Who doesn't want more sales in their real online business?  A great way to do this is to increase traffic to your website and one of the best methods to go about increasing your web traffic is to increase your rankings in the search engines.  Google, MSN and Yahoo are examples of search engines in which your website rank. You might think, "My website is so little compared to all the giants out there.  There's no way I can rank higher than them." 

You may not believe, but you can have higher rankings than the big boys." Here's an example from my real online business.  We sell at book called "A Thomas Jefferson Education". Although we are not first for this book, our site does come in third, which results in our site having a spot on Google's page one for this search phrase.  We are also one of only two sites on the first page of Google that actually sell the book! 

Bottom line is, we get the majority of the book sales. At one point, our site actually outranked the publisher of Thomas Jefferson Education.  Amazon does rank on that page, but they are not competition for us at this time, because they only sell used copies of the book and we sell new copies.  

A common question I get is, "What's Google's formula for determining ranking?" Unfortunately for all of us, that is Google's closely guarded information.  It's top secret and as much as I wish I knew the exact method for ranking high in the search engines, neither myself nor anyone else outside of Google actually knows that formula.  My bet is that even the top execs in google don't know the exact formula because it's so complicated. 

So beware if you see ads for, "Everything you need to know about getting ranked in search engines".  That author should qualify what they mean so their title isn't misleading. There are however many people who specialize in this area who do know a lot about it. In the end though, Google guards their secrets, just like Kentucky Fried Chicken guards its famous recipe.  

So the obvious question is, what can you do to rank higher in the search engines? The absolute best way to do this is to get backward links to your website. Backward links occur when other websites link to your website.  Therefore, they give you a "backward link."  Websites with more backward links score very favorably with Google.

Backward links tell Google that what your site is about.  If I'm about cars and another website has a link to my site with the keyword, "All About Cars", Google starts to think I'm about cars. The more of these backward links that I have, the better Google ranks my website.

So what do you do to generate backward links?

1.  Offer to Trade Links with other websites - Contact other owners of websites similar to yours and ask them to put a link to your site on theirs and in exchange you will put a link to their website on yours.

2.  Online Press Releases - When you have something in your company worth announcing, submit an online press release.  Make sure that you include a link to your website.  When a news site picks up your press release, your link will be published along with your press release.  Here's a great free site for submitting press releases: http://www.free-press-release.com/.

3.  Articles - Write articles about your specific niche and be sure to include a bio about you with your website link.  There are many online directories in which you can submit articles you have written.  Ezine publishers are generally very lazy so when they need newsletter content, they look in these directories. When they publish one of your articles, you get a backward link to your website.  Here's a link to get started publishing your articles:  http://ezinearticles.com/.

Personally, my favorite way to get backward links is by writing and submitting articles.  I also think this is the easiest way to get more backward links.  It's very easy to write an article.  Just set aside a few minutes this week and write a 300-400 word article.  Then submit it to 10 online article directories and you should have several backward links coming to your website over the next few weeks.