Topping the search engines

Everyone who owns a website wants to be no.1 in the internet's busiest search engines Yahoo, MSN & Google, which can be a very complex and time consuming task.

Over the next few weeks i will be explaining some of the basics of search engine optimisation, and helping you achieve better positions, no experience necessary.

Links, Links & more Links

If you want to get that golden spot in Google, you need to keep on gaining more links to your website, the best way of doing this is to perform a search in Google for your chosen keyword, lets say "Electronic Goods". This will give you a run down of all the websites that you will need to compete against in order to get the golden spot.

Now we need to find out what links they have into their website and also get a link to our website, to do this you can search in Google using the following term:

link:http://www.cybermarket.co.uk/

This will show you all the links into the website, beware some of them may be internal, which means for example the about us page is linking to the home page so don't note any links that begin with the website address http://www.cybermarket.co.uk, but any other website, at the time of writing here are two links that i seen:

http://www.hotfroguk.co.uk/Products/scart-leads

A Google directory listing

At this stage it is also worth noting how many links this company has to thier website, in this instance, they do not have a huge amount, so its possible that it will not be too hard to beath them, but this all depends on other factors which we will discuss later.

Your next task is to get a link from that website to yours, which will most likely involve you sending them a nice email asking them to list you. Bear in mind that you want a link back to your website with the keyword you want to achieve i.e.

Hello, please could you list my website on yours, i will in return provide a link from my website to yours once you send me the appropriate details, please see my link below:

Electronic Goods [http://www.myelectronicgoods.com]

Fantastic electronic goods at amazing prices, we offer some of the best deals on the internet, so don't miss out, shop with us.

Im assuming you have the ability to add links to your website, but if you don't your web designer should be more than happy to help.

Gaining links is one of the biggest factors of modern day search engine optimisation, so keep on linking, some directories that you should apply for listings in are DMOZ (which supplies Google its information) and also Yahoo .