The Search Engine Optimization Advantage

With billions of web pages in existence but only 10 spots on each of Google's search results page for a given keyword search term, it can be tough to get your website found on the Internet.

Of course, if you have created a website for the benefit of yourself and a few friends or colleagues, you really don't care whether your site is ranking well on top search engine sites like Google, Yahoo!, Bing, or MSN. That's because, if people already know your web address, they can easily get to your site. No problem.

However, if you are like most website owners, you do care about how your website ranks on top search sites. You care very much, in fact.

That's because, as mentioned above, the competition is fierce. For any given keyword search term, there are usually at least 10,000 other web pages that feature that term. More commonly, there are 1,000,000 or more competing web pages for the same term. And, studies show that most information searchers do not look past the first page or two of search results, which means the top 10-20 positions. In essence, the difference between a #40 ranking and a #5 ranking could translate to a 100-fold difference in site visits for that keyword term.

The question, then, is just how do you go about getting your site to rank well on search results pages? If you want to rank well for search terms that are desirable to other website owners, you need to learn search engine optimization (SEO) techniques.

SEO is the art and science of getting your site to rank better than other sites for a given set of keyword search terms. In actuality, search engine optimization is more science than art: there are a number of nearly-universal, identifiable actions you can take to help your site improve its rankings. However, each top search engine site uses a slightly different set of data about each website it indexes to determine how that site will rank.

Here's how a search site works: the search engine sends out indexing bots to scan and collect certain data about all of the sites it can find on the Internet. A given search bot may collect 20, 50 or 100 pieces of data about each web page it scans. It then sends all of this data back to its servers instantaneously, which then apply certain algorithms to combine the data on a web page-by-web page basis. In this way, it determines which sites should rank better for which keyword search terms.

The "art" of all of this is the following: no major search engine actually makes public their algorithm that combines all of these factors together and determines ranking order. Rather, they purposefully avoid releasing this information because they do not want SEO practitioners to try to "game the system, artificially tweaking their websites to meet optimal search conditions. After all, what these search sites really want is to serve up the best, most relevant content to a searcher at any given moment. That's why they don't want anyone to know their algorithms.

That's why a good search engine optimization practitioner avoids the latest fads, instead focusing on the tried-and-true techniques to get the sites they are promoting. Their goal is to get first-page rankings on top search engine sites. That's the the search engine optimization advantage: better search engine site rankings and more site visits, without having to pay pay-per-click or banner ad fees.

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