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It doesn't matter how great your website, 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. Boy, was I 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. 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.

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:

- They search the Internet -- or select pieces 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.

Early search engines held an index of a few hundred thousand
pages and documents, and received maybe one or two thousand
inquiries each day. Today, a top search engine 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, 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 Web sites.

When a spider is building its lists, the process is called
Web crawling.

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

-Indexing

Once the spiders have completed the task of finding
information on Web pages, the search engine must store the
information in a way that makes it useful. There are two key
components involved in making the gathered data accessible
to users:

- The information stored with the data

- The method by which the information is indexed

In the simplest case, a search engine could just store the
word and the URL where it was found. In reality, this would
make for an engine of limited use, since there would be no
way of telling whether the word was used in an important or
a trivial way on the page, whether the word was used once or
many times or whether the page contained links to other
pages containing the word. In other words, there would be no
way of building the ranking list that tries to present the
most useful pages at the top of the list of search results.

To make for more useful results, most search engines store
more than just the word and URL. An engine might store the
number of times that the word appears on a page. The engine
might assign a weight to each entry, with increasing values
assigned to words as they appear near the top of the
document, in sub-headings, in links, in the meta tags or in
the title of the page. Each commercial search engine has a
different formula for assigning weight to the words in its
index. This is one of the reasons that a search for the same
word on different search engines will produce different
lists, with the pages presented in different orders.

An index has a single purpose: It allows information to be
found as quickly as possible. There are quite a few ways for
an index to be built, but one of the most effective ways is
to build a hash table. In hashing, a formula is applied to
attach a numerical value to each word. The formula is
designed to evenly distribute the entries across a
predetermined number of divisions. This numerical
distribution is different from the distribution of words
across the alphabet, and that is the key to a hash table's
effectiveness.

The search engine software or program is the final part.
When a person requests a search on a keyword or phrase, the
search engine software searches the index for relevant
information. The software then provides a report back to the
searcher with the most relevant web pages listed first.
Is Your website search engine friendly? If you have any
doubts, it may be time to take a look and make your own 'big
break'.

Warmly,
Sam