Website marketers cited Search engine positioning was top method to drive traffic to their sites (66%), followed by email marketing (54%). Source: Direct Marketing Association. Accordingly, most cost effective way to market your web site online is to obtain several top 10-search engine rankings in major search engines for your keywords.

According to a recent Jupiter Research Survey, searching on search engines is one of main uses of Internet among 79% of users. Source: September 2002 Jupiter Research Survey. So that being case, whatever your promoting you’ll want to make sure it can be found on first page of search engines results page.

The reason is numerically simple. An Iprospect Survey in 2002 reported that 78% of web users abandon their search if first 3 pages don't provide an answer to their question, and 28% don’t scroll past 2nd page of results. Source: Media Post article reporting results of Spring 2002 IProspect survey.

Combine those facts with Internets explosive growth rate of 1.8 Million people worldwide going online every week for very first time, Source: Official Guide To Internet Promotion and you can soon appreciate what a top 10 ranking can mean to you. Google receives approximately 39.4% of all search engine traffic. Yahoo receives approximately 30.4%. They’re simply largest search engines being utilized online today.

Bringing up rear is MSN at 29.6%, and AOL 15.5% then Ask Jeeves with 8.5%. Source: Nielsen//NetRatings January 2004

How much traffic is that? Well, Google and its partner sites were reporting a whopping 250 million searches a day in February 2003.

Overture and its partners were reporting over 167 million searches per day. Inktomi reported 80 million followed by LookSmart with 45 million per day.

FindWhat reported 33 million while Ask Jeeves reported 20 million, Alta Vista reported 18 million and finally Fast reported 12 Million searches per day. Source: Searchenginewatch.com 2004. With all said, you can easily see how your search engine rankings are directly proportional to traffic your web site receives, and your site traffic is directly related to your potential to profit online.

*Incoming and outgoing linkage is more important than exchanged links. The reason for this belief is that usually incoming and outgoing linkage is relative to content.

*Exchanged links are an agreement between web sites to make a link to one another. Although recent exchanges are based on relavence, relavence is not to content but to industry.

*Even bad linkage, can qualify as good linkage. But, best linkage is linkage being used to bring visitors to your site.

*I do not care how high your linkage improves your ranking on Google or any other search engine. If linkage isn't providing visitors and searchers aren't searching for your keywords, number one ranking doesn't mean a damn thing.

*SEO means Search Engine Optimization. It is intended to make your web pages Search Engine FRIENDLY. This does not "promote" your web site or product. It provides person with better optimization ability to rank higher on search engines results than others. (And, if you think about it, it's allowing search engines to dictate design and content of your web site.)