Schewanick Computer Services

Search Engines and Links

Search engine optimization with the correct use of keywords is just one part of the battle plan to drive visitors to your website, something you have to do if you want to be successful in your at-home online business.

Search engines, their computers unable yet to read like humans, now look for links from other sites. The logic is that if the webmaster of another site thinks yours is worth linking to it must contain good information worthy of a higher ranking in the search engines.

In the constant battle for position, this led to things like link farms and mass link swapping. This defeats what the search engines try to do: present their advertisers with the best relevant content, and so they now penalize sites that use these tactics. They look for links that are on topic and offer value to the visitors to your page. They also give more weight to incoming links than they do to links that are exchanged. And the more highly ranked a site is by Google, the more value is given to that link.

How to get links

So how do you get these links? Some will come by themselves, if your site is good enough, but they will probably not come to an affiliate site and certainly not to one provided for you in cookie-cutter fashion by a company for which you are selling. But if your relied on these chance links, you'd die of old age before achieving your objectives.

You could write the appropriate webmasters and ask if they are interested in exchanging links with you, and some of that may be appropriate. But for the most part, it is both time consuming and frustrating. You will write a lot of e-mails that are not even acknowledged.

One of the best ways - and a quick way - to achieve good inbound links is to write articles - information articles - in some way connected with what your business is about. Make sure they are not sales articles, or full of hype. Make them of solid value to the people who will receive them. Don't even mention your business in the body of the article. There is room for that in a comment box at the end of the article.

Getting published

Getting them onto other websites with a link back to your site is easy. Just sign up at EzineArticles.com, follow the guidelines, and submit your articles to them. This article database is used by thousands of ezine editors. If your article is picked up, you can be sure that the relevant type of website is using it. And most sites will have good Google scores.

When it comes to driving traffic to your website, you need to give as much as you can to your visitors and to others. Be open and honest. If you constantly try to help, it shows and is ultimately rewarded tenfold.

No tricks

The search engines are a key ally in your struggle to gain more visitors and more recognition for what you are doing. Work with them, not against them. Try to understand what the search engines are attempting to do, and why, to look after their real audience: advertisers.

Recognize, too, that they have thousands of highly qualified and smart people on the payroll just looking for webmasters who try to use tricks to get higher positions in the listings. Use tricks and they will catch you and penalize you heavily. Your site quite likely will get banned.

Play the game honestly, work to provide your visitors with as much good content as you can, keep providing more and more useful information, and you will work your way higher in the search engine rankings.

There are other sources of traffic and these include placement of advertisements in ezines, classified pages and the use of pay-per-click (PPC). It's hardly possible to employ all traffic generation methods because of time and monetary constraints, just as it is difficult to employ all media vehicles in offline advertising. What's important is having a balanced mix and working it efficiently.

About the author:

Matthew Eigbe has over 25 years experience in consumer marketing and now focuses on network marketing using the internet. He is webmaster at http://www.mattlinks.ws, a site that explains how you can gain Financial Freedom by inviting people to have their own domain name.