My Buy Essay

Posts Tagged ‘SEO’

Google likes to offer all kinds of neat little tips and clues regarding how it views sites. Google PageRank is one such tool, but with questionable value.

The Red Herring that is Google PageRank

Google is a highly secretive beast. If you are trying to optimize your site to obtain high rankings, Google will provide you with little or no information. It even fails to show all of the links it is counting to your site, a negative step that no other engine takes. What Google does provide, however, is the Google PageRank for sites.

In my opinion, Google PageRank is a bit of red herring. I don’t believe it tells you much about how Google views your site. Instead, it is a bit of bait designed to get you to download the Google Toolbar. Yes, you can only see your PageRank if you download a Google program on to your computer. And you thought Microsoft was bad!

Assuming you have downloaded the toolbar, the PageRank is the little bar in the middle that should be partially covered in green. The green represents your PageRank and is out of ten. You can run your cursor across it and the actual PageRank number will appear. Most sites have a PageRank of 3 to start off with. Google gives itself a rank of 10, while Yahoo and MSN each get a 9. If your bar is grey, it means you have been banned by Google for doing something they don’t like in your optimization efforts. If the bar is blank, it either means your site has not been indexed yet, is relatively new or Google is updating its rankings.

So, what does the Google PageRank really mean? Not much. Originally, it was thought to be a measure of value compared to other sites. Google still touts the tool as this, but this claim appears a bit dubious. A site with a PageRank of 5 will not necessarily outrank a site with a PageRank of 3. You can perform a search on Google for practically any keyword and see as much by looking at the top 5 returned listings.

Google PageRank is an interesting tool in a very general sense. It can be used to determine that Google has found your site and how it generally values it compared to others. Just keep in mind that it does not actually mean much of anything when it comes to rankings.

Other than creating your own products in order to join the herds of increasing business online crowd, there are also other easier ways to have an immediate Internet business established.

So what do you need in order to join the Resell Rights business? It is very easy(really mean it..), which is to have a domain name &ndash able to get one easily from Yahoo for $2.99 or namecheap for $8.88, it depends on which you prefer, a hosting, most preferably a paid one &ndash important, and a fully-functional website.

There are tons of hosting out there, and to name a few midPhase(free domain name), lunarpages(free domain name as well), bluehost, or GoDaddy are the better ones.

These are almost the basic requirements of a successful affiliate, but don’t be mistaken – Affiliates and resellers are different.

Affiliates don’t need to have any other startup costs other than the basic requirements above, but resellers &ndash yes. Resellers will need to purchase the rights to a product owned by the other people, but they can resell the products and keep 100% of the profits instead. For affiliates, they only receive a percentage of commissions from their sales. Usually, purchasing the rights to resell a certain product can cost 3, 5 or even 10 times more than its normal price.

The few stages of Resell Rights:

• Basic Resell Rights

You can sell the product, but not your customers.

• Master Resell Rights

When you have a master resell rights product for sale, you can resell it to your customers, and so can they with the same product. This means that when you purchase a Master Resell Right, your customers get to sell the same item as well.

• Private Label Rights

These are really popular. Why is it so? &ndash If you purchase a private label right of a product, you get to change the contents of the product any ways you want, produce it under your name, anything! Basically, you can treat it as though it’s your production.

Prices for a private label right is much higher than any other rights. Of course, everyone knows it(it’s common sense!).

• Give Away Rights

As clear as it sounds, you may give away the product to anyone you want! Instead, you can’t sell or edit the product in any ways.

Usually give away rights works well with viral marketing &ndash people give their work out for publicity.

• Rebranding Rights

This product works almost the same as a product with give away rights, but you are able to edit part of the contents to benefit yourself on publicity as well. Most probably, you can only edit the sponsored names, website URL and affiliate links.

How can you profit from a resell rights business at its peak?

