Most things worthwhile don’t have any shortcuts. At least none that work for a sustained period of time. Without a doubt, creating an excellent search engine ranking is worthwhile – it will boost your visibility. But developing that ranking is not easy. The search engines work very hard to design ranking algorithms and they don’t take kindly to websites trying to cheat the system.

The best strategy for improving your search engine ranking is to get other websites to link to your website. This tells the search engines that you are a popular website. The quality of the content on the linking page along with the quality and size of the site linking to you are key factors that contribute to your ranking position.

One touted shortcut to SEO is buying links to your website from Link Brokers. A Link Broker or Link Auction takes websites that want money to link to your website and sells that link space. You purchase the links and supposedly that will boost your search engine ranking. BUT, there are multiple reasons why this is bad news.

1. The links you are buying may not be relevant to your website content. If you talk about dentistry but the sites linking to you have nothing to do with dentistry, then this discrepancy will actually dilute your web ranking rather than strengthening it. Here is a Google Employee talking about quality of links and link brokers.
2. The websites that sell links are probably not popular sites with web traffic that stays on the site for long. This means that the link to your website will not be prioritized high and so will not help your ranking all that much.
3. Finally and most important, the search engines invest a lot of money and resources in creating the best possible search product. They do not appreciate websites that try to hack their work. As such they may outright drop or demote your website if they find out that all your links come from link brokers. It has happened before. In June 2006 the Link Vault was dropped by Google.

So, what’s the best way to increase your search engine ranking?

Well in short, the old fashioned way:

• Make friends
• Trade links with colleagues
• Have your college or school link to you
• Write articles and publish them online

These are a few suggestions. For more, contact us about the Online Marketing package.

Good luck!

Related Posts

• April 29, 2010 -- 3 Easy SEO Tips for your Website
• November 23, 2008 -- Your complete online solution for design, development and marketing

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online marketing by Chris