Where do you think is the first place people would go to when they are searching for information online? The answer is through a search engine like Goggle, Yahoo! or MSN. Well, that is also how most of your potential customers will find you. With the hundreds of thousands of websites that turn up on each search, what do you think are the chances of your website appearing on the top 20?



If you just put up your website and do nothing about it, then the chances of people finding your website is zero. For an online business to flourish, it is of paramount importance to get traffic from search engine. The primary reason why so many online businesses fail today is due to lack of understanding of how search engine rank websites.

Most people often have the misconception that ranking is based on a ‘first come, first served' basis or based in an alphabetical order. Instead, search engine generate ‘spiders' that crawl the World Wide Web and index the millions of web pages based on a complicated mathematical formula that measures the website's relevancy and popularity. The more relevant your website contents are to the searched keyword and the more popular your website, the higher your search rankings will be.

Here are some strategies that you can use to increase your rankings.One way that search engines measure your website's popularity is based on the number of incoming links to your website. This is often called ‘link popularity'.

Before you start getting all your friends to place links to your site, be warned that links must be relevant. In other words, if your website is on ‘health supplements' and you get your friend's website on ‘computer games' to link to you, it will not be counted. In fact, search engine may even penalize you for that. Having a million links from sites that nobody visits will also not be considered. One good strategy to get other websites in your industry to link to you is by including useful information (valued by your target market) on your website.

Actively search for websites that are related (but not competitive) to your target market. One strategy is to check the websites that are linking to your competitors' site. Write a personal message to the website owner and request a link from them. If you position it as a win-win partnership, the chances are they will be happy to oblige. The best way to boost the number of website pages that link to your site is to create them yourself. Create your own content rich pages that direct traffic to your main site.

Another powerful strategy is to build separate web sites for each of your products (or category of products) and then link all these sites together. This results in each of the sub-site having higher link popularity and ranking.So, there you have it, the strategies to building a profitable online business by getting traffic from search engines.

As a successful entrepreneur, especially in the online world, remember that knowledge is power and it is of paramount importance to continue to invest in your education by keeping up to date with the latest trends and strategies on internet marketing.