Tuesday, August 26, 2008

MyWirelessNews - How's Your Site Ranking On The Search Engines?

By Trisha Frauenhofer


Search engines are the most important part of the experience of using the internet these days. A search engine is, more often than not, the way that people find websites and any other information they are searching for online. Why? Simple enough - it's the easiest, fastest way to find the information you're looking for online! MyWirelessNews requires that you know how all of this works and why you need to know it, here's the skinny on search engines.

Search engines have a lot of what are known as crawlers or spiders which constantly roam the internet checking out the content of websites. Every time a new site is submitted to a search engine, its spiders head on over to investigate. The content of the site is examined and this information goes to a central data bank where the site is then indexed. Any sites your site is linked to will also be checked by the spiders. Updates to your webpage lead to the page being re-indexed when a spider makes another visit to it - something which happens frequently.

Search engines have another very important function; they decide the importance of any given site, as well as the sites to which it is linked. Each search engine has its own criteria for determining this ranking.

When you perform a search using Google or some other search engine, what happens is this - the search engine will give you results which are not actually real time results, but rather the results of its own rankings. Since each engine uses different criteria to rank pages, a search for "birdhouses" on Google will yield a different set of results than will the same search on Yahoo. The results are dependent on the engine's ranking system.

So as an online marketer, what does all this mean to you? Well, it means that understanding how search engines work is key to the health of your business. When someone searches, for instance, MyWirelessNews, they will generally look only at the first page of results. They may look at the second, but almost never the third page. The odds of anyone finding your page if it doesn't show up high in search engine rankings is slim.

Understanding keywords is so important to your business. You need to find relevant keywords which are searched for often but for which there is little competition (this will give you a better rate on these in a pay-per-click campaign). Used properly, you can use these words to get higher search engine rankings.

Knowing how search engines work and how to use keywords properly can make a big difference for your website and your business. Using keywords the right way can get you onto the first page of search results - the top of the heap!

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