How many email offers have you gotten that promised the secret to beating the search engines and getting a flood of free traffic to your web site? These offers which are common and promise you the "secret" for only $47 or something like that.

As if there is some magic bean of information that will shoot your web site to the top of the search engines overnight and fill your bank account with cash. That is hogwash my friend.

There is no secret. If they had it they would not be selling it for $47.

The secret to search engine ranking is the same as it has ever been and it is no secret. You can research the topic for yourself and find tons of free information all over the web from top SEO and Internet marketing gurus. Don't take my word for it.

They all agree. One of the most important factors of getting good search engine rankings and consequently free traffic is determined by how many one way backlinks you have pointing to your web site. This is how the search engines determine how important your web site is compared to the other hundred million sites on the net.

So why isn't everyone on page #1 of Google besides the obvious reason?

Everyone is trying to take shortcuts with outdated linking strategies like reciprocal linking or article submission. Do you really think submitting articles to run of the mill article directories is going to be enough to put you on page #1 of Google? It won't.

Submitting to quality article directories like EzineArticles.com is important but much more is needed. You need quality links from a variety of web sites, social bookmarking sites, web 2.0 sites and blogs to beat the competition for the top.

It is well known that Google values quality one way links from sites relevant to your niche. It is also undisputed that blogs weigh heavily in the search engines. Google loves blogs. If you can get one way links from relevant blogs your rankings can improve almost overnight.