Top 10 search engine rankings. Everybody wants it but a few achieve it. Search engines have always been an important source of traffic for many marketers. Achieving high search engine rankings should be one of your goals because it can be profitable in the long run.

But what is it that prevent some people from obtaining their coveted rankings?

It's true that some years ago, getting high rankings was very easy. You could just set up a site, heavily optimize it on the page itself and bam, you can appear in the top listings quickly and easily.

Nowadays, this has totally changed. It is becoming more and more difficult to secure and even maintain good rankings on the major search engine result pages(SERPs) like Google and Yahoo. Some of the reasons are:

(1) Competition

There is more and more competition. More and more websites are popping out everyday and everyone is trying to promote their websites, hence increasing pages and websites in the SERPs. An example, Google has more than 8 billion pages now in its index.

(2) Search Engine Algorithm Change

With the search engine algorithm changing, it can become more complex to figure out how to get top rankings or maintain your existing ones.

(3) Search Engines Are More Severe

Doing any foolish mistake with your site can be costly. You should be careful what you are doing when promoting your site. For eg, you can have hidden text or links on your site without you knowing and you can be penalized.

If it's not a mistake, you could be linking to websites that aren't good anymore, hence devaluing your site.

What should you do? Well, you can't do anything about competition neither algorithm change but you need to monitor who you link to and ensure that your site is clean everytime. And above all, links on as many similar and related sites are still highly valuable to get top rankings and you should constantly get them regularly because that's the core building block of good placement in the SERPs no matter what and to outrank your competition, that's what you should do. And you can be sure that good quality links will still be important in every algorithm change.

Here are top 2 ways to get links to your site and higher rankings in major search engines:

(1) Reciprocal Links

It's being said that reciprocal links are decreasing in value but still though, they are worth getting. If you are exchanging links with sites which are of similar or related topics, it can do you more good than harm. So don't stop getting these type of links. A link is a link and it will benefit you in many ways you can imagine. A link will not only help you in better search engine placement but you will get traffic from that link alone.

I know that because I get lots of traffic from my link partners alone. If you can get one on the homepage, it's even better. So don't underestimate reciprocal linking. They still work. Many sites with high search engine positioning have reciprocal links to them, so they are still of great value. The web is simply a network of websites linking to each other in a way. Links are what form the internet.

(2) One-way Links

On the other hand, one-way links are best because they are independent votes. Other websites link to you without linking back. Well these type of links are harder to get.

Some good ways to get them are:

(i) Build a useful site and allow others to link to you freely by providing them with the necessary materials like text links or banners. Text links are better because you can include your targeted keywords in them. Some people will even link to you just because your site has good content and will find a way to link to you usually just by taking your homepage title. I've seen that.

(ii) Buy some text advertising on other quality related sites. This will give you traffic and automatically benefit you in your rankings.

(iii) Write articles of interest to your audience and submit them to other websites which accept articles. In your author bylines, you have a link to your site. Well this will certainly help your traffic, link popularity and rankings. But to boost your rankings better, check out section (iv) which reveals how use the article marketing strategy to get one-way inbound links with your targeted keyword in your anchor text.

(iv) Create a section on your site allowing others to re-publish your articles. Provide them with the exact html code so that they can just copy and paste that code on their sites easily. Don't forget to mention that the article and author bio should not be modified in any way if it's used. Hence by facilitating their tasks, you can be sure to get your articles distributed on the web much more faster.

In your author bylines, be sure to put an anchor text with your targeted keyword in the link to your site. This is how an author bylines can be extremely beneficial for your rankings. This is not just a url but a keyword targeted url. Imagine your reprint article page gets decent traffic, you increase your chances to get some people interested to re-publish your work on the net. With time, you will boost your link popularity and get higher rankings.

Well you work hard to produce quality content and it can pay itself many times over. One article can be published on hundreds of websites and if your url is automatically coded with an anchor text containing your targeted keyword, you will have 100 one-way keyword-rich inbound links. Now what's the value of that? I let you figure it out.

Getting high search engine rankings takes time, work and patience but if you are serious about your business and you are here to stay for long, you should devote some of your time everyday doing some search engine promotion. In the long run, you are going to reap the rewards of your on-going work.

This article can be freely published on a website as long as it's not modified in any way including the author bylines, plus the hyperlink must be made active just like below.

Jean Lam is the author of the highly acclaimed eBook Top Search Engine Ranking Secrets in Google Revealed, a concise, step-by-step guide to high search engine ranking for the beginner to intermediate level webmaster.