You definitely need your opt-in lists. In fact, the most important thing for an Internet Marketer is his or her lists of subscribers. Some Internet Marketers who own 100,000 to 200,000 subscribers(also called leads) doesn’t even need to actually work anymore. What they do everyday is just providing their subscribers or leads with some useful information, real life news, stories, and build a closer relationship with them.

When they found a good product or item, easily they can send an email out and endorse it, earning commissions through the affiliate links. Well as for a reseller, you do the same, but a little bit different. When there are products that you think is interesting and is worth to be “told” to your subscribers, you purchase the resell rights to it and usually, sell them to your subscribers at a better offer.

Most Internet Marketers will usually purchase much more resell rights to the other products then combine them together, selling all of them at a cheaper price in a bundle. Sometimes the price can even be more expensive for up to ten times if you purchase them separately, that is why tons of people would rather purchase the products from resellers in a bulk.

Nevertheless, it is not always a must to sell all of them together. Many resell rights have the same looks and same sales page and you can change that. By writing your own or hiring a copywriter to craft a much more compelling sales copy for the resell product, you can increase the response a lot more.

As for digital products like e-books or software, you can design a whole new e-book cover or software box instead of using the given one that comes with the resell rights. As the saying goes “in the valley of the blind the one with an eye is the king.” 727 words

Now being a reseller is really sometimes easier than anything. When new resell rights which seems attractive are being sold, people will just need to purchase the rights to them, compile them, and next ready to be sold in a single sales copy. Search for joint venture partners, offer them a higher percentage in commissions, request them to endorse your offer and that’s it.

Being any Internet Marketer, it is always better to take hold of every opportunity you can earn money with. When you successfully sell a product to a customer, try and sell him or her another product right on your Thank You page. Basically the idea is “since you’re my customer and you purchased a product from me, here’s a great offer specially for you at an incredible special price.” It’s a very good way of having a back-end sale.

That’s not all, to urge customers into pulling out their credit cards for the Thank You page item, most Internet Marketers will also make it a one-time offer &ndash this will be shown only one time, you won’t see it again. If the customers are interested they’ll get it, if not, there’s no harm at all.

There are many ideas of earning money as a reseller and you can always apply it for your own. The Internet business market is so huge that you can choose from these varieties of business styles that suits yourself. From starting your own Internet business selling your own product, earning commissions from affiliate programs and being a reseller &ndash make the best decision for yourself and get started!

So you have a website, and you want to increase your traffic to sell your product. There are thousands of the websites just like yours, so how will you be seen? There are basically 3 options. You can pay some company thousands of dollars to market your site for you; you can hire someone full time to do the marketing for you; or you can do the marketing yourself. This guide will give you the basic knowledge you need to market your website successfully at your own pace.

First, you need to have realistic expectations. Web sites do not get in the top 10 in search engines over night. There is a lot of hard work that needs to be put into a site for it to rank high. I would grab a pen and paper and write down your main competitors. Then I would use the Google Toolbar to check their pagerank and incoming links to see how they rank. The higher the pagerank and more links pointing to your site, the higher your site will be in the search engines. Once you see how many links are pointing to their site and how good their pagerank is, you have an idea how much work is needed to get your site listed.

Link trading is the process in which you will get these links pointing to your site. You need to contact other similar, good ranked pages and tell them how trading links will benefit both sites, and then link to them, and in exchange they will link to you. The more pages linking to you the better, but remember quality, relevant high pagerank sites is what your looking for, you want your link to be on a pagerank 2 site as least, preferably 3+. Managing your link exchange program takes time, some software on the market can do this for you, some of the software is good, some bad. I would recommend adding the links to your site manually to start, until you get a better understanding of the SEO world.

Articles are another good method to establish links to your site. Unlike a regular link exchange which is just a sentence with a link, publishing an article you wrote will give other websites quality content about your business / products and also link back to your site. Most article sites do not require a link back to them, so when your link is published search engines count that link better then a standard link exchange because you are not linking back.

