Is your Billboard in Times Square or a Dark Alley?

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With any kind of advertising or publicity, the goal is to put your message in front of as many people as possible. Not just any people, but you want your ad to be seen by those people who are potential customers for the goods or services that you are selling. In other words, you want your message to be where it will have the maximum impact upon your sales. That holds true whether you are advertising with billboards, radio or television ads, or are acting as a corporate sponsor of a local charity. It also holds true on the internet.
The internet is unique in that the biggest potential source of potential customer traffic is completely free, at least at the surface level. That source is search engine results page rankings. Each month, some 14 billion searches are made through the top search engines by people looking for something on the internet. The vast majority of those searchers choose one of the top, first page results. Having your website appear on that first page, and especially among the top results of that first page is like having your message appear on the Jumbotron in Times Square instead of having it spray-painted on a wall in some dark alley.
In the world of internet searches, Google is the equivalent of Times Square. It’s where all the traffic is. All right, not all the traffic, but the overwhelming majority of internet search market share belongs to Google. Roughly 70 percent of internet searches take place on Google. When you are focusing on achieving high search engine placement for your website, Google is the place to start.
Google and other search engines use a variety of factors to determine the ranking for each website for any given search term. The process of building your website to maximize your search engine results ranking is called search engine optimization or SEO. Search engine optimization simple means that you do everything you can to let the automated algorithms used for ranking know that your website is highly relevant for those web users who are looking for the products and services that you offer on your website.
Some of this depends upon the HTML code of your website, some depends upon the quality of the content or text of your website, and some depends upon things like certain kinds of links to your website from other popular or highly ranked websites. The exact formulae used by search engines to determine a website’s search ranking are closely held secrets, so that search engine results are kept relevant and not monopolized by a few sites trying to game the system.
While it is free to appear on search engine results pages, a reasonable investment to make sure your website is properly optimized for the major search engines can be money well spent. Some search engine marketers will even help you cultivate incoming links to your site to help boost its search engine ranking that way. If you have a web business, search engine optimization can be the key to your success.
