Getting Your Real Online Business Listed in the Search Engines

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.

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.

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

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. Write an article: You can write an article about the topic that your web site is about with a link back to your website. You then want to submit it to the different article directories that are available online. Many ezine publishers and blog owners use content in these directories so you can get free links that way. You not only get the link from the directory, but you get the link from each site that uses your articles as well. One of the best directories is 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.

Stephen Beck shows entrepreneurs how to capitalize on home-based business opportunities. Go get Stephen's three free videos at http://www.8weekstoprofits.com so you can start today.