Saturday, July 19, 2008

How to Climb to the Top of All the Search Engines

By Daniel Z. Kane

Nobody creates a website or a blog to record their deepest, darkest secrets. If there is one thing those of us with websites have in common, it's the desire to generate more traffic...more visitors to our sites.

Even more important than increasing the total number of visitors to your site is boosting the number of visitors with a strong interest in its content.

Some websites get all their traffic via advertising. But, advertising can be expensive and most folks who advertise get "hit and miss" results. For those reasons, and others, organic search engine traffic is your best bet. And, for that, you'll need good search engine rankings.

Not everyone spends their advertising dollars badly, but not even the best advertising program can compensate for the absence of good search engine rankings in Google and Yahoo.

A less obvious but not wholly surprising "secret" is that while keyword selection and good content are imperative, it is impossible to achieve success online without devoting a high percentage of your time and energy to strategic link building.

Many website owners have received thousands of links (literally) by writing articles not unlike this one. If well received, a single article can result in nearly 1,000 links. And, there are organizations which will distribute your articles for a fee, and software programs which enable you to do so pretty quickly and easily.

Requesting links on appropriate websites can also move you well up the search engine ladder. And, while you can do it manually, there are several relatively inexpensive pieces of software which can make link building far faster, easier, and less tedious. Most SEO software offers a free trial, so try a few options before making a purchase.

The organization I oversee has offered a free, ten lesson website promotion course for nearly ten years. During that time, website owners have told us, again and again, that the most helpful of our ten lessons has been the one on link building.

If boosting your website traffic is important to you, there is no better way to use your time than by conducting a focused, ongoing link building campaign.

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