There was a time when you could simply put up a decent web site of just a few pages and it would be indexed and ranked in a week or so. But that was a long time ago in Internet years. The situation is very different today, and your small business Internet marketing efforts need a good, solid link-building strategy if you want to have any chance of ranking well for your keywords.

Link building should not be considered a one-time effort. It should be ongoing throughout your web site's lifetime. In this way you will build up a powerful set of back links, all supplying your web site with a solid foundation. Your small business Internet marketing efforts will be generously repaid as a result.

One of the factors that search engines look for in determining the value of a web site is the inbound relevant links that your site has. These can be any kind of links, but greater value is placed on one-way inbound links using relevant anchor text that originates from authority sites.

What this means is that a site is considered important by the search engines links to yours, but you do not link back. The important site also uses a keyword relevant to your site as the piece of text that is actually clicked on as the link. Acquiring these kinds of links in your link-building campaign is not particularly easy, but well worth pursuing.

Reciprocal links are also useful to get in your small business Internet marketing efforts. They carry less weight than relevant one-way links, but they do count, and they are much easier to acquire. Most owners of web sites that are similar to yours will be willing to exchange links as part of their link-building strategy.

The search engines consider many factors when deciding how to rank your web site's pages. Some of the factors are on the page itself, and some are external. All of them are important, but back links to your web site are arguably the most important factor of all.

In a nutshell, the more relevant links you have pointing back to your web site, the higher your site will be placed in the search engine results for any given keyword. Some of the most popular web sites have millions of back links. While it may be difficult to compete with that level of link building, it is still quite easy to rank well within limits.

It is important that your small business Internet marketing efforts pay off to the point where your web site ranks on the first page of any of the major search engines. Being on the second or third page carries increasingly less weight. The traffic you will receive will be considerably lower too.

It should be obvious therefore, that being in the first or second position on the first page of the search engine results for a given keyword is what you should be trying to attain. Most of the major search engines have organic, or natural search results as well as sponsored links. Some 80% of searchers will click on the natural results, and most of these will choose one of the results near the top.

This is why it is important to rank high, and why your link building efforts are important too, as this is one of the best ways to achieve sustainable top rankings. Small business Internet marketing is not difficult if you have a solid strategy to implement and you stick to it. It takes time, but the end results are worth it.