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

Watching Your Rankings

Although Web site pages might last forever in a search engine's database, the Web site's importance or relevancy doesn't carry over. As Web site owners try to figure out ways to improve their positions in search engine results, search engines update their systems and algorithms to reduce the effect of specific tricks that become popular.

One such practice is keyword spamming. Web site owners hide paragraphs of targeted keywords by matching the color of the keyword's text with the color of the Web page background. For example, the owner of a Web site using a white background puts in a block of keywords using white text. These keywords are invisible to customers browsing the Web site because the white text doesn't show up on a white background. The spiders that download the information from the Web page can see the keywords, however, and they assign weight to those keywords regardless of whether they're relevant. Search engines now compare the colors being used and eliminate those keywords, even if the colors being used are slight variations of each other.

As a business owner, you need to stay informed of the changes the search engines make to their programs, and then update your Web site accordingly to take advantage of whatever the new rules enforce. The last thing you want is to optimize your Web site based on one set of rules and then have your Web site ignored because the rules changed and you didn't update your site.

A variety of Web sites provide news, ...