If you want traffic from searches, you need back links. You see, links are what search engines use to determine how popular your site is. The more links, the higher your rank. This means you need lots and lots of links.

It takes time and talent to do this but it will be worth it. Google receives 3,000 search inquiries a second. That's 180,000 per minute. If you want your share of this avalanche of free business, you will need to work hard and work smart.

Back links are simply a link from somewhere else to your site. It sounds easy to create them and it is easy, but you will need thousands of these links and you will need new ones every month. They may only take a minute to create but to create hundreds or thousands take lots of time and talent.

How Many Links Do You Need?

Lots and lots. You need more than the competitor that is ranked number one with Google. If you do that, you will be number one. Let's take a look at a few areas and see how many we would need to dominate that field. - Top company in "search engine optimization" had 52,100 links - Top company in "web site design" had 54,200 links - Top Company in "custom T-shirts" had 72,000 links - Top Company in "Tiffany Lamps" had 825

As you can see, the more competitive the area, the more links it takes to be number one. Plan to add as many links as you can every month for as long as you stay in business. Remember that your competitors are adding new links every month too, so the number of links you need keeps growing.

Beware Of Short Cuts To Success

As you surf the web, you will see sites that advertise short cuts to link creation. They offer to sell you hundreds of links. As you evaluate these services, realize that the quality of your links is important to your success. The sites you link to must concern themselves with similar topics to your site or they may be disregarded by the search engines. Also, the quality of the linking site is important. If the site is known for spam or porn, you may be seriously penalized search engine rankings just for being associated with it. Buying back links is fraught with danger. You will be far more successful if you actually chose the sites you want to link to.

Using Articles To Create Links

Writing informative articles is a great way to create back links. You can use the articles on your site and publish them to article directory sites. Every site that publishes your article will create a back link to your site. Other sites may pick up your article and publish it creating "viral" publishing and more links. Someone in your organization should be responsible for creating this content every month or you can hire an outside firm to do this work for you.

Using Video To Create Links

Another great way to create links and sell as well is to create video clips that tell your story or sell your product in an interesting way. You can use these clips to sell on your site and you can publish them to video sites like youtube.com, metacafe.com, viddler.com and many others. These get great rankings in the search engines. Someone in your organization should be responsible for creating this content every month or you can hire an outside firm to do this work for you.

Using Social Networks To Create Links

Social networks like myspace.com are great ways to create quality links. Myspace is one of the most visited sites on the web, so links from it make your site rank as very popular. To create links from social sites, open an account , link to others with similar interests, and make comments that include a link to your site.

Using Blogs To Create Links Blogs want comments from readers. Visit blogs on similar topics to yours and on any popular blogs, leave a comment on a posting. Your comment should have a link to your site. This should not be just self serving but should continue the dialog. For example, if your site deals with web marketing and you see a blog article on meta tags, you might make a comment like, "excellent article with good points. I also found good meta tag tools at www.yoursite.com" One great way to find good blogs is to set up a Google alert for all keywords you use and you will be notified anytime a post is made with those key words. Next, simply go to the blog and make a comment.

That Sounds Like A Lot Of Work

It is a huge amount of work but just keep remembering those 180,000 inquiries per second. If you do not have time to do this, don't despair. You can outsource the work to companies like ours and get the job done. Outsourcing this work is very cost effective as it allows you to keep selling and managing while someone else creates the links that drive your site to the top of the inquiry list.