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Information that is posted on the internet in the form of web pages includes business information, family photo albums, book contents, school courses, even stores where you can place orders with your credit card and have your products shipped to your home without ever speaking to a human.
Of course, the value of having business information posted on the internet is its ability to be displayed to potential customers 24 hours a day. The internet is a very economical way for businesses to advertise. For a nominal monthly fee they can post a great deal of information on a web site that could potentially be viewed by millions of potential customers each month.
With all of the information on the internet, it can be hard for any one web site to stand out or even be found by an internet user. This is where search engines and websites that are search engine friendly come in.
NOTE: The estimated number of web pages on the internet is currently in the billions.
Search engines such as Google, MSN, and Yahoo continually “crawl” (search) the internet through programs called “spiders” or “bots”. These programs look at all websites they come across, read the information in them, determine their category, and index them in a giant catalog. When a person uses a search engine to find web sites in a certain category, they type in “key words” or “key phrases” describing the subject they are searching for. The search engine then looks at its index to find the best matches for that key phrase and displays its results for the user to select from. Exactly how each search engine ranks web sites is something that web designers are continually trying to figure out, but there are some things that ARE known about them.
Utilizing these known factors when creating a website is important in ensuring that the website will appear high in the rankings when a user looks for a category that the website fulfills. The higher the website is listed in search engine results, the more likely it is that the website will get people visiting it. Higher rankings in search engines may also lead to increased credibility in the eyes of potential customers, and could lead to a higher number of visitors who will also become customers.
NOTE: The percentage of people visiting a website who become customers is called the website’s “conversion rate”.
Although there are hundreds of search engines on the internet, most people only use an important handful. Google, MSN, Yahoo, AOL, and the Open Directory Project constantly search the internet for new websites, so even without paying a service to submit your website to them a website should be crawled within 2-4 months. Once a website is listed with these major search engines, the smaller engines should pick up the website automatically.
NOTE: You should only pay to submit a website to a search engine if you need it to be listed right away.
Businesses today have a great need for web designers who can create a search engine friendly website for their company, and often pay thousands of dollars to have their website “analyzed” and reworked for search engine optimization. Successful optimization can actually be accomplished in a series of simple steps.
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