When I first started my work at home business, I had no experience building websites, and no experience advertising. I decided to use Microsoft Front Page, to create my site, because I had used other Microsoft Office software products and I figured it would be the easiest for me to learn. My first site looked great. I was meticulous to make sure all of my links worked and everything lined up. I uploaded it to my host server and asked someone else to look at it for me. Someone did look at it and they said "Are you kidding? Your site is a mess!". Huh?  I don't get it! Well, it turns out that my site looked great in Internet Explorer, but it was a mess in Netscape! After fixing the problem, and asking some of my friends to look again, they said "So, if I search for your website in Google, will I find it"? Well, I knew it wasn't at the top of Google's search engine, but I had no idea how to get it there! Sure, I had submitted my website to Google, so I knew it was there. In fact, if I entered my URL in quotes in the Google search bar, it popped right up, but otherwise I couldn't search and find it. Unfortunately, I learned that the only way to get a new website to the top of Google's search engine quickly was to pay for it! You've probably noticed when you do a search that there are listings that show up on the side and top of the search results, with the words "sponsored listing" next to them. It turns out that these are advertisements that people pay for. They actually bid a certain amount for each "click" they receive.  As long as they keep their price per click low enough, they can realize a profit. So, I guess the notion "if you build it they will come" doesn't apply when it comes to websites.

It turns out that with all of the hundreds or even thousands of search engines out there, the majority of the searches are made using Google, Yahoo and MSN. According to the 2005 November Nielson/Net Ratings, Google has the largest share of the U.S. based searches with 46%, Yahoo is second with 23% and MSN is third with 11%. I also learned about something called "SEO" which stands for Search Engine Optimization. I think it really should be called "WSO" for WebSite Optimization. Because in actuality all we can do is optimize websites in order to get higher search engine rankings, not the other way around. Google uses a rating system known as "PageRank", which assigns a rank to each site between 1 and 9. If you are wondering why it only goes up to 9 and not 10, it's because Google is the only site that rates as a 10. Even Yahoo and MSN only have a PageRank of 9. The algorithms to determine PageRank are not easily understood, or even communicated in such a way that the average person can understand and can only be described by me as "double-top-secret". If you download Google's toolbar, you can customize it to the show PageRank for the sites you are viewing. It's basically a little green bar, that will show the PageRank if you hold your cursor over it. It seems in general that the way you increase your PageRank is through backlinks. These are links from other web sites linking to your URL. And not just any links, they have to be relevant to your type of site and the higher the PageRank of the sites linking to you, the better.

After doing some digging around on the net, I discovered a website  (www.linkpopularity.com), where you can input a URL and it will tell you how many sites are linked to that URL. By using some of your competitors URLs ( the sites that do show up at the top of a Google non-sponsored search), you can get some sense of how many links are required to get to the top and what types of sites you can link to.  In many cases you can link to these same sites. After doing this, I found that there are many different types of sites that can link to you that are other than the norm, such as classified ad sites, guestbooks, forums...and directories! I think directories were my biggest find. There are an abundance of directories out there, many which are free. Many times when you request a link, either by email to a site or through a site with automated online forms, they ask you for a "reciprocal link". This basically means that they would like you to put their link on your site, so they can attempt to increase their own PageRank.

The most surprising thing that I learned while reviewing the sites of my competitors, is the number of back links they had. The had about 3,000 to 4,000 links. Considering the amount of time it takes to request a link, post a reciprocal link and upload my page to my host server, it would take me a very, very long time to get the same number of links. I've basically dealt with this situation by committing to request 10 links per day. So, hopefully I will have significantly increased my PageRank over the next year, and will be able to increase my traffic without having to spend as much money on pay-per-click advertising.