You might have spent hours trying to optimize your website to make sure it is highly searchable, and crawlable by engines. Spent more hours and hours making that CSS page work, and got your self a good design layout, and validation stuff. Now you wanted your site to be on top of the engines. Will your website rank well, you might ask?
Now there are a couple of things you might do to make sure you rank on the engines and at least stay on the first page of the SERPS!
1. Put your site on a relevant site that has already been crawled by the engines. Relevant? yes it must be, and as most of you knew, this is to make sure you are in a way which won’t hurt your search engine rankings in the future.
2. Submit your site to as many web directories as possible. Most web directories have pages that are designed to make sure you site fit on that page, make sure you select the most appropriate category for your site and not simply adding a link elsewhere. Choose the best directories possible, pick the most trusted directories such as dmoz, yahoo etc. sometimes it really pays off spending sometime or a few bucks for inclusion on these directories.
3. Create articles, and submit it to good article directories. These articles are being picked up by most webmasters to have some content on their websites. make sure you also have a good link to your website or else are in no way earning anything from that article you have just submitted.
4. Ask some website owners to link with you. It might be time consuming but it’s worth the time. Most webmasters would ask you to have a reciprocal link from your site to their site if they have agreed to your request. Make sure you play with them fairly, cheating them might put you in a bad section, and they might not entertain any of your requests ever again in the future.
5. Create several anchor texts to use while building links. This is usefull to make sure your links are not being mistaken as a spam.
6. Socialize with your competitors and know what they are upto, they may or maynot tell you but doing so will give you hints and ideas for your own use.
I have created a small web directory on one of the sites I am currently optimizing called the clickpond web directory. This directory have quite several categories that will surely fit your site. Go on and add your link to it, linking is Free, though you need to place a reciprocal link to my site.
Lastly, make sure you won’t overdo your link building, in my case i add around 20 - 30 linkbacks per day to make sure the engines would not think i am spamming. Creating too much inbound links to your site might harm you also so be careful.