To sell your products effectively on the web, you need to use internet marketing effectively. People need to be able to find your site easily using search engines, directories or by clicking on a link on another website. To do this, you need to create links to your website.

The web is actually made of links. That is what the word web meant to the people creating the internet. Links tie the websites together and make it useful. Getting links to your site is still the best way to promote your website. This is the essence of internet marketing.

There are many ways to create links to your website. Here are some of the most effective:

Fundamentally, a link is just the name of another web page. It is a special instruction to your browser to load the web page named by the link. A text link has two parts: the text you see and the URL. URL stands for Uniform Resource Locator, but that definition is not really important. The point is that a valid link must have both parts to really be useful.

Some examples of text links are at the top of this page. The Search link takes you to the Helioza search page. The word "Search" is the text part of this link and "http://www.helioza.com/index.php" is the URL. When written in HTML, the language of the web, the full link is:

<a href='http://www.helioza.com/index.php'>Search</a>.

That last bit is what you want other website owners to add to their sites. You need to customize the link with your own text and URL. Then you send it to the site owners and ask them to add your link. That is really all there is to getting other sites to link to yours.

Before submitting your link anywhere, you need to decide what information to display. It is very helpful to spend some time writing good descriptions of your website. A good title is essential. This is usually what people will see first, and it is often the link to the site. The title should describe your site accurately and concisely. You also want to use several keywords in the title. Ideally, the title of your link will be the title of your website.

The description is just an expanded title. It should provide more information about your site, describing the benefits to a visitor. Use more keywords and give a positive description of the information your visitor will find there. Avoid calling it the best, hottest or biggest anything, unless you can back up those claims with data. Many directories will reject your site if you make such inflated claims. It is best to leave out the superlatives altogether.

Write several descriptions of different lengths. Do a short one, slightly longer than the title, a lengthy one that fully describes your site, and 2-3 in between. You might even want to write several titles as well.

Choose the URL for your link carefully. The home page of your website might not be the best one. If your directory submission is aimed at selling a particular product, the best link would go directly to the page that describes and sells that product.

Now you are ready to submit your links. The first stop: directories.