• Market Me has launched a new website with more interactive tools, a new look and better ways to serve their clients. The fall workshop series is now posted as well.

The number one question in our industry (the web marketing industry) is how can we be number 1 in the search engines? This is a huge question with huge answers. In fact that's why there is a whole industry around this. The hard part about this question is that today's answer won't be the same as yesterday's or tomorrow's.

Getting higher ratings in the popular search engines is time consuming and will probably cost you. But not in the ways that you would expect. It will cost you your time. The most important factor for search engines is traffic. Does your site generate a lot of targeted traffic? If so, the search engines assume that your site must be important so it puts you at the top of the list. So with that in mind, generating visitors is the key.

So, how do you generate more traffic to your site? We've talked about traditional advertising in previous issues, and we've talked about meta tags, but let's talk about another method to get people to visit your site - links.

76% of your visitors get to your site thru search engines, 23% get there using directories or in other words other links placed throughout the Internet World, the remaining 1% is thru direct hit. So, links in fact help drive 99% of your website traffic. What ? - that doesn't make sense you say? Let me explain...

Search engines are looking to place the most popular sites at the top of their lists, because they think that the public will be happiest with those results. Therefore, they've set many rules to judge this popularity, one being traffic as discussed above. Another way is the number of links from your site to outside sites and vice versa - the number of links out there in the Internet World that connect to your site. So this means that the more links you place to your site, the higher your search engine ratings will be, therefore, links help direct 99% of the traffic to your site. Another piece of advice, be cautious, make sure your posting on targeted sites, be wary of link exchanges, make sure you check them regularly to ensure they're displaying the correct information - especially the correct link.

Where should you start? www.kingstonbiz.ca and www.on-biz.ca are 2 sites that we run to help our clients in the ratings battle. It's free to post your link, and there's many others like them around. Links aren't the only answer to higher search engine ratings but put traffic, links and meta tags together and your search engine ratings will sky rocket.