The Internet has become a great tool or vehicle for many industries and is an option to be considered in their marketing plan. Any person, organization, or company can have a website created and hosted for the world to see their products and/or offerings. But having a website is not enough. With millions of websites on the web, how will people find the website? Word of mouth will only go so far and traditional advertising is expensive.

People find websites from search engines, but not all websites are listed. If your site is not listed in a search engine, your site will not achieve its potential. In the same sense if your site is listed on a search engine but is not listed in the top 20 for the selected category, your traffic will be very minimal. On the other hand if you were to be on the first page of a search result your traffic will increase significantly and if you are in the top 3 your traffic will again multiply.

Search engines use algorithms to rank websites according to key words. The problem is that no one knows what or how to break the algorithms to be the top site on all the major search engines. Sure there are companies that claim they know and they will charge you a fortune for their service, but the algorithms change constantly. So what can we do to help our rankings on the search engines?

For starters, content is still king, not only for rankings but also for keeping your visitors on your site. Content for a website should be natural and yet optimized for the search engines. If you focus only on optimizing your pages for the search engines will your visitors get your full message? Remember you want your visitors to stay on your site and always return, so it has to be interesting and intriguing for your visitors, not just 50 key words plastered on a webpage. Keep your content fresh for both the search engines and visitors. Both will love you.

Once you have your website up and running, develop a link campaign. A link campaign will consist of both one-way links to your site and reciprocal links with other sites. Reciprocal links are tough. Many sites will not reciprocate links unless you have a certain google page ranking. Some will reciprocate a link on conditions, so be flexible. And other will be nice and help the little guy out. I have found a link directory community to be very helpful in a reciprocating link campaign. You can find many by doing a search on any of the search engines.

One-way links to your site might sound harder than reciprocal links but in reality they are both a lot of work but not really hard. Consider article writing as a vehicle or tool for one-way links. To do this you write an article on virtually any subject you want. Sign up for an account on an article directory and publish your article. You may be wondering how this is going to help with my one-way link campaign. Here it is. All the article directories include an author resource box or bio at the end of each article. This is the perfect place to tell the world about the author and a little bit about your site (don’t forget to include a link). Just remember not to spam your site links in the resource box as most article directories frown on. Once your article is published in an article directory you would now have a one-way link to your site.

Here is another cool feature of the article directories. Most of them syndicate their content (articles submitted to their directory). This means other websites may potentially have your article along with your resource box or bio on their site as well giving you another one-way link.

Just remember to be patient.

C. Dakota write articles for NarrowisthePath.com and is the administrator for a Christian Article Directory

Article Directory: Article Dashboard

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