One-way links is just that, a link to your site, but in return you do not link back. Articles are great one-way links, but so are directories! There are numerous directories on the internet ranging from shopping to home improvement. You can go to these sites, and either for free, or a small fee you can submit your site to them. Having your site listed in the major directories benefits your site in 2 ways. First, you get a link back to your site, increasing your link popularity, and second, people searching the directories for your product may see your site and buy from you.

As you can see, getting your site listed in the major search engines will take some time to do, you need to manage a link exchange program, submit your article to publishers and directories, and maintain your current website, but remember if you take your time, and establish your presence steadily over time, then your website will begin climbing in the search engines, and you will begin to enjoy the benefits of increased traffic.

If you are in a sales position where you are soliciting a product or service, there is some advice that might be helpful when speaking to other businesses. There are times during a year that are good times and other times that might not be so good. As I always state in any advice I give, every market is different, so this is more of a generalized theory than anything else.

Rather than get wordy and lengthy in my explanation and reasoning, I’ll give best and worst times:

Best Times for B2B selling:

* The months of January and February. (First of year numbers start over)

* Between the dates of the 10th through 25th of any month except December. (Meat of month less bills)

* Between the 5th and 20th of December. (moves up a bit due to holidays)

* The last week in December. (Some companies like to dump excess funds to escape taxes)

* First of January, April, July & October (Typically first of each quarter for quarterly companies)

Worst Times for B2B selling:

* Any holiday period. (companies may be closed)

* The week leading up to the tax deadlines. (business owners stressed and sometimes facing big bills)

* The last week in December. (This is either hit or miss. While it can be the best, it can also be the worst)

* The end of March, June, September & December. (End of quarter for quarterly companies)

* Weekends. (This one is obvious, but Saturday and Sunday are probably the worst)

Again, these are generalized timeframes for business to business selling. If it’s business to customer, it’s a completely different ballgame because weekends are great for customers, along with holidays. You should always try to sell 365 days a year in some fashion, but put more emphasis towards the prime, or best selling times.

The first step in getting your site noticed is to have a site that is designed in a way that is search engine friendly. That is called SEO (search engine optimized). This is mostly a web designing issue. We will assume that you are starting with an SEO optimized site. But that alone won’t give your site high rankings.

To get the search engines to notice you, you need to understand them. The search engines’ whole purpose is to find quality content– that is what the internet is all about. Information. And the more content (related to your site’s most important keywords) that you have, the more that search engines will like you. They like to see sites that grow with quality content at a steady rate. They also like to see a lot of quality links from other sites on the Internet going to your site.

This is where article marketing comes in. Let’s say you have a website that sells cameras. First you would want to expand your site beyond several pages. You could do that by adding lots of related products. Or you could review products. If you don’t want to do that yourself, look for free articles that review products for you. You could add other related free articles, such as how to use the product, where to display your photos, etc. Maybe start a blog on the topic. Blogs are great for promotion because they are constantly updated with fresh material.

Where do you get all this fresh material? From article directories and article list servers. Because of the rapidly growing need for people to find and submit articles, the number of article directories sites are increasing.

You can take advantage of this fact. You could write an article about you website’s subject (or take the material from what you have already written for your website). For example, how to find a quality camera or how to take great photos. Then you submit this article to article directories. I like to personally add my articles to a new directory every day. By doing this, you now have links all over the Internet leading to your site– links from the article directory, as well as links from everyone who publishes your article for free on their website, ezine or blog.

Article marketing is now considered the method of choice for web marketing. It is the best way to get top placement with the search engines and to drive traffic to your site.

It takes some time and effort to find and/or write and submit articles, but it is free. You can also pay a submission service to send your articles out to more directories than you would have time to do yourself. So, start thinking “content” if you want the search engines to notice you.

This article may be freely copied as long as it is not modified and the resource box accompanies the article, together with working hyperlinks.

SEO Tips & Strategies

Getting started:

Choosing a Domain Name

When choosing a domain name keep in mind to include your main keyword in the name.

If your main keyword was "Replica Watches" then you would want a domain name like .swiss-replica-watches.com.

