If you want to get your web page noticed but don’t want to spend a lot of money on text ads, your best bet is search engine optimization, or SEO. As of this writing, that mostly means understanding how Google ranks search hits, and adapting your web presence accordingly.
Historically search engine results were based on the frequency and proximity of keywords in the page text. The problem is that there are a lot of web pages out there with overlapping keywords. Another problem is that this system is easy to game by loading your pages with invisible text repeating the keywords over and over. Google attempts to rank its search results in the order of their usefulness. They do this using a complex proprietary algorithm called PageRank. One of PageRank’s most heavily weighted factors is the number of links pointing to your page. If more people link to a web site, presumably it’s because it’s more useful or authoritative. PageRank also recursively factors in the number of links going into those pages that link to you.
So the key to a higher Google rank is getting inbound links. The question is, how do you get people to link to you?
