Getting to the top of search engines requires an organised effort of optimising your website pages to be considered relevant to the search engine queries that your customers are using. But even more important is the effort in getting relevant, quality sites to link to you. Link building is significant because search engines treat quality links as 'votes' for your site.

What makes a good link?

• Content Relevancy - the topic of the content of the page linking to you should be related to the content of your site.
• Higher Page Rank - if Google considers the site more important than yours and they link to you, then that's a vote of confidence for your site. Use the Google toolbar to get an indication of the Page Rank of a page.
• Geographic closeness - other links from Australia will be considered more important than ones from India
• Top of page links - links from content that is in the body or header of a site is more likely to be considered important than content from the footer

How should I go about a link building programme? Here are three ideas to get you started.

• Create content for your site - search engines love relevant content and are more likely to consider your site important if there is useful and relevant content that gets traffic coming to your site.
• Contact other sites that have related content to yours but are not in competition to you - seek a reciprocal linking agreement
• List with directories - Australian directories relevant to your industry are best for .com.au sites, but all quality directories could help. Also apply for a link from the Open Directory Project.