The key to promoting your real online business is website traffic. There is no way you can make money without it. One of the best types of traffic is traffic that comes from the search engines. You might wonder if it is practical to try and get traffic from the search engines. There are a lot of competing websites out there and you might not be able to beat them in rankings.

Here is what you may not realize. You can beat many websites in search engine rankings because there are a number of keywords and phrases these websites are not even trying to get ranked for. We offer a book for sale called "Thomas Jefferson Education." There is only one other website on the first page for this keyword that sells this book as well. As a result, at the time of this writing, we are listed on the first page of Google for this keyword and phrase.

Do you realize the significance of this? It means most of the people searching for the book buy from us. Sometimes we have even received a higher ranking than the publisher of the book. Amazon ranks as well, but they only have used copies of the book, while we sell new copies.

My students ask me all the time "How does Google determine where I get ranked?" Nobody knows for sure because if they did, they can manipulate the listings and it will hurt Google?s business.

This is why you should have a certain level of skepticism if someone claims they are going to show you "all the secrets to dominating the search engines." They really cannot because the only people that TRULY know the secrets work for Google and the specific details of those secrets change all the time.

Does that mean they do not know what they are talking about? No, you can always experiment and discover different things. However, it is always going to be speculation because Google guards their secret algorithm very closely.

So what is the key to getting high listings in the search engines? The key is to increase the amount of backward links you have to your website. A backward link is when another website links to your website. Google uses that to determine if your site is important.

Most search engines use back links as part of their search engine algorithm. For example, if you get a link on a website and the link says, "Butterfly", this will help your search engine rankings if your website is also about butterflies. This is how search engines determine what website should get placed where.

There are many ways to get back links. Here are some suggestions:

1. Reciprocal Links: This is where you ask someone to put a link to your web site. You in turn will put a link to their web site.

2. Use Press Releases: Another way is to write and submit a press release about your business. The press release should have a link to your website. When it gets published by news websites, this creates a back link online to your website and improves your search engine ranking. Here is a site that you can submit your press release to: http://www.free-press-release.com/

3. Write an article: You can write an article about the topic that your web site is about with a link back to your website. You then want to submit it to the different article directories that are available online. Many ezine publishers and blog owners use content in these directories so you can get free links that way. You not only get the link from the directory, but you get the link from each site that uses your articles as well. One of the best directories is http://ezinearticles.com/

In my opinion, the simplest way to create backward links for your website is to use articles. If you write a single article, about 300 to 400 words and submit it to 10 article directories, you should have backward links for your web site within a short period of time, which is exactly what a real online business needs.

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