By Shrinivas Vaidya

Dear friends, ranking high at the search engines for a keyword

which has high demand is every marketers dream. No matter what

your website about, a fully loaded super store or a hobby site,

you need traffic and search engines have a capacity to provide

an unending supply of thousands of visitors (if your niche has

that much demand) at zero cost.

Actually it would be wrong if we say that search engines send traffic

at zero cost. There is a price you need to pay to rank high

and that's TIME. Yes, it takes time to reach there. (especially

at Google)

there are many factors that undergo a normal Search Engine

Optimization exercise and building "inbound links" is considered

one of the most challenging tasks involved today. To understand

better why search engines look for inbound links, let's take

a real life example.

For a moment forget the Internet, forget you website/search engines

anything that has to do "ranking high", just read this small

story.

There was a young boy Jim, about 21 years old. He was a fantastic

painter. He painted in water colors on canvas. His favorite

subjects were landscapes, natural beauty, mountains, etc...He

could spend hours painting and playing with colors. Colors were

his passion, his life.

He lived in a small village that was away from a major metro city.

With a small population, no one really visited this village very

often. Jim was very happy with his passion of painting.

One day Jim's uncle visited his home on a Sunday. When he saw Jim's

paintings he thought Jim has got an inborn talent of colors, of

looking towards the surrounding beauty that he was able to capture

on canvas. His was a special skill that very few people have.

So he suggested Jim to move to the city to display his work to

people out there. Jim assured him that whenever he gets the

opportunity he would definitely make the best of it.

Then the golden day arrived. Jim was listening to a radio station,

when he heard the announcement of an exhibiting of paintings to be

held in the metro city. Jim thought this is what I was looking for an

quickly rushed to the city at his Uncle's place to arrange for the

formalities.

Five of Jim's paintings got selected and displayed at the metro city

exhibition. He got a tons of post and is still getting from his

fans and now the best part is he is making thousands of bucks just

from a single painting. He is happy and wealthy too. His passion

is keeping satisfied and now he is famous guy. The villagers are

proud of having him in their village.

OK... now what's this story got to do with SEO..you ask..

A lot...If you read the story again you will discover that Jim is

already happy when he is in his village, spending most of his

time with paints and brushes. But when he displays his work out

to public, his work is admired by more and more people. It has

to do with "numbers". Again when no one knew about his talents,

he still was a great painter, but now because now thousands of

people say that "Jim is a great painter" his value becomes

magnified thousands of times.

Now if Jim launches his website on water color paintings where do

you think it must rank.. You see, it's a numbers game. Of course

it's also important that who recommends Jim as a great painter.

But Jim doesn't care, he's already taken all the care for years

polishing his painting skills. All he knows is producing great

quality paintings for his customers which are ready to pay him

truckloads of money.

There is a simple exercise to do. Put yourself in Google's shoes,

imagine that you are Google.com [:-)] and then look at Jim's new

website. If I am a regular Google user I will take all the care

to see that my search results for the keyword "water color paintings"

show up results that are best and most importantly recognized by

experts in the art industry.

This is true for every search engine out there, including Yahoo! and

MSN, because they want to retain their users.

Here "inbounds links" come into picture. The number and the quality

of inbound links is the only way for the search engines to

recognize the quality of the website it is supposed to rank. Of

course as I mentioned there are many factors that a search engine

will look for, but inbound links can have a major impact on your

rankings.

Again if Jim wants his website to rank well for many years to come,

he will have to keep on producing quality work just the way he is

doing now. Most people think that search engines are money

machines, just build a website, get is indexed and forget about it.

But it is getting a long term goal now a days to rank high at the

search engines. As I said it comes at the cost of TIME. If you

are ready to go for it, creating traffic through search engines

will be one of the most profitable skills you will ever learn

in this lifetime.

I hope this article was useful....

Copyright 2005 Shrinivas Vaidya

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