Hi Peter,

In my experience getting highly ranked on the search engines is a bit of a black art.

I too have heard that linking to other sites can boost your rating, but I think that it is slightly more complex than adding simple links.

The search engines consider not only how many links you have to (and from) your site, but also the quality and the current ranking of the site that you are linking to. So for example, it is likely that www.tescos.com (or some other large website) will have a higher ranking than other smaller unknown sites.

It is my understanding therefore that it is useful to seek out links/affiliations with trusted sites, as these could prove extremely fruitful.

Also, we have recently used Google Adwords to help to boost the local listings for our website - www.carworksni.com.

Google Adwords is the program that controls the listings that you will often see on the right-hand-side of the page when you do a search.

I'll not bore you with the details, but you essentially bid for position within that listing. Our ad is targetted to local traffic only, so it is cheaper than some of the national rates.

Another good tool that can be used in conjunction with Adwords is Google Analystics...it allows you to report on who has visted your site, when, what pages they visited, where they were referred from etc.

As I say, I am learning a bit more as I go, but thought that some of this might be useful for some of you.

Cheers,
Martina