In order to have one's website become a popular site, a webmaster has to engage in what is called site promotion. Getting the word out about your website, after you've built it, is the next most important thing a site creator has to do.

In order to get the word out, there are a number of ways to achieve this. Some are free, some cost a little bit of capital, and others cost a good deal of money.

One of the easiest, and best, no to low cost ways to increase traffic, and website search engine rankings, is through the building of back links to your site. By placing targeted, keyword rich, back links to your site, on as many related websites as possible, a webmaster can virtually assure high search engine results (rankings), and can see a corresponding increase in their website traffic as well.

The reasons for this are more than a few, but the main (and most important) one is this. When the search engines crawl the internet, looking for content, the more links a site has to it, the better. The search engines look at these links as something akin to votes. The more votes a site has, the more likely the site is something that the searcher, based on the keywords input into the search engine query form, is looking for, and the search engines have "learned" this.

An example would be a person looking for sites related to purple widgets. More likely, sites talking about red or blue widgets would not be what the searcher is looking for, and these sites wouldn't have much content related to purple widgets. However, a competing site about purple widgets, besides having content about widgets that are purple, might have a forum, or a blog, where people leave comments, and these comments can sometimes have links in them. If the folks leaving linked comments, link to another "related" site, the search engines see this, and count this as a back link. Future visitors see these links too, and may visit them, and if the content at the linked site is good, may choose to bookmark (for their friends) your site.