Once upon a time on the Internet, promoting websites was a child’s play, and this is no joke. There was a report of a 12 year old that put his personal homepage online, promoting it by submitting the site to search engines, directories and getting his friends to link to the site. The site ended up on page 1 position 1 on all the major search engines, for highly competitive keywords.

The same is still possible now, buy highly unlikely. To achieve page 1 position 1 for a decent keyword is now extremely difficult and very expensive. Back then; the number of documents on the Internet is not half of what is online today, and most large companies who thought Internet was a fad that would fade with time have now embraced it, spending millions of dollars to buy important keywords.

Note that the word used is ‘difficult’ and not ‘impossible’ however to achieve page 1 position 1 for any given keyword requires lots of work in the form of link building (it goes without saying that the site must be well designed and well optimised).

Building quality inbound links is one of the most important requirements to achieving decent position on search engines. In the days when 12 year olds achieve page 1 position 1, building inbound links was mostly free, including submitting your site to Yahoo directory. Today, Yahoo charge £199 per year to list a website in its directory. There are hundreds of web directory and websites charging anything from £1 to several thousands to place a link to your website.

All hope is not lost yet, for website owners trying to achieve a good position in search engine for free, like it used to be in the good old days of the Internet. In the next instalment, this article will show you how to build quality links by exploring the top ten free link-building opportunities.

Now and again in the middle of a project a trivial seeming but crucial piece of the puzzle goes missing, today the missing puzzle in my project was a list of countries and their regions or states. I have a quick look on Wikipeadia but I could not find a concise list, I had to spend a few hours compiling the list from various source, I believe I now have a complete list of countries and regions of the world. Webmasters or anyone else for that matter who need this information can download it from here. If you spot a mistake in the list please let me know.  The file is in CSV format, click here to view it.