With thousands of websites competing under the most obscure categories, ranking high on search engines has become like the Holy Grail of the Modern Era. This is especially true for companies whose goods and products are relatively common.

There are over 3,000 entries for scrapbook papers, and over 5,000 entries on recipes. Faced with this kind of competition, ranking high on search engines seems almost impossible.

Not impossible, although be prepared to put up quite a long fight. Search engine promotion know the secrets to ranking high on search engines, and increase search engine ranking even in relatively difficult niches.

They do warn, however, that ranking high on search engines is a daily battle. Just as you are pulling out all the stops for the sole goal of ranking high on search engines, so are your competitors. Ground is gained and lost everyday. So one moment, you’re ranking high on search engines, and the next, you’re not.

That’s why experts say that ranking high on search engines is not the only way to win the Internet war or secure your home business profits. . In fact, ranking high on search engines isn’t even the way to ensure sales. The most ranking high on search engines can do is to bring people to your website. But it does not get them to make a sale—they can still visit other sites and choose to buy from them. So you need to complement ranking high on search engines with good customer service, competitive prices, and a good reputation.

A good reputation is a function of the kind of reviews you get from other related websites. If others like your content and choose to link to you, you get their “seal of approval” while also driving up your link network, a big factor in ranking high on search engines.

It’s also important to penetrate forums invite others to check out your site, or if you have the budget, to invest in advertising or promotions. This helps start word of mouth. So even if ranking high on search engines fluctuates, you still get traffic,

Ranking high on search engines is important. But this is not enough. You should complement ranking high on search engines with other internet marketing and promotions efforts.

One of the sweetest things for a webmaster is to go to a search engine – maybe Google, Yahoo, or MSN – type in a keyword, and voilà, they see their own website listed on the first page, or better still, ranked at the top of that page.

You can go to Google and type “Guide to earning a living without a job”, you’d see that this website, HappyJoblessGuy, is ranked at the top spot of the first page. It’s just less than 3 weeks since I started this website (many of you have followed it since Day 1, so you know I have not misrepresented the dates). How do I get there so fast? Well, that’s what I want to share with you. And, if I can do it, so can you! But why should I teach you the secret? Because I firmly believe that everybody should have the opportunity to earn a living without holding a job. Whether or not you want to do it as a side income or a full time job is entirely your business. And what do I get in return? Quite honestly, I make HappyJoblessGuy into a very important website that helps lots of people.

I do say that, if this website provides you valuable lessons, please feel free to donate – especially after you have become successful. If asking for a donation makes the information not free, fine, regard what I am sharing with you as not free. In fact, regard it as priceless – you can name the price, any price, from zero dollars and more. In a future chapter, I will also show you how you can place a donation link on your website. If you are freely giving away valuable information that touches people’s lives, you’d be pleased to see that some actually show their appreciation by donating back to you.

One of the easiest ways for you to earn money from home is through advertisements that appear on your website. I covered in the previous chapter how you can add Google AdSense to your website. If you are keen to see it happening, set up your website and apply for the AdSense account. Otherwise, all your success is a fragment of the imagination. I have seen it happening to my websites, now I am sharing this with you so that you can try it and start earning money too. But that’s just the first step.

In order to be successful, your website needs one key ingredient: traffic. Yes, Virginia. No traffic equals no search engine ranking equals no money. Simple as that. And you know, you’d never get any traffic till you get a good ranking in Google and all the other search engines. But how do you do that? How do you get the search engines to find your website?

There are millions and millions of websites out there, how do the search engines find websites and rank each of them? That’s the whole purpose of this article, to supply you the answer. If you’re on the verge of starting your own website, I hope it also provides you the motivation to get started. The reward is very sweet. Not only is there the pleasure of seeing your website listed for all the world to see, you also improve its traffic, and if you’ve added Google AdSense, it means getting more advertising dollars.

In the early years of the Internet, it was pretty easy to get a top rank on the search engines. Granted there were fewer webpages back then, search engines were also less sophisticated than they are today. If you ask me, do I prefer them now or back then, my answer to you is a resounding NOW. Although search engines today are more sophisticated – and there are more websites to compete with – today’s technology allows for more relevant search results. Today’s search engines are more sophisticated than years ago; now they are better able to recognize quality, and are not so easily fooled into ranking dubious websites. The likelihood that someone fools a search engine into providing his website an unfairly high ranking has diminished, and the likelihood of searchers finding the most relevant results has increased. How was this achieved, and how then can we increase the chances of our website to be listed?

The answer, quite simply, is by understanding how the search engines of today work.

There are many search engines out there, but the most popular are Google, Yahoo and MSN. Of these three, Google takes the lion share of all Internet searches – no small feat, considering Google was the newest player in the field. On the Internet, however, being newest does have its advantage. Google’s search engine simply outshone the rest. It was more sophisticated and accurate. And looking at Google homepage, the search engine also appears deceptively simple. But behind that simple front lurks a mighty beast. As a result, close to half of all Internet searches today are done on Google. Yahoo is a distant second, MSN an even more distant third, and everybody else bites the dust. So if your webpage ever want to be anywhere significant on the web, it has to be ranked high on Google.

An entire industry has sprouted up to help people get their websites ranked high on the search engines. Many use honest ways to improve your website but there are also those that use dubious ways to try and fool the search engines. My advise to you is: don’t ever try to fool the search engines. Search engines expect you to play by the rule, and if you let them catch you trying to fool them, they’d throw you out of the rankings faster than you can yell “Google!”

Rather than getting someone to help get your website ranked high in the search engines, however, I recommend that you learn to do it yourself. I may have mentioned it before but I’ll say it again: you cannot be a captain who can’t tell stern from starboard. You need the acquire the skill necessary to guide your website up the ranks, and I’m here to help you.