An introduction to search engine marketing

Why do you have to optimize your web pages for search engines?

New web sites can be submitted to search engines by filling out an online form. Unfortunately, a submission of your web site to search engines is not enough. Without optimizing your web pages, your web site will be listed in position 7,523 of 634,234,202 result pages.

Only a few web surfers look further than the first or second result page of a search engine 75% of searchers never look further than page one (Source: Georgia Institute of Technology). Most search engines display ten results on the first page; and very few searchers click the links to look at the second page.

Usability expert Jakob Nielsen points out: "Users almost never look beyond the second page of search results." Danny Sullivan, ClickZ Search Engine Marketing Columnist, puts it out this way: "Being listed 11 or beyond means that many people may miss your web site."

You'll only get targeted visitors from search engines if your web site is listed in the top results. You must tell search engines what your web site is all about

Search engines must be able to find out what your web site is all about. If search engines cannot find out that your web site is about fishing equipment, they cannot give your web site high rankings for that keyword.

The process of optimizing your web pages so that search engines can quickly find out what your web site is all about is called search engine optimization (SEO).