For more than 4 years now I have been modifying my work from home based web sites trying to optimize for the major search engines, Especially Goggle. Today with much disappointment I have come to the realization that search engine traffic alone will not make me rich. Yes my search engine rankings are now worse today than when I started 4 years ago.

Google is constantly changing their algorithms which may or may not benefit your web site. In my case it appears it does not. And then there is Yahoo and MSN search on the horizon. It appears these 2 are beginning to take away valuable customers from Google. Although this is not necassarily a bad thing we now need to optimize for 3 search engines instead of 1. Back in the good old days if you had a number 1 ranking on Google for work from home (the holly grail of search terms) you also had a number 1 on Yahoo and MSN for work from home. Today that is not the case.

I have always been reading other people saying not to place all your chips on Google and expect to make it big time. Today I realize how correct they were. I still optimize for search engines this will never change. But in addition to search engine optimization other advertising methods must be used if you want to make it on the internet big time.

If you have the money paying for placement is not a bad idea. Google has its very popular ad words program which for a price will place your website link in an ad box down the right hand side of the search results. And Yahoo has Overture search results which are placed above the natural search results. But you will need to be in the top 3 for your link to show up because Yahoo only shows 3 sponsored listings on top of the natural listings. You can also use several smaller pay per click engines such as Findwhat, 7Search and Kanoodle to name just a few.

Gaining in popularity and very effective is writing and submitting press releases. If you write a good press release with your target URL in it you could potentially get 1,000's of visitors from just 1 press release. Press releases are also showing up in the news search results of Yahoo and Google. This can't hurt your search engine optimization efforts either. The most popular place for information on press releases and getting your release published is http://www.prweb.com. For a small fee of $30 you can guarantee a next day listing and submission of your press release to Yahoo, Google and many other engines.

People have been raving about writing articles for a long time now. Do they work? Of coarse they do. Why do you think I take the time to write articles? It's difficult at first if you are not into writing, but writing articles can help your search engine rankings if you can incorporate your website URL into the article you are writing and then submit it to as many article directories as you can find. Also make sure you add all your articles to your own web site. This adds content to your site that hopefully you visitors will want to read.

There are literally hundreds more options for you to advertise your website both online and offline that I am not going to get into in this article. The main point is don't put all your eggs into one basket like I did (GOOGLE) Spread them out advertise everywhere and don't count on a good search engine ranking. If you do everything else right the search engines will look after your sit for you.

Tom Worsley is a successful work from home Internet marketer and independent representative for SFI, Owner and Webmaster for http://www.kawarthapublishing.com.

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