Using the Right Keywords

Using longer keyword phrases are generally alot easier to rank with and usually convert better.

How many should i use?

When performing SEO, try to optimize each page for a maximum of 5 keywords.

Meta Tags

Title Tag

Many search engines over look most meta-tags, but alot still recognize the title tag. Try to include your most important keywords at the begining of the title, this will increase its prominence. When optimizing the title tag, get straight to the point. Dont include stop words like "to, a, an, as, in, etc… Search Engine Spiders overlook these words and including them really just decreases your keywords weight in the tag.

Description Tag

The description-tag is still in use by some search engines. Try to explain the pages content in one sentence. This tag still shows up in some engines, so try to make the tag read good and catch someones eyes.

Keywords Tag

Many engines overlook this tag, try to place your 3-4 main keywords here.

On-Page Search Engine Optimization Strategies

H1, H2, H3 Tags

Try to break your pages up into paragraphs, using one keyword rich H1 tag on the page preferably at the most imortant area of the page. Minor paragraphs should be broken up by desriptive keyword rich H2 tags. Try to include some H3 tags when possible.

Internal Links

Try to interlink your pages using keyword rich anchor text. To make it easy and with out much sacrafice to the look of your page you can use bread crumb navigation, like Home>Try to interlink your pages using keyword rich anchor text. To make it easy and with out much sacrafice to the look of your page you can use bread crumb navigation, like Home>seo.com”>affordable seo please visit .astonishseo.com

There are two major search engine marketing strategies in use today: SEO (search engine optimization) and PPC (pay-per-click). Both strategies are entirely different and it is tough to decide which one or which combination is right for you.

To decide which strategy is best for you, consider the basics. It is easier to judge the pros and cons when taking the big picture into account. People will continue to battle for the top search engine positions. Search engine marketing is undoubtedly one of the best sources of targeted traffic.

As people continuously try to find new and unique ways to get additional traffic to their web sites, the SEO industry continues to grow. PPC refers to advertising on a search engine that charges on a per click basis whenever a visitor clicks on one of your ads. The order of ads is usually based on bidding prices, meaning that the advertiser who bids the highest price per click will be listed first. These sponsored listings are known as PPC listings.

SEO tries to change your search engine ranking by looking at a number of factors including link popularity, Page Rank and so on. If your web site is search engine optimized then obviously you are more likely to have a good ranking in the search engines. A well-optimized and marketed site will be listed in the top results whenever a person searches for related keywords. One of the best benefits of SEO marketing is you don’t have to pay for any clicks! So, how can we decide which method is better? Both methods actually serve different purposes. However, one is likely to be a better fit for your business than the other one.

PPC

PPC traffic, rankings and results tend to be more stable and predictable than SEO, and, combined with its low cost, this makes PPC one of the more popular ways of advertising. Most companies try PPC before they try SEO, because it’s seen as more stable. In many cases PPC lets you rank well on the search engines, without having to do the tedious work involved in SEO &ndash no finding link partners, posting links, creating content and so on. As long as you have the budget for it, the ranking is yours. Another advantage is that the listing will get posted when you want it and not when the search engine gets around to it. With PPC’s popularity growing day by day, the market is also getting competitive. You will find that CPC’s (costs per clicks) are steadily rising, and for a common man it is getting tough to invest much. As with most auctions, the more people bidding on PPC, the higher the prices get.

SEO

The main benefit of SEO is that it does not cost per click. The disadvantages are that the traffic to your website is more unpredictable and requires a lot of work. With SEO, you have to adapt and constantly change strategies as search engines change their algorithms. SEO is also slower than PPC, as many search engines don’t list new sites. So what should you choose? Well, it depends on how much money you are willing to spend, what your time line is, and what your return on investment is. If you have cash then PPC should be your first choice, as it produces fast results. PPC can also be used for testing the effectiveness of web sites. If you have time and money to invest in long-term results, SEO is an excellent option as well.

