In order for your site to show up in the Google search results, you need to have backlinks. Backlinks are links on other websites that point back to your website. It is believed that the number of backlinks provide an indication of the popularity of a website; the more backlinks a site has, the more popular the site, and the better the search engine rankings. So how do you go about generating backlinks? Here are a few simple ideas:
 
• Contact various website owners and as if they are interested in doing a link exchange where you add their link to your site and vice versa. Many site owners will be more than happy to swap links. Feel free to contact Laneware at http://www.laneware.net.contact.aspx if you would like to swap links with us.
 
• Add your site to web directories. Web directories are sites that categorize and link to sites that deal with particular topics (i.e. web hosting, web design, etc). The easiest way to find directories is by searching Google for something like “intitle:web hosting”.
 
• Posts some comments, questions, & answers to some forums and blogs that you like to follow. Most sites will let you post a signature which can include a link back your site. This is a really quick way to generate links.  Just make sure that your posts are relevant or you could get banned.  
 
• Write and post an online article. Again, most sites will let you post a signature which can include a link back your site.
 
You can track your progress and check to see how many backlinks you have by visiting http://www.online-utility.org/webmaster/backlink_domain_analyzer.jsp.

My personal experience suggests that there is no quick and easy way to generate backlinks. While it is a long and tedious process, it is worth the effort in the end. Remember, slow and steady wins the race.

I have had the opportunity to speak with dozens of website owners over the past several months and I was surprised to learn that most site owners fail to actively employ proven SEO techniques. Simply building a website and submitting the URL to Google doesn’t ensure that people will find your site. You need to proactively design your site with search engines in mind. Having said that, here are a few things you can do to really improve your website search engine rankings. • Identify several keywords or keyword phrases that explain what you do and what your website is all about.

• Setup each web page to target a specific set of keywords or phrases. I would recommend targeting 1-2 keywords per page.
 
• Include the keywords in the page header and description tags. This is frequently overlooked and can provide the most bang for the buck.
 
• Make sure that the pages contain the keywords in the page content. Content is king so the more content the better!
 
• Use anchor links to internal pages where possible.
 
• Use keywords in the h1 header tags.
 
• Use keywords in your page names (i.e. WebHosting.html).
 
• Get as many external links back to your website as possible. These “external links” are generally referred to as backlinks. I’ll touch more on this topic at a later date.
 
• Once you’ve re-worked your site and you are ready to go, don’t forget to resubmit to the search engines for re-indexing. It usually takes 3-4 days for the changes to show up on Google.

I’ve personally had the opportunity work on several SEO projects where I used each and every one of the above techniques and I can safely say that the effort really paid off; Some of the sites went from not being listed anywhere on Google’s SERPs to showing up on the first page!