If you want to promote your business online, you can't neglect the search engines. After all, the search engines account for over 70% of the traffic for most websites that are online. If your website is highly valued by the search engines, you will get a lot more traffic. It's then up to you to convert the traffic into paying customers.

But before you get traffic, you have to get the search engines to rank your site well in the search engines. Let's use an example as an illustration. You will quickly see how you can get better search rankings.

Assume that you are in the business of selling home improvement tools. There are tons of traffic in this market, and people are searching for all kind of tools. For example, some may search for "spanners for sale", while others may search for "electric drills".

You know you have these products in your inventory, and you know you give the prospects (they are not customers yet) what they are looking for. So you set up an eCommerce store online, hoping that these customers can find you through the search engines, and hopefully buy something from you.

Unfortunately, that's not how the search engines work. The search engines need to find your website and index your site content before you have any chance of ranking in the search results. Once you website has been indexed, it's now time to worry about rankings.

Do a quick search using one of the major search engines. Use any two or three keyword phrase that you can think of. Chances are, your search will yield millions of search results. Your website is probably buried under these results. Usually, only the first few pages get the traffic. The rest of the web pages will probably never be seen by the world.

Quesion is, how does the search engine decide who to rank first?

The answer is back links. The more quality inbound links a website has, the higher it will rank in the search results. Having a large number of links is tantamount to having thousands of websites that are "voting" for yours. In a way, it's like an election. Links have become "votes" in the eyes of the search engines.

But you have to be a little careful here. If you are going to acquire back links, be sure to acquire links that are valued by the search engines. For example, submitting your URLs to well established web directories is a good way of building back links. Listing your site in a link farm is the wrong way to build links. Your link will probably be among thousands of irrelevant links anyway.

When getting links for your site, exercise discretion. Your links should only come from relevant and well established sites that are not spammy. Otherwise, your sites may be penalized by the search engines.

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