You may have a great topic in a great niche with many pages of fantastic content, but chances are you are not alone. There are probably hundreds or thousands of pages with content that is just as good and covering the same topic as yours.

Search engines have a number of ways of determining where to rank your site in the search results besides the content of your pages. For instance, when a web surfer goes to a website by clicking on one of the links on a search results page, and discovers within a few seconds that the site is not what they were looking for and returns to the search results page to try another one, it’s called a “bounce". You bounce off of the site back to the results page. Sites with very high bounce rates are not going to rank high. But if you click on a link and never return to the results page, or return after a lengthy stay, then the search engine thinks you must have found what you were looking for. Very low bounce rates are rewarded with higher rankings.

Another way that the search engines can determine the value of your site and or page for ranking purposes is the count the number of links to your site from other web sites on the internet. Not only can they count the number of links, but they can assign the links quality scores depending on what kind of site they come from etc. The link text is a consideration, and the text surrounding the link and even what the subject matter of the page the link is on is an indicator of quality. If your site is about widgets, and there is a link to your site from a furniture company and a widget company, the widget link is of higher quality. If you have two links from widget companies, and one originates from a page about the history of widgets, and the other comes from a “links" page where related links are exchanged, then the link from the history page has a higher quality score.

In theory one-way links are more valuable than reciprocated links. One way links are links to your site from another site that you do not have a link to. Presumably if your site is of such high quality that other sites put up links to it without reciprocation, your site must be pretty good or useful or something.

One common approach to obtaining links is trading links or “reciprocal linking", where you have a page where you list useful links, and you can place links to other sites with the same arrangement on that page or pages and the other site does the same. You can then surf around looking for sites that you feel are compatible with yours, and email the webmasters asking to trade links. Some webmasters will trade links with you. It’s best to trade links with high quality sites and sites that have something in common with yours.

When you trade links with other sites, don’t give the same description every time. Search engines probably give a lower quality score to links when there are dozens or more with identical link text. Vary it each time you trade, using different variations on your keywords if possible. Don’t always link to your home page…link to some of the other important pages of your site. Do this where the site/page the link is coming from appropriately matches the page being linked to.

Another way to obtain links to your site is through a process known as article marketing. You write articles and publish the articles in what are called article directories. The articles range in length from about 500 words to several thousand, but most articles are rather short. I like to keep my articles around 1000 words if I can.

These directories publish your article on their home page briefly, where their visitors can scan the titles and read the articles. You are allowed two or three links at the bottom of your article where you can direct the links back to your own site. After the articles have been displayed on the directory’s home page it ends up archived for years and thus you end up with a one way link to your site.

Publishers with blogs and ezines often republish the articles and they are required to publish your links as well, so there are more links to your site and more potential visitors.

There are 20 or 30 pretty good directories and generally your article ends up online within a day or two. After a week or so I often can find the article in several hundred locations on the internet. Just do a search on Google in quotes for the headline of your article, and you can see where it’s ended up. It’s not a bad idea to do the title search before you write the article so you can avoid headlines that are already all over everywhere. When I am submitting my articles to the directories I change the link text every few directories to work in a variety of keywords.

After I write each article and just before submitting them to the directories, I create a page on one of my websites that is related to the topic of the article, and post the article there. One more page on my site to attract search engine spiders…more words for them to find those keyword phrases and send me visitors.

Remember we are looking for long-term success. Try to write an article every week or so…it builds up your site as well as increases the number of links to you. After a year or so you will be surprised at the results.