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

Getting Your Web Site Noticed by Search Engines

Whether people are waving their hands in front of a crowd or smiling for TV cameras, they like to be noticed. To succeed in business, you're always told, “Stand out from the rest and be noticed.” As business owners struggle with the notion of getting noticed on a finite budget, creative measures come into play.

As we discuss in the preceding section, increasing your Web site's visibility on search engines involves knowing the rules they use and ensuring that your site follows those rules. Search engines don't base their rankings solely on keywords. If they did, a Web page that mentions the same word a thousand times would be at the top of their rankings. Instead, search engines also look for references, or how many other Web sites offer a link to a given Web page. The more links that point to a particular page, the higher that page appears on the search engine rankings, especially on Google. The reasoning is that, if other Web sites are all pointing their visitors to a particular page, that page must have more relevant content than other, nonlinked pages.

Search engines also look for content, or how much quality information you offer on your Web site. Websites that have more content — whether it's in the form of articles, calculators, reviews and guides, or just plain text — are typically given higher search result rankings than sites with little content. The reasoning here is that Web sites that offer a lot of content are more useful ...