Search Engine Marketing
By Lori Osterberg
A lot of talk is going on now about search engine marketing, and how you can rank high in the search engines. Though there is nothing “definite” about the strategy used by major search engines, most use a spider system. A spider enters your site, and crawls through your system following the links from page to page. It reads the text and the code as it goes, then brings it back into its system for ranking.
Think of the web as a gigantic library. If you asked the librarian for a book on “small business”, they would direct you to huge amounts of resources. In order to begin ranking those resources, they would start with titles and content to rank the data in order of importance. The web is set up the same way. A website is ranked by the text used in its keywords, in the titles, and used throughout each page. The more times your keywords are used, the more relevant it is, and the higher it will be placed in the overall listing.
When you design your site, choose your main keywords first, and build your site around those words. For example, if you are selling gift baskets, and your primary focus is on corporate, use the words “corporate gift baskets” frequently throughout your site, including your keywords and titles.
