Chapter 3 - Using Search Engines to Get Traffic

It doesn’t matter how great your website is, if no one sees it, you’re not going to make a penny. You can spend days producing the perfect design, weeks tweaking the copy, and months writing the code and uploading the pages, but if no one knows where you are, how are they going to know they should buy from you?

When I first started selling on the web, the first major problem I ran into was bringing customers to my door. I put banner ads on other sites, organized reciprocal links and joined web rings. Those methods all worked to some extent, but what really did it for me, what turned my business from a small earner into a major money-grabber, was figuring out how to use search engines.

Sure, I’d submitted my sites to the major search engines as soon as I’d finished building them, but I didn’t really pay them much attention. After all, I figured search engines are just for people who are looking for information; they’re not really good for commercial sites.  But, I was wrong.

One day, I sat down and checked out which sites were popping up first in the categories that suited my businesses. I found that all the top-ranked sites were my biggest competitors. And when I say biggest, I mean these guys were in a whole other league. They had incomes that were ten or twenty times the size of mine-no wonder they had top billing at Yahoo! and Google! And then it clicked. Search engines don’t list sites by size, they list them by relevance. These sites weren’t listed first because they were big; they were big because they were listed first!

That was when I began to ‘optimize’ my pages and think about meta-tags and keywords. As my sites rose through the listings, my traffic went through the roof. And not just any old traffic! The people that came to my sites from search engines hadn’t just clicked on a banner by accident or followed a link from curiosity, they’d actually been looking for a site like mine. My sales ratio went up like a rocket. I’d created my own big break.

In this chapter, we are going to discuss all proven strategies of Search Engine Optimization (SEO). We would discus how to optimize your site, submit your pages and pick up the targeted traffic you need to make cash. This chapter is probably the most important chapter in the whole book. It’s crucial that you read it carefully.

Let’s start with search engines.

3.1 How Search Engines Work

Internet 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:

• Search enigines search select parts of the Internet based on important words.
• They keep an index of the words they find, and where they find them.
• They allow users to look for words or combinations of words found in that index.

Search engines used to hold an index of a few hundred thousand pages and documents and received maybe one or two thousand inquiries each day.  However, today, the top search engines will index hundreds of millions of pages and respond to tens of millions of queries per day.

Spidering

Before a search engine can tell you where a file or document is on the internet, 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 various websites.  When a spider is building its lists, this process is called web crawling.

In order to build and maintain a useful list of words, a search engine's spiders have to look crawl many pages.   How does any spider start its travels over the web?  The usual starting points are lists of heavily used web 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.