A top listing in search engines, especially in Google, can increase visitors to your web site and help. Let's say you sell web design services. If your site was at top of list when people searched for "web design" in Google, it could increase number of people who know you exist and know what you do, by a factor of ten or more.

You may already know that a top listing in Google will help your business, but at present you are having a tough time even finding your site in Google search engine listings. What can you do to help Google find your listing and put it as close as possible to top of list?

Submitting Your Site Google uses a "spider" to look for links from one site to another and to add information about additional sites and web pages to its database. Google's "spider" is very active and may already have found your site. If any other site has a link to your site and is listed by Google, Google may have found your site on its own. To find out if your web site is listed, just type in www.yoururl.com into query box at www.google.com and press search.

If your site isn't listed, you can prompt Google to spider to it at http://www.google.com/addurl.html Submit your primary url and Google will find rest of your site.

Getting your site listed by Google and other search engines is first step. Next you need to make it easy for search engines to code your site pages correctly and move them towards top of their listings. Here's how:

Picking Right Keywords If you want your prospects to find your site use words and phrases most commonly associated with your product or service in your web pages. These are called keywords. In selecting your keywords, think about problem your prospects want to solve. If you sell ergonomic chairs, which will work best, "comfy chairs" or "eliminate back pain" or "ergonomic chairs"?

I'm talking about pay-per-click search engines, and how they've become a really bad investment!

There are two reasons for deterioration of pay-per-click search engines: high bid prices and out of control click fraud.

A few years back, you could get popular keywords at a halfway decent bid price. Nowadays, even moderately popular keywords are ridiculously high.

How high? Well, let me give you an example, using most popular pay-per-click search engine: Overture.

Let's take popular keyword phrase, "home business."

At time this article was written, Overture's top bid for keyword phrase "home business" was an exorbitantly high $2.28. Just to get on first page, it would cost you $0.61, which would place you last at number forty.

Now let's just delve inside numbers for a moment, shall we? I'm not going to even bother breaking down number one bid price, because quite frankly, it's obvious top spot is reserved for and controlled by high-rollers.

So, let's break down bid number forty. The bid price of $0.61 means that for every 100 visitors Overture sends to your website, it's going to cost you $61.00. Now, here's where numbers really get interesting.

According to so-called experts, a decent conversion ratio is right around one percent. In other words, one out of every one hundred visitors to your website converts to a sale. I happen to know for a fact that most websites don't even come close to converting one percent. However, that's a subject for another day.

Using very generous one percent conversion ratio, here's problem. Unless you're selling a big-ticket item and making $100 or more per sale, it's impossible to make any real money with pay-per-click search engines. You just can't do it!