The key to promoting your real online business is website traffic. There is no way you can make money without it. One of the best types of traffic is traffic that comes from the search engines. You might wonder if it is practical to try and get traffic from the search engines. There are a lot of competing websites out there and you might not be able to beat them in rankings.

You would be surprised at the type of results that you can get. For example, we sell a book with the title of „Thomas Jefferson Education.“ At the time we wrote this, our website was ranked #3 for this keyword, which places us on the first page on the Google website. Interestingly enough, out of all of the websites that are ranked for this term, we are one of only two web sites on the first page of Google that sells the 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 question I am often asked in particular is „Is there a way to know exactly what Google looks for?“ Google’s search engine algorithm is as closely guarded as Coca-Cola’s formula for making soda. No one knows what it is exactly.

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 is the key to getting high listings in the search engines? The key is to increase the amount of backward links you have to your website. A backward link is when another website links to your website. Google uses that to determine if your site is important.

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.

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. Write a press release: You can write a press release and submit it online about your company. You need to include a link to your website to get any benefit. If a news website uses your release, they will publish it along with a link back to your web site. An example of a press release site is http://www.free-press-release.com/

3. Article writing: With an article, you can create back links by writing articles and submitting them to different article directories. Each directory you submit to creates a back link to your website. In addition, ezine publishers and blog owners look for articles that they can publish in their ezine or blog. If your article is selected, this creates another back link to your website each time this happens. One of the best article directories on the internet can be found at http://ezinearticles.com/

Out of all of these strategies, I personally prefer article submissions. They give you the biggest „bang for your buck“ because one article can continue to create back links to your website for months or even years to come. What this does is gives you a residual source of traffic so that you can promote your real online business effectively.