Keeping an archive of articles on your website builds your knowledge base. You can refer visitors to your articles when answering their questions. People searching for information on topics you have written about will find your articles listed in their search results. Once they arrive at your site, maybe they will buy something from you: if you know so much about planting bulbs, maybe your site is place I should buy my bulb-planting books.

Other Offerings

What else can you add to this mix? Think about adding professional gardening book reviews, a gardening book club, FAQ's about gardening, gardening articles, a rating system for books, audience book reviews, and other gardening-related topics. Adding this type of information gives your visitors more reasons to keep coming back to your site. Offer free tools, create a forum. Set up a newsletter for your audience with your topic, adding in a discount for your product for newsletter readers. Give your audience a reason to come back to your website.

What Results Can I Expect: Google PageRank

A primary example of how this works is Google's PageRank. One of most important aspects of ranking for Google and other search engines is good content. Google wants their search engine users to find what they are looking for, a successful search experience for their users. The keywords included in your site are important; after all, those are terms your potential visitors are searching for. Now not only do you have your catalog pages and ordering information, but you also have a more in-depth treatment of topics you have addressed in your articles, book reviews, and other materials. More keywords in more places means you have a better chance of matching a potential visitor's search.

So how can you "rise above" other online gardening bookstores out there in search engine listings? Link popularity can be next important piece that allows you to differentiate yourself from rest of pack. All other things being equal, search engines that pay attention to link popularity will list your site higher in their results if you have more links coming back from other sites which have a focus related to yours. In other words, if your gardening bookstore has a number of backlinks pointing to it from websites of gardening clubs, nurseries, and so forth, your site will be seen as more authoritative. The more authoritative a website looks to Google through link popularity, higher that site will rank. After all, if all these other gardening-related sites point to your site, they are demonstrating that you have something important to say. That is another reason why it is important to have your material published on other websites.

Conclusion

Maintaining good content is a stepping-stone for your visitors to delve in deeper to your website. Taking time to build your content and provide for your audience will pay off in good search engine ranking and returning visitors.

4. FAST(AllTheWeb) FAST Search results power listings at popular Lycos search portal. Lycos has largest global footprint of any Internet portal with more than 140 sites in 41 countries through its network of Web sites and partnerships. FAST results are also displayed at Lycos Europe, Ask Jeeves, AllTheWeb, WebCrawler, InfoSpace, Excite, DogPile, MetaCrawler and other international partners.

5. AltaVista Altavista is a pure search engine. As well as displaying Overture’s results, Altavista maintains 20 International search sites that are locally-optimized in each country to display its results. Submitting to main Altavista site will include you in all International sites.

6. Open Directory (DMOZ) While this directory does not even factor in Neilson/NetRatings results, its audience reach is significant. The Open Directory provides main search results to Netscape Search as well as categorized directory results at AOL, Google, Lycos and HotBot. Google regards a listing in Open Directory as very significant in terms of its PageRank system, so a listing here will give your site a higher ranking at Google.

7. LookSmart A listing at LookSmart will enable your site to be dispayed at very popular MSN – default search portal of Microsoft’s Internet Explorer browser. Google also regards a LookSmart listing highly in its PageRank system, which will in turn help your site’s ranking at Google.

8. Yahoo A listing in Yahoo’s directory has become less significant since they began to use Google search results as primary listings. If you rank well on Google, you will rank well at Yahoo and gain first rate exposure this popular search site provides. Google regards a listing at Yahoo as highly significant in terms of PageRank, so a listing here will in turn help your site’s relevancy with Google search engine. What you need to decide is: will a directory listing at Yahoo help boost your ranking enough on Google to warrant $299 annual fee Yahoo charges.

9. Ask Jeeves/Teoma Ask Jeeves search results are powered by Teoma. While this search portal is popular amongst Internet users, its reach is not that significant. If your aim is to have your site listed on all major search engines, then this would definitely be one to be listed with, although you may want to focus your efforts on gaining a high ranking on other more significant search engines above for maximum traffic. Ask Jeeves dispays top four results from Google’s AdWords and ad results from Lycos in a right hand column format.

What we can construe from above results is that majority of Internet search results are delivered by a small minority of search engines through a wide network of partner search portals. When planning your search engine positioning campaign, it is important to consider this. If you begin with idea of maximum audience reach in mind, your results will return a wider net of targeted traffic.