All and all, the best marketing strategy is typically to go with PPC in the short term to get immediate traffic and analyze conversions. SEO should then be taken with a long term view in mind, so you can reap the benefits of free traffic later on.

Think of the right keywords as the Open Sesame! of the Internet. Find the exactly right words or phrases, and presto! hoards of traffic will be pulling up to your front door. But if your keywords are too general or too over-used, the possibility of visitors actually making it all the way to your site – or of seeing any real profits from the visitors that do arrive – decreases dramatically.

Your keywords serve as the foundation of your marketing strategy. If they are not chosen with great precision, no matter how aggressive your marketing campaign may be, the right people may never get the chance to find out about it. So your first step in plotting your strategy is to gather and evaluate keywords and phrases.

You probably think you already know EXACTLY the right words for your search phrases. Unfortunately, if you haven’t followed certain specific steps, you are probably WRONG. It’s hard to be objective when you are right in the center of your business network, which is the reason that you may not be able to choose the most efficient keywords from the inside. You need to be able to think like your customers. And since you are a business owner and not the consumer, your best bet is to go directly to the source.

Instead of plunging in and scribbling down a list of potential search words and phrases yourself, ask for words from as many potential customers as you can. You will most likely find out that your understanding of your business and your customers’ understanding is significantly different.

The consumer is an invaluable resource. You will find the words you accumulate from them are words and phrases you probably never would have considered from deep inside the trenches of your business.

Only after you have gathered as many words and phrases from outside resources should you add your own keyword to the list. Once you have this list in hand, you are ready for the next step: evaluation.

The aim of evaluation is to narrow down your list to a small number of words and phrases that will direct the highest number of quality visitors to your website. By “quality visitors” I mean those consumers who are most likely to make a purchase rather than just cruise around your site and take off for greener pastures. In evaluating the effectiveness of keywords, bear in mind three elements: popularity, specificity, and motivation.

Popularity is the easiest to evaluate because it is an objective quality. The more popular your keyword is, the more likely the chances are that it will be typed into a search engine which will then bring up your URL.

You can now purchase software that will rate the popularity of keywords and phrases by giving words a number rating based on real search engine activity. Software such as WordTracker will even suggest variations of your words and phrases. The higher the number this software assigns to a given keyword, the more traffic you can logically expect to be directed to your site. The only fallacy with this concept is the more popular the keyword is, the greater the search engine position you will need to obtain. If you are down at the bottom of the search results, the consumer will probably never scroll down to find you.

Popularity isn’t enough to declare a keyword a good choice. You must move on to the next criteria, which is specificity. The more specific your keyword is, the greater the likelihood that the consumer who is ready to purchase your goods or services will find you.

Let’s look at a hypothetical example. Imagine that you have obtained popularity rankings for the keyword “automobile companies.” However, you company specializes in bodywork only. The keyword “automobile body shops” would rank lower on the popularity scale than “automobile companies,” but it would nevertheless serve you much better. Instead of getting a slew of people interested in everything from buying a car to changing their oil filters, you will get only those consumers with trashed front ends or crumpled fenders being directed to your site. In other words,consumers ready to buy your services are the ones who will immediately find you. Not only that, but the greater the specificity of your keyword is, the less competition you will face.

The third factor is consumer motivation. Once again, this requires putting yourself inside the mind of the customer rather than the seller to figure out what motivation prompts a person looking for a service or product to type in a particular word or phrase. Let’s look at another example, such as a consumer who is searching for a job as an IT manager in a new city. If you have to choose between “Seattle job listings” and “Seattle IT recruiters” which do you think will benefit the consumer more? If you were looking for this type of specific job, which keyword would you type in? The second one, of course! Using the second keyword targets people who have decided on their career, have the necessary experience, and are ready to enlist you as their recruiter, rather than someone just out of school who is casually trying to figure out what to do with his or her life in between beer parties. You want to find people

who are ready to act or make a purchase, and this requires subtle tinkering of your keywords until your find the most specific and directly targeted phrases to bring the most motivated traffic to you site.

