Consider a father who has a very beautiful daughter who he keeps inside the house everyday but then expects someone from the community to fall in love with her then eventually marry her. This is nearly practically impossible. Putting that into perspective, you may have taken the great step to develop a very well detailed website with a very attractive layout which is advertising very great products. Certainly, those who know your website address should be able to find your site without any great difficulty, but this may not be the case for the rest who don’t. Your website is likely