The key to promoting your real online business is website traffic. There is no way you can make money without it. One of the best types of traffic is traffic that comes from the search engines. You might wonder if it is practical to try and get traffic from the search engines. There are a lot of competing websites out there and you might not be able to beat them in rankings.

You would be surprised at the type of results that you can get. For example, we sell a book with the title of "Thomas Jefferson Education." At the time we wrote this, our website was ranked #3 for this keyword, which places us on the first page on the Google website. Interestingly enough, out of all of the websites that are ranked for this term, we are one of only two web sites on the first page of Google that sells the book.

Do you see how powerful this is? With a high ranking and little competition, this gives us a significant advantage. There are times where we even had a higher search engine ranking than the publisher of the book. Amazon has also ranked well for this book, but they only have used copies.

One of the most common questions that I receive is "How do I know what Google looks for to determine my ranking?" The fact of the matter is Google keeps this information secret so that people cannot manipulate the search engines.

If you see someone selling an eBook that claims to teach you "everything you need to know to get listed in the search engines" you should proceed very cautiously. The reason why no one can teach you everything is because no one knows everything. Google itself changes the formula all the time.

Does this mean you should not buy search engine optimization books? No, you will learn something of value. However, you just need to know that they cannot teach you everything because they do not know how the algorithm works.

So what is the key to getting high listings in the search engines? The key is to increase the amount of backward links you have to your website. A backward link is when another website links to your website. Google uses that to determine if your site is important.

The way Google uses back links is it looks at the incoming links to your website and the keywords used. If you have a link that says "From Caterpillar to Butterfly" and your web site has content about butterflies, Google will be able to determine that your website should be ranked for the keyword "butterfly."

Here is the question "how do you get backward links to your website?"

1. Linkback exchanges: With a linkback exchange you offer to link to someone else's website if they agree to link to your website.

2. Write a press release: You can write a press release and submit it online about your company. You need to include a link to your website to get any benefit. If a news website uses your release, they will publish it along with a link back to your web site. An example of a press release site is http://www.free-press-release.com/.

3. Write an article: You can write an article about the topic that your web site is about with a link back to your website. You then want to submit it to the different article directories that are available online. Many ezine publishers and blog owners use content in these directories so you can get free links that way. You not only get the link from the directory, but you get the link from each site that uses your articles as well. One of the best directories is http://ezinearticles.com/.

In my opinion, the simplest way to create backward links for your website is to use articles. If you write a single article, about 300 to 400 words and submit it to 10 article directories, you should have backward links for your web site within a short period of time, which is exactly what a real online business needs.