Once you have chosen your keywords, your work is not done. You must continually evaluate performance across a variety of search engines, bearing in mind that times and trends change, as does popular lingo. You cannot rely on your log traffic analysis alone because it will not tell you how many of your visitors actually made a purchase.

Luckily, some new tools have been invented to help you judge the effectiveness of your keywords in individual search engines. There is now software available that analyzes consumer behavior in relation to consumer traffic. This allows you to discern which keywords are bringing you the most valuable customers.

This is an essential concept: numbers alone do not make a good keyword; profits per visitor do. You need to find keywords that direct consumers to your site who actually buy your product, fill out your forms, or download your product. This is the most important factor in evaluating the efficacy of a keyword or phrase, and should be the sword you wield when discarding and replacing ineffective or inefficient keywords with keywords that bring in better profits.

Ongoing analysis of tested keywords is the formula for search engine success. This may sound like a lot of work – and it is! But the amount of informed effort you put into your keyword campaign is what will ultimately generate your business’ rewards.

For realtors the Internet can no longer be ignored. Significant numbers of home buyers on going online to do their preliminary research for real estate and agents. Recent surveys suggest over 50%.

I personally know a number of local realtors, and it is interesting to see how some are easily adapting to this media, while others are sitting on the sidelines wondering why they are seeing a decrease in prospective buyers.

The Internet is not going away, and if someone plans to make real estate a viable career they must incorporate online marketing in order to not only succeed, but to survive. So how can realtors cost-effective connect with potential customers? In addition to MLS listings, they can reach a very targeted audience through search engine marketing. There are basically two forms of search marketing, organic and pay per click advertising.

Organic Search Marketing

Organic search marketing is about ranking at the top of the search results. It is accomplished through search engine optimization (SEO). The goal is to get your web pages at the top of the search results for targeted terms and phrases. For example, if you are a realtor in Boise it would be profitable to have your site rank at the top for terms phrases like “Boise Realtors” or “Boise Real Estate.”

How do you accomplish this mysterious feat? First, you have to optimize your web pages around certain phrases like “Boise Real Estate.” That term becomes the theme of the page, and there are certain techniques that let the search engines know it is the theme.

In addition to optimizing the page you have to convince the search engines that your site is important enough to deserve a prominent ranking. This is achieved by getting other web sites to link to your site. When a web site has a hyperlink to your site, the search engines consider this a vote of confidence. It is more complicated than just getting a bunch of links, since some links are considered more important than others. But in general, the combination of optimized pages and external links results in top rankings. SEO takes time and effort. If you are a new site, you may not see results for 6-9 months with Google.

Pay Per Click Advertising

In contrast to SEO, pay per click advertising (PPC) can provide instant gratification. With Google you can set-up a marketing campaign in less than an hour. With Yahoo it takes 24-48 hours to be approved.

PPC is where you pay to have your web site listed at the top of the search results for particular terms that are relevant to your business. There are basically two search engines where you want to pay to market, Yahoo and Google. PPC is based on an auction model, where you bid for the position of your ad. The ads appear above and to the right of the organic search listings. They are listed as “Sponsored Links.”

PPC advertising is based on an auction model. You bid for positioning on terms that are relevant to your business, just like how you would optimize your web pages for similar terms. Once again if you are a realtor in Boise, you would bid on terms that your prospects would use to find services in your area. The position of your ad depends on how much you bid in relation to your competitors.

The appeal of PPC advertising is you set the bids, you set a maximum daily expenditure and you can turn your campaign on or off at any moment. Even more important is the ability to track exactly how your advertising dollars are being spent. With with this information you can tweak your bids and your ads for maximum performance.

It important to note that buyers who search online tend to be better informed, spend significantly less time with their realtor, and preview fewer houses than traditional buyers. That is another reason why search engine marketing is becoming essential.

Time is running out to ignore the Internet. Either you are going to be a player or you will be cut from the squad.

