How Search Engines Work and What You Can Do to Get Your Online Business Listed by Them
If you are doing online business you are probably depending on people to come to your site and buy stuff. Now you could be advertising your site or mailing out to people every day. But you could also be harnessing the power of search engines and that is an automatic way of generating traffic if you learn how to set it upright.
Now there is no way search engines will tell you how to set up your site parameters so that their algorithms find you easily. If they did, everyone would play the algorithm and there would be no way the search results would stay unbiased. So search engines operate in a way that could be the secret of the century.
But there are three things that you can easily appreciate to crack help yourself to the code. The first is that all the searches everyone in the world is making are databased by the search engines. Therefore the nature of the beast is as dynamic as there are people in the world. By mastering search engine operations you are actually making a study into artificial intelligence! While that may sound exciting, the takeaway lesson is that you must learn how to keep your content simple and sharply focused on a few words that searches would commonly use. When your site’s pages use the same words the search engine can believe that your content is relevant and therefore will tend to serve your page higher.
How would you know what words searchers are using? Thanks to Google we have the ‘Google Keyword Tool’. Search this phrase and check it out online. It tells you the number of searches in any geography on any word or phrase you type in. You can choose ‘broad’ matches so that the phrase in any sequence will be checked for. Or use ‘phrase’ match so Google only checks for the words in the same sequence as you desire. Or ‘exact’ match, which means the results will be limited to only searches containing exactly the words you type in.
Play with it and you’ll see lots of other features that give you feedback. Now, the second thing search engines go by after ‘relevance’, is ‘interest’. If your site is served but does not sustain the viewer’s interest, it means Google has made a bad selection and will drop you out of their serving list. How the search engines learn this is by your ‘bounce rate’. If your page is opened and the viewer presses the back-button in less than 10 seconds, you have obviously not satisfied him. Thus your bounce rate is high and that’s not good for Google. So the remedy is… have sticky content.
Third, is the concept of ‘backlinks’. These are like endorsements to your page. Each page on your site can get popular is other sites link to it… like quoting it as a reference. If search engines see lots of backlinks they like the page because it seems to be an online celebrity. You can join link-building groups to get more backlinks and comment on other’s blogs as well as in forums citing your site’s pages.
