It’s the 21st century, and you’re already aware of the rapid changes and development that your industry is going through, almost on a daily basis. It’s becoming more and more competitive, and you need to grab every advantage that you can possible get over your competitors. The Internet seems like a good way to reach out to more customers and close bigger sales, but how would your small company stack up against the hundreds, or even thousands of companies selling products and services similar to yours?

If you want to grab yourself a piece of real estate on the Web, you basically start by creating your company’s website. Your website serves as your company headquarters, in a virtual sense, and just like in the real world, it is where your potential customers go to visit and learn more about your company and what it has to offer. It’s also commonplace for businesses to closely monitor their competitors’ websites to see what they’re up to and to learn anything they could. In short, it’s all about information. The Internet isn’t called the “Information Superhighway” for nothing, you know.

But having a company website is one thing; promoting your business and marketing your products and/or services is a whole different matter. People need to know that your company is on the Internet; otherwise your website would be pretty useless. Even so, you need to remember that almost everyone, from billion-dollar Fortune 500 conglomerates down to a tiny florist in Idaho, is bent on making its presence felt on the Web. So how can a small company like yours compete? Well, one of the most widely-used and most effective methods that webmasters and Net-savvy businessmen use is link building. Used effectively, it can be one of the single best techniques you can have for getting people to your website, and thus promoting your company’s products and/or services.

First of all, it’s important to know that 85% of the people looking for a particular type of business look for it using a search engine like Yahoo!, MSN and Google. It’s like the equivalent of a phone directory. And those people usually don’t bother looking for companies beyond the first three to four pages of the search results. That’s why it is most critical for a company to be listed in the first few pages following a keyword search. Because major search engines now consider link quality and link popularity as part of their ranking algorithms, link building has become more critical than ever. Simply put, if you don’t have links, you won’t rank well for competitive keywords.

Links are one of the most useful, and therefore one of the most important ways, for visitors and potential customers to find your site. With quality and efficient link building, the search engines can find your company faster and rank you higher on their search results, so people can find you easier. It’s all about getting traffic to your website. And by traffic, I mean people. If a website is new and needs immediate traffic, they can get advertising with one of the three biggest search engines, Google, Yahoo! or MSN. Each search engine offers a unique program in which websites appear in search results for specific keywords. This is the fastest way to get immediate traffic.