Starting an Online Business All-in-One For Dummies®, 3rd Edition

Chapter 6: Mastering Search Engines, Optimization, and Rankings

In This Chapter

• Understanding how search engines operate
• Convincing other businesses to link back to your Web site
• Telling search engines about your Web site
• Updating your Web pages with the right keywords
• Arranging your Web pages strategically
• Watching your search engine rankings
• Moving up in the search engine rankings
• Offering your own knowledge and experience to help your business

If you earn prominent placement for your business where traffic is flowing, customers are more likely to stop by, look around, and buy something before they leave. Now, with the ever-growing and ever-changing nature of the Internet, many people are using search engines as their on-ramps, or their premier starting points for Web browsing. After all, if potential customers think that they are going to end up at a search engine to find something, why wouldn't they start there? The result is that the search results are becoming the gateway to the Web, which is exactly where you want to be, offering your products to the right search results.

In Book VI, Chapter 3, we talk about marketing yourself in the sponsored ads to the right side of the standard search results page. In this chapter, we put the more valuable real estate — the search results themselves — front and center. We show you how to improve the quality of your search engine placements.

We also discuss the inner workings of the biggest search engines and then show you how you can ...