Many businesses believe that having a website is enough to attract customers online. They think that "if you build it they will come", but nothing could be further from the truth. If you want your website to be visible to web searchers, you have to actively market your website. The most important technique to attract qualified visitors to your site is through link building.



Many businesses invest thousands of dollars into developing a web presence, completely ignoring the importance of driving traffic to their website. Even people who know a little about search engine optimization are relying on old information, or techniques that have not been working for years. For example, some think that Meta tags are the end-all-and-be-all to search engine optimization when most search engines, ignore Meta tags.

Links are important because they speak to the value of the site. The keyword here is value. The way the major search engines rank websites has to do with value. If the search engines consider your site more valuable than another site, your site will rank higher in the results. Higher-ranking means more traffic, and more traffic means more revenue.

The difference between the way search engines value a website today compared to how they valued websites in the past has to do with the importance of what others say about your site. Let me explain, in the past it was very easy to manipulate the search engines because they only considered the content of your site content such as your meta tags, keyword saturation, headers, etc. In other words, whatever you have said about your site they believed. If you said that your website is about "super product one" in the body of your site, in your page title, in your meta tags, in your headers, etc. they believed you. Very naive, isn't it?

Today, search engines no longer believe you so much. They still believe you a little such as your page title, and they still consider the body of text on your site, but what you say about your site on your site has become much less significant when it comes to your search engine rankings. If you want good rankings for competitive keywords, you have to get other websites to link to your site. Yes, your goal is to get other sites linking to your site. When another site links to your site the search engines consider it a vote. If another site thinks that your site is worth linking to, your site must be important. Consequently, your site is going to rise in the results.

Getting a link from one site, is a good start, but it is only the beginning. The more competitive keywords you wish to rank for, the more links you have to get. It is always good to study sites that have top ranking for your target keywords, and study how many links they have pointing to their sites.

Link building is not a project with a beginning or an end. Your company has to be committed to link building on an on going basis. If you want to get great search engine ranking results your company has to make a long term commitment to link building. Unless you have a large in-house IT department that appreciates link building, you should consider outsourcing this essential task. You have to set monthly goals to meet, so it is understood that link building is a numbers game. The more links you build the better your rankings will become, and the more traffic you will receive, and the more your revenue will be.

If you rely on Pay Per Click to drive traffic to your site, one day you may realize that the ever-increasing cost of bidding for your keywords have become too expensive for your margins. Pay Per Click is a great supplement to organic search engine results, but it is no substitute.