If you’re doing any type of business on the internet than search engines like Google and Yahoo! could play a large role in the success or failure of your business. Even though most internet user have experience using search engines, many don’t know how the engines work.

For website owners it is important to understand how, at least at a high level, search engines work so they can take advantage of the website traffic that only search engines can deliver.

Search Engines are special sites on the Web that are designed to help people find information stored on other sites. There are differences in the ways various Search Engines work, but they all perform three basic tasks:

- They search the Internet or select pieces of the Internet based on important words,

- They keep an index of the words they find, and where they find them, and

- They allow users to look for words or combinations of words found in that index.

Early Search Engines held an index of a few hundred thousand pages and documents, and received maybe one or two thousand inquiries each day. Today, a top Search Engine will index hundreds of millions of pages, and respond to tens of millions of queries per day.

Before a Search Engine can tell you where a file or document is, it must be found. To find information on the hundreds of millions of Web pages that exist, a Search Engine employs special software robots, called spiders, to build lists of the words found on Web sites.

When a spider is building its lists, the process is called web crawling.

In order to build and maintain a useful list of words, a Search Engine’s spiders have to look at a lot of pages. How does any spider start its travels over the Web? The usual starting points are lists of heavily used servers and very popular pages. The spider will begin with a popular site, indexing the words on its pages and following every link found within the site. In this way, the spidering system quickly begins to travel, spreading out across the most widely used portions of the Web.

To increase the likelyhood that the spiders find your website make sure you are listed on high ranked websites like Merchant Circle. You can create a free business page and blog that will not only increase your chances of being found but also be another place for potential visitors to find about about your website.

Once the spiders have completed the task of finding information on Web pages, the Search Engine must store the information in a way that makes it useful. There are two key components involved in making the gathered data accessible to users:

- The information stored with the data, and

- The method by which the information is indexed.

In the simplest case, a Search Engine could just store the word and the URL where it was found. In reality, this would make for an engine of limited use, since there would be no way of telling whether the word was used in an important or a trivial way on the page, whether the word was used once or many times or whether the page contained links to other pages containing the word. In other words, there would be no way of building the ranking list that tries to present the most useful pages at the top of the list of search results.

To make for more useful results, most Search Engines store more than just the word and URL. A Search Engine might store the number of times that the word appears on a page. The engine might assign a weight to each entry, with increasing values assigned to words as they appear near the top of the document, in sub-headings, in links, in the META tags or in the title of the page. Each commercial Search Engine has a different formula for assigning weight to the words in its index. This is one of the reasons that a search for the same word on different Search Engines will produce different lists, with the pages presented in different orders.

You can get a customized Page Critic Analysis Report from Webs 4 Small Business that tells you how YOUR webpages should be set up to make sure give the search engines what they are looking for when they review your page.

An index has a single purpose: it allows information to be found as quickly as possible. There are quite a few ways for an index to be built, but one of the most effective ways is to build a hash table. In hashing, a formula is applied to attach a numerical value to each word.

The formula is designed to evenly distribute the entries across a predetermined number of divisions. This numerical distribution is different from the distribution of words across the alphabet, and that is the key to a hash table’s effectiveness.

When a person requests a search on a keyword or phrase, the Search Engine software searches the index for relevant information. The software then provides a report back to the searcher with the most relevant web pages listed first.

Not sure what keywords you should use? Picking the right, or wrong ones, can make or break your chances at online success. Consider getting a customized Key Word Report from Webs 4 Small Business that tells you which keywords you should and should not consider for your site. These keywords are specific to YOUR website not a generic list of keywords.

So, why are search engines important to business website owners? Simple. You need traffic and Search Engines have lots of it. And, their purpose is to drive traffic to sites that they think match their visitors’ needs.

The way to get a portion of that traffic, is to optimize your website (you’ve likely heard of Search Engine Optimzaiton or SEO). That way when a someone searches for a keyword that is relevant to your website, the search engines includes a link to your website in the search results. That puts traffic and potential visitors just a click away from you website.