Bruce Freeman writes the Small Business Professor column for Scripps Howard News Service. This week, with help from Bill Treloar of the search optimization firm Rank Magic, he looks at what to do to show up better on search engines.

Search engine optimization has to address on-page keyword placement and off-page link popularity.

The combination of those two is what will help you rank well on the search engines.

On-page keyword optimization is an essential part of getting found in the search engines, but not always sufficient.

You also need link popularity: the number and quality of other websites that link to you.

Bill Treloar says that other websites linking to you are like votes saying you’re a good company and have a good website.

The more websites that link to you, and the better the reputation of those sites, the higher you should rank in search engines, all else being equal.

Treloar has some excellent advice:

Your link popularity is important in all search engines. With Google it could account for about 40 percent.

Do not buy links, because they won’t help.

Google is concerned over paid links, always working to identify them and discount them when gauging your link popularity.

Don’t get a whole bunch of links all at once and then stop.

A suspicious spike in inbound links may be a sign you’ve gotten those links in an unacceptable way.

Instead, spend a little time each week so you get a steady inflow of new links spread over time.

Seek good links from websites related to yours, like manufacturers of products you sell.

Claim your listing in local search (Google Places, Yahoo Local, and Bing Local) and then ask satisfied customers to write reviews of you in those places.

You may not need hundreds of links; just enough to compete for the rankings you need. It does take work, but spread it out over time and you’ll find it well worth the trouble.

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