One of the things that you can do to increase your rankings in the search engines is to get other sites to link to you. Getting the link is not really getting people to click on the link although that can help too. It is more about just getting a link so that the search engines will think that your site is popular. Search engines especially Google has a way of looking for and tracking the number of sites that link to you.

Getting backlinks can help you especially when you have some serious competition in your area or have someone who has had a website forever and is always in the top spot in the search engines. To find out where they rank you can go to your competitors site and get their url. You can then put that url into various search engines and just put the word link: (with the colon) before the url. The search engine will tell you how many sites are linking to your competitors site. If you want to get a higher listing just work on getting a higher number of links!

Some ways to get backlinks to your site:

• Post on blogs such as this one!
• Post on bulletin boards or discussion forums
• Create a free blog on blogger.com or www.wordpress.com and write posts that include links to your site
• Use social networking services such as myspace.com or linkedin.com
• Submit your site to free directories.
• Ask other neighborhood businesses to exchange links with your site.

The more links the better. It is also better to only link to sites that have good alexa rankings which is a system of ranking sites according to their traffic and popularity. You can find out a sites ranking by going to alexa.com and entering that sites url in the search engine there.

So along with creating high quality content, getting back links can improve your traffic to your website and increase the number of people finding your site. The reason why this is so important is that people really hardly ever look beyond a few pages of search results. You are also getting highly targeted traffic when people find your site using the keywords ‘massage, your city’. They are already looking for a massage therapist for whatever reason. They are much easier to convert into clients compared to doing a random mailing to your neighborhood. Many people may not be looking for a massage! Finding those who are by having them come to your website is half the battle!

Julio Onofrio
Founder of www.thebodyworker.com

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Tags: search engine, traffic

This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 18th, 2008 at 10:03 am and is filed under Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.