There are two ways to have your web site to appear on first page of any search. The first is to engage in a pay-per-click campaign. The second is to appear on first page due to “free” or natural search results. Getting high, natural rankings in major search engines is one of most efficient and cost effective ways to market and sell your products on Internet.

Search engines use complex, mathematical algorithms to determine which web sites are ranked high and which are not. If your web site matches criteria, you’re ranked high. If it doesn’t, then you’re not. It’s that simple.

Search engine optimization, then, is designing your website and all of your eCommerce actions so that when consumers search for keywords that are central to your company, your website will appear at top of search results.

For example, if your company sells running shoes (a keyword that receives 127,575 searches per month), it would be very beneficial to be one of top websites on search engine. If you received only a small percentage of new visitors each month from that top ranking, it would still result in a significant source of revenue.

It might help to think of it this way: At least 10 million Internet searches are performed every month within each major business category. If only 1% of those searches found your website, you would have over 100,000 new visitors to your site each month. If only 1% of those visitors purchased your products or services, you would be making more than 1,000 new sales per month. (The worldwide average is 2.5%, making these conservative estimates.)

The scope of this article is not to look at methods behind search engine optimization. Instead, it is to look at importance Internet is playing in business development today and in future. The traditional marketing schemes of past still have their place, but advertising dollars must be allocated to Internet marketing.

As Bruce Carlisle, CEO of SFInteractive said, “If you aren’t putting money into search engines you are letting business walk out door.”

If you happened to learn that a grandmother is shopping online to buy a gift for her daughter’s newborn baby, then what are chances of there being many other grandmothers doing same thing. If enough grandmothers are doing this in real life every day, it creates a trend.

So lets get down to talking about behaviors then.

Some people have already realized that online consumers are searching for price comparisons online. Wouldn't it be useful to know exactly what prices or what products people are comparing? How easily you could you take advantage of this information by creating ideal content within a retail site, that compares exactly these things that people are searching for and want to know! Not only that, but suppose you could research those exact products and determine fairly quickly where biggest "window of opportunity" would be for you?

One of most powerful and useful tools for researching human behavior is Wordtracker.com. As an official member of Wordtracker's question and answer support team, I help answer peoples questions about keyword research every day. The questions I answer are mostly things that customers are curious about, but often answer to their question does not allow me time to explain about some of special advantages of Wordtracker. This is why I wrote an e-book called Wordtracker Magic, to help people understand some simple, easy alternatives to performing keyword research and behavioral research. Many people miss behavioral trends simply because they are thinking too narrowly about "keywords" which may already be pre-programmed into their minds. Remember, if there is enough common interest in any topic, so that a similar search behavior is occurring then it will often leave an identifiable trend behind in Wordtrackers database. Every time you can discover those trends, it's like pure gold!