Crazy People Work From Home…

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.

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.

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 this mean you should not buy search engine optimization books? No, you will learn something of value. However, you just need to know that they cannot teach you everything because they do not know how the algorithm works.

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.

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.

There are many ways to get back links. Here are some suggestions:

1. Ask and link back: One way is to ask others to link to you in exchange for you linking to them.

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/

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.