The downside is that it takes time, patience and good research to make it happen. Beware of companies claiming to be Search Engine Optimization experts. Make sure that search engines they are submitting you to are high quality search engines and that they use appropriate keywords. Google, Yahoo, and MSN, are just a few of top search engines today.

What is "Pay Per Click?"

Pay Per Click is that latest, greatest attempt by search engines to make their searches more relevant. Paying a fixed, or sometimes fluxuating amount can guarantee you a high search engine ranking. In fact, you can be guaranteed top spot.

I can't stress enough importance of choosing right keywords. If you aren't specific enough they get a lot of hits from Pay Per Click, but no buyers. The return on investment would be a laugh, except for impact it's having on your budget. Think of e-bay; when someone is willing to pay more you get bumped down list, or your price goes up.

The good news about Pay Per Click is that it can bring quick results. With right search keywords you can have high search engine ranking without waiting for Optimization. If your business is seasonal, or you're just starting out and want immediate results Pay Per Click can be beneficial. Another benefit is to companies who are providing services that have saturated Internet. You can avoid difficulties of trying to get to top of a search with 7 million results.

Whichever path you take make sure to choose a high quality developer to help you with research and implementation. This will make all difference between being found or being lost in millions of other websites vying for attention.

4. Spider limitations. The device that gathers data from your site for search engine inclusion is called a “Robot” or “’bot” for short. The process of gathering data is called “crawling” or “spidering” as ‘bot will follow all links on your pages to explore whole site and include all its data for assessment. If your webmaster favored you with a Flash menu system, then – to spider - your site is one page long. Robots do not spider links locked-up in Flash. If java was your medium of choice, or you use java scripts extensively, then consider this. More weight is placed on data at top of page than at bottom. In a java-based or java-rich site header (top end) of your page will look something like this: -

-html- -head- -link rel='stylesheet' href='include/styles.css' rel='nofollow' type='text/css'- -script language="JavaScript1.2"- //Highlight image script- By Dynamic Drive //For full source code and more DHTML scripts, visit http://www.dynamicdrive.com //This credit MUST stay intact for use function makevisible(cur,which){ strength=(which==0)? 1 : 0.2 if (cur.style.MozOpacity) cur.style.MozOpacity=strength else if (cur.filters) cur.filters.alpha.opacity=strength*100 ........

Excuse abbreviating of this horror story - but you see what I mean. In this site I was called to review - 3,034 characters of pure gobbledygook before you even find page title (removed here by me.). Meta-tags are not to be found. Spider wise, this page is virtually invisible, Sure enough you can find this page by “direct hit”, that is by its name (URL), or by other sites that refer to it, but searching for site itself returns nothing.

5. Publishing. You should publish your site to all free search engines you can, usually in area of some hundreds of engines. This will take from a few weeks to months to yield any significant results and there is no way to speed this up without paying. If you chose to look at paid submissions then paid submissions appear within days – but when you stop paying yearly fees they disappear just as quickly. If you are published regularly to free engines then sooner or later you will probably find your way into paid engines by “back door”. The “back door” relies on fact that search engines interrelate and some of these relationships are known.

6. Push and Pull. To supplement your on-line publicity (“pushing” people to your website) consider “pulling” them by other means as well. All of your company paperwork should have your website and e-mail clearly marked on them. In fact every scrap of paper should be similarly equipped, plus coffee mugs, t-shirts and anything else available to you.

7. The Truth behind Myth. From moment you become visible on-line, people will offer to “boost your placings” and bills for this will rage from modest to thousands. Here is ultimate secret of search engine optimization…..it’s a secret! No one really knows systems used by engines except those who designed them - and anyone who says otherwise is misleading you. There are no guarantees whatsoever because at same time as Richard Olmshaw’s webmaster is trying to make him number one; everyone else’s webmaster is trying to do same thing at same time – often with same tools. It’s going to be a close run race by any standards. 8. In Conclusion Prepare site, publicize, and then wait. Consider promoting site by non-internet techniques – mouse mats, t-shirts etc. Paid inclusion programs if required. Watch your statistics Talk to your webmaster. Respect their abilities – but at end of day remember who is paying piper and therefore calling tune. If your chosen “web professional” will not listen to you, or cannot explain why he cannot or should not realize your ideas – consider changing webmasters.