Since the inception of the internet, there have been certain group of webmasters who have been able to utilize the media effectively to market their money making sites. Webmasters who develop and run sites/blogs/forums for personal use or as hobby have totally different objective than money making webmasters who run sites to make money online. For the later group, running an website is all about making money and these webmasters view the internet as a source of free traffic that generates revenue for them. Some are somewhat successful in this online marketing venture, some are making a killing, and for some it is nothing but a total failure.

So why there are so many different outcome given that all are using the same internet to market their sites? Difference is the knowledge of SEO (search engine optimization). Better knowledge a person has on how to optimize a site for search engine, more successful s/he is in getting the site ranked higher. And we all know what it means when a certain site gets higher ranking on Google, Yahoo, MSN, and other search engines. It means free traffic which generates revenue. This revenue can come either from contextual advertising, banner advertising, paid membership, affiliate marketing, or even direct sales of product and services.

While the concept of search engine optimization sounds a little easy, it is actually a highly competitive and extremely time consuming process in reality. One needs to spend countless number of hours developing the site or blog keeping search engine spiders in mind so that spiders or robots can crawl the site properly and fetch the site content for indexing purpose. Then there come the job of on-page optimization which involves optimizing the site content, title, description, and spreading the targeted keywords (search phrases) evenly and wisely across the pages. Proper site navigation, XML sitemap, and adding RSS or ROR FEED also falls under the umbrella if on-page optimization.

Well, doesn't sound all that bad. You can do it, right? Yes, you can and so can anyone else. So what give you the competitive edge and how in the world your site gets ranked high in search engines competing with hundreds of millions of sites out there?

Link Building or Backlinks

Yes, that's right! More backlinks your site has (more sites linking back to your site from their sites), more votes you have in the eyes of Google and higher your site ranks for a particular search term. For example, if you have a site selling Blue Widgets, then you find the sites that currently show up for that search term and how many backlinks they have and just build more backlinks than your competitors.

How Do You Build Backlinks? Not hard at all actually. There are plenty of methods of building backlinks to your site and often, lots of them are totally free of cost. Link directory submission, article submission, RSS feed submission, dofollow blog commenting, forum posting, social bookmarking, press release submission, they all can give you the backlinks you need. However, it is an extremely time consuming process and finding all the sites to get backlinks form is not an easy job to do if someone is not completely familiar with the process.

Don't lose hope quite yet. If you are not sure how to build backlinks for your site or simply don't have the time to do so yourself, then there are SEO companies offering several different webmaster services that will provide you the required backlinks to your site. These SEO companies can also help you with proper on-page optimizations and even can offer you custom SEO packages that will benefit your site in terms of ranking. So either you work on SEO or link building yourself or you outsource your project to an SEO company, you just have to do it one way or another. Your competitors are already doing it so why not you?