Ask any SEO, what one of the most important factors of getting your web site highly ranked in the search engine indexes is, and they will undoubtedly say building links.  Links is a major way that Google and other search engines determine the importance and rank of your site.  If you are looking to build a popular or profitable site, you need to have both quality and a quantity of links for Google to notice you.  Here are some tips.

Links are just hypertext of a web sites address that is posted on other sites.  The way Google determines how important your site is and how it will rank in the search engine rankings is to see how many other people link to your web site and the importance of these web sites that link to you.  For instance, If 50 web sites all have your link on their web site, Google will take notice.  And if all 50 of these web sites are important and have many links of their own, your web site will be viewed as important and ranked high.

Unfortunately Google’s ranking formula is secret, so you can never tell with 100% certainty how many links are needed and which web sites are important to Google to place you at the top of the search index.  However Google does have a toolbar tool which displays a page rank.  Page rank is a measure of how Google rates the importance of web sites. You can use this tool to seek out web sites with high importance and ask them to post a link of your web site on their site.  Most web sites will be happy to exchange links as well as sell you a link on their site for a fee.  Fees vary but can cost from $10 per month to over $100 for a high page rank site.  If you are looking for a great way to build a popular and profitable web site, look at the above suggestions.

Well I still haven’t been able to contact the seller.  They don’t want to reply to my PMs or emails.  Which leads me to believe that they DIDN’T buy the script with a license.  This means that the cost for the site has increased 25% because I need to go out and purchase a license.  This in turn cuts into the cash that I had put aside for development.

That said it is a lesson learned.  I will be much more careful in the future when making major purchases like that.

There are a number of things that you have to know before you buy a site.  First you want to make sure that the traffic is for real, and if they are claiming any revenue you have to get proof.  These are two fo the biggest things.

 However on a recent site that I bought I screwed up, I didn’t ask for proof of license to use the software.  I didn’t even think about it until after the sale when I was double checking to make sure that the site was up-to-date.  Now I can’t get ahold of the seller, and I am getting little help from the writer of the script.  What I am going to have to do is buy teh script again and go from there.  Luckily for me the script is not going to hurt my bank account too much, however it is going to eat into the advertising budget that I put together to promote the site.

So next time you are interested in buying a site, make sure that you ask what software it uses, and if it is one that you have to buy, as in NOT Open Source, make sure that they provide you proof, otherwise walk away.