One of the most difficult tasks, having developed your website is to promote it on the search engines and achieve first page rankings. This is after all where we, as web site owners want to be, especially if you are selling products or promoting your services. Anything after the third page is generally useless for attracting visitors and potential customers. So how can you achieve this first page ranking on the major search engines? I will assume that you have good content and update this at least on a weekly basis as this attracts the search engine spiders to regularly visit your site. However content alone will not see you leap through the rankings. What will encourage this movement on all the search engines are backward links.

You will have undoubtedly read of the many ways of getting links to your website, from reciprocal links to one way links, and that the latest information out of Google suggests that buying links may result in a penalty and in being demoted in the rankings. So how do you, as a busy person running your own business and attempting to promote your own website do it? You could as people suggest e-mail a variety of webmasters whose sites are related to yours asking them to link to you. This is very time consuming and yields little result. Reciprocal linking is easier but still time consuming and the links seem to be of little value now so again the time spent on this may not be a useful and productive way of using your time. Directories are again relatively easy if time consuming and many of them now require a payment for a link in their directory. If you are planning on registering with as many directories as possible then this can ultimately turn out to be an expensive enterprise. This is OK if you have a big budget but most of us work on very tight budgets. It is also being suggested that the value of directory links is being downgraded so again it may not be the most valuable use of your time.

That leaves one avenue, that of writing and publishing articles. You are presumably an expert in your field so writing about different aspects related to your website should not be difficult. The very first article is difficult and takes up a lot of time but subsequent ones become easier and easier to write. You will surprise yourself as to what you can actually write about. How valuable these articles are I can only relate from my own experience. Three months ago I started writing articles and have averaged ten per month ever since. When I first started my web site had 12 links registered on Google, 36 on MSN, 8 on Yahoo and none on Teoma and was languishing on pages seven and eight. Three months down the line and 30 articles later the site is on the first page of these three search engines for at least six of my keywords and the links have increased as follows; Google 54, Yahoo 616, MSN 2056, and Teoma 606. When these links are investigated over 90% of them are from these articles which have been picked up by ezines, weblogs and used as content on other people’s sites. It is a constant source of surprise and enjoyment looking to see where they end up! Getting excellent link backs to your website is not the only benefit you get from the articles because they also encourage visitors to your site, and every visitor is a potential customer.

David Andrew Smith is the owner of http://www.wesparkle.co.uk a cleaning services company which operates throughout the UK