When a search engine tries to determine how popular your website is, what do you think they use as a rating factor? Links from other websites. Of course that is not the only factor they consider, but is definitely one that tells them an awful lot about your website.

Think about it, if somebody on a message board says “hey, check out this thread at http://www.example.com/thread-title, it helped solve my problem”, isn’t that really a vote for that website?

Well it is considered one, and is perhaps the best way to tell how great any website is. Becuase let’s face it, nobody is going to put a link on their website to another website that isn’t helpful, or at least can provide some sort of service to people.

So with this is mind you may be wondering how do you make this happen for your website? Well there are many ways of accomplishing it, but to sum it up in a few words I would say “BUILD A WEBSITE THAT IS USEFUL!”

If your website isn’t going to help anybody, then why would the search engines want you in there listings? Afterall, there main objective is to please the visitor.

The next thing that is probably running through your mind is how to make your website useful. You can do things like add a forum, write and maintain a blog, or even just publish articles on a daily basis, which you can also submit to various article directories.

Those methods are really the best ways to kick start a website and get people visiting it, so they then can start talking about it on other websites, to other friends and more.

Always remember though, if you make a useful website, then why wouldn’t visitors want to come back?