The search engine is called Google, and for all intents and purposes, it is perceived to be the Holy Grail of all internet searches. More people "Google" something every day than use any other search engine on the internet. If you go to Google and type in any keyword to search for, within seconds, hundreds of thousands of results will be returned. How does Google do it? It's simply their page ranking and indexing algorithm. Formulated by a couple of college friends from Stanford University, they were able to devise a scheme where each website is indexed and ranked on the internet. They call this the Google page rank. The Google page rank or "pr" for short is a system that ranks a website from 0 to 10, with 0 being the lowest. Then, when someone searches for certain keywords, Google returns the pages that are ranked higher first.
In order to keep an updated ranking of the web, Google crawls the internet about twice to three times per year and indexes each website, adjusting their page rank up or down based on their popularity. So how does Google know how popular a website is? It's based on the number of quality links pointing back to it. The higher the pr of a website linking back to your site, the more favorably it is looked upon by Google. For example, the New York Daily News has a pr of 8. If you were to receive a link from the New York Daily News back to your site, that would help boost your PR (if it were lower, of course). However, your link pointing back to the New York Daily News wouldn't carry as much weight in the ranking system. For the Daily News, it would still help them, but not as much as their link back to you would help your site.
There are a couple of good ways to get good quality links back to your website. The first is to participate in conversations on blogs and other written articles where you add quality feedback and, in your comment, post a link back to your website. When you add comments, you want them to add value to the discussion. If they seem like you're just trying to get your link in there, chances are your comment will be deleted. The second way is by adding content to the world wide web. People who use the internet are hungry for valuable information. You're an expert in something, and you need to write about it. What you want to do is write articles that are about 350 to 750 words in length and offer valuable content. If you're an auto mechanic, write about how to properly check your tires for tread wear. If you worked as a handyman, offer some tips on how to repair small holes in drywall. You get the point. Then, at the bottom of the article, you're going to put in your author resource information. It would read like this: "John Doe is a 15-year experienced auto mechanic specializing in tune-ups, brakes, and front-end alignments. You can learn more about John’s work at [your website]."
The resource gives you a chance to tell readers of your article that you're experienced, so the advice you're giving is valid, and also gives them a way to get in touch with you. Now that you have your articles written, what do you do with them? You want to submit them to article directories so they can be used by others around the world. You can post them to sites like EzineArticles or ArticleDashboard. These are free sites where your articles are posted, and then others looking for content for their site will go there and use your article as it is written, link and all, and post it on their site. The more articles you write and post, the more backlinks you will get.
Finally, I need to make mention of one fact that a lot of website owners overlook when it comes to the Google pr. Time is both your friend and enemy. When you create your website, it usually takes anywhere from 2 to 4 months before Google will even take a look at it. That's because most websites get removed within the first couple of months. So don't get discouraged if you write a hundred articles in the first two months and your PR is still zero. It will jump up once Google...