determination?

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. Use Press Releases: Another way is to write and submit a press release about your business. The press release should have a link to your website. When it gets published by news websites, this creates a back link online to your website and improves your search engine ranking. Here is a site that you can submit your press release to: 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.

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Copyright Stephen Beck, 2009
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