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