It is a well-known fact that a key to obtaining a good search engine position is having a lot of other Websites link to yours. The quantity is important, and the quality is important, too. A link to your site from Amazon.com is regarded by the search engines as more important than a link from Never-Heard-Of-It.com. How can someone with a fairly new Website obtain links from other sites? Quite easily, as it happens. Write articles about your Website's topics and publish them on the Web. It is easy to do, it provides fairly fast results, and it is less expensive and safer than if you hired a company to promote your Website for you.

Writing articles is easy. Just find a topic that relates to your Website and write what you know about it. Offer informative tips, information or other factoids that may interest the public about your topic. It need not be long; 250-500 words is just fine. At the bottom of your article, you may include a brief bio about yourself and you may include a link to your site. The next step is to search for "submit free content" in your favorite search engine. You will find many sites that accept articles from anyone who wishes to contribute. You usually publish an article by simply cutting and pasting into an online form. The Website where you publish your article shares your article with other sites that wish to republish them. Each time this happens, you'll get another link back to your Website. It only takes a minute to publish an article, and I have seen additional links back to my site in as little as 12 hours! It works, and it's free! The more articles you write, the more the links to your Website will propagate throughout the Internet.

But what about hiring a search engine optimization (SEO) company? Can't you hire someone to promote your site for you? Yes, you can. These companies will modify your site to make it more search engine friendly, and they may recommend some other promotion techniques, such as pay-per-click advertising. Depending on your financial situation and the amount of free time you have, such companies may represent a good investment. Unfortunately, there are also unscrupulous Website promotion companies out there, and there seem to be more of those than legitimate ones. I got a call just last week from one such company that promised to place my Website at the very top of the first page of Google's search results. They also promised to provide thousands of links to my site. I declined their offer, but did some research on the company. What I found is that they have done business under three different names in the last year, they've used hidden link, hidden code and other techniques that search engines don't like, they've built Web pages that plagiarize from other sites and they've done work that results in their clients being blacklisted from the major search engines.

These things weigh heavily against their promise of having thousands of links that point to my site. I see no reason to pay thousands of dollars for a service that may obtain links for me or may get my site blacklisted on the major search engines. I'd rather save my money and obtain the links myself by writing and publishing articles. It's safe, fast, and inexpensive. And it works.

?Copyright 2005 by Retro Marketing.

Charles Essmeier is the owner of Retro Marketing, a firm devoted to informational Websites, including End-Your-Debt.com, a site devoted to debt consolidation and credit counseling, and HomeEquityHelp.com, a site devoted to information regarding home equity loans.