A Listing in the Search Engines
If there's one thing every business owner wants it's this: you want lots of people to find your business. That's why you want a presence (or a better presence) on the Internet. The Internet, after all, is the World's biggest marketplace.
Wouldn't it be wonderful if you had a shop (or an office) in the best location on the most popular street of every English speaking town and city in the World? Well that's exactly the Internet equivalent of having your web site on the first page of the search engines.
According to Forrester Research, more than 85% of people looking for goods and services on the Internet find web sites through search engines such as Google, Yahoo, and MSN. The idea of optimizing your pages for high search engine rankings is to attract targeted customers to your web site who will be more than likely to make a purchase or at least see what you have to offer. The higher your web page comes up in search engine results (or listings), the greater will be the traffic that is directed to your website. That's what search engine optimization is all about.
The main search engines, Google, Yahoo and MSN "" as well as the lesser but well-used engines such as AOL and Ask, – are all keen to provide their users with relevant search results. Whenever someone types a search query into a search box, in the form of a word or a phrase, the search engines want to make sure that only the most relevant results are brought up.
So how do the search engines do this? How do they know what a web page is about, and how do they judge the relevance or importance of one web page as opposed to another.
In the absence of humans to do the work (because that would take too much time) they do this automatically by using what is called an algorithm. This is just a formula that each search engine uses to work out what a web page is about and how important a web page is, as rated against other web pages which are about the same or similar things. Each search engine uses its own secret algorithm; each engine's algorithm seems to get more and more complex as time goes on, to deal with the increasing complexity of the search process itself.
Algorithms judge the relevance and importance of web pages in two ways: firstly by the words on the pages listed in their index, and secondly by links pointing to that page from other pages and other sites. Good search engine optimization (SEO) listens to these algorithms and is what puts your site at the top of the natural search listings.
Of course, you could get on the first page of the search engine results by paying for it "" by going the pay-per-click route in the sponsored listings sections (down the side of the page and at the very top of Google). But this is so obvious.
Why pay for clicks? You've already decided that you'd like to do at least some of the work
yourself and save a lot of money. So why spoil the party and pay good money every time
someone clicks on an ad?
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