It is proven that out of all of the major marketing techniques in use today over the internet, search engines are by far the most popular way people find sites they are interested in. If you are running or promoting a small business over the internet, it is vital that potential customers and visitors can find you via search engines.

If people come to your site from a search engine, they have already expressed an interest in your products and services.

According to goto.com, a leading search engine, users are more likely to visit your site as a result of searching than clicking a banner ad that appears somewhere else on the internet.

If you have a site currently up and running on the web, you have probably been indexed by some of the major search engines already, however indexing is not enough. If your site was indexed without meeting certain criteria, chances are you will never gain top ranking.

Being that search engines are in competition with each other, they will never reveal their secrets to anyone. If, for instance, goto.com released step by step documentation on how they rank their results, a site such as Yahoo! would be able to analyze how they do what they do and beat them at their own game. So then how am I supposed to ensure top ranking? The one aspect search engines do release to the general public is what their spiders are expecting to find.

If we can begin to give the spiders what they are looking for when they visit our site, we have won half of the battle. Proper indexing is key to obtaining high ranking results.

The information covered within these pages will give you a handle on what is involved in optimizing your site for top placement. While we do not guarantee top placement, after reading and practicing some of the techniques discussed here, your rankings will go up if not reach the top.

Lets begin by discussing an important distinction: Search Engines vs Directories. Next Page>