To a large degree your success in search engine results will depend on your inbound linking strategy.
You have probably seen links in the pages of a web site. Links can take you to another page in the same web site or to a totally different web site. Links are the "blue bits" on a web page and usually look like this:
http://www.thepartyfairy.co.uk/
The link above is an inbound link for The Party Fairy (a very good friend of ours).
Search engines know that it takes human effort to place a link on a website and so they see links as a vote of popularity.
Someone actually has to take the time to put a special piece of code on a site so that when you click a link you are whooshed to another site. In very broad terms the more links you have the more popular you're perceived by search engines.
Search engines all have "spiders" (sometimes called "robots") whose job it is to crawl the web going from site to site to read or "index" every page they come across. That way when you ask a search engine a question it knows where to get the answer from.
The way spiders get from one site to another is via links. If you have no links into your site then search engines will find it very hard to know your site exists. How would they get to your site if you had no links? It would be like building a town with no roads to it. That's one good reason for developing inbound links.
Another good reason to develop inbound links is that they can be used to tell the search engines what your site is all about. The blue, clickable text in the link example above was:
http://www.thepartyfairy.co.uk/
If the clickable text (anchor text) in the link were to read:
birthday fairy party for girls
…then the search engine would have a good idea what the Party Fairy site is all about. Now multiply that by tens and hundreds of links with the clickable text all mentioning "birthday fairy party", "fairy party", "girls party" and so on. The search engine would be in no doubt of which site to bring up in its results if someone were to search for "fairy party".
That is the power of inbound linking explained in the simplest and most general terms.
However there are many pitfalls in link building which could cause your site to perform poorly or not appear in any search engine results at all.
In general you should look to add links quite gradually - usually over the course of 12 months.
Look to develop links from:
sites relevant to yours
sites in the same geographical area as you
specialist directory sites
high page ranking sites
a broad range of IP addresses – not all hosted on the same computer
sites that will let you manipulate your anchor text
get links into your internal pages - not just the home page
A good place to start is to make a list of your local customers, suppliers and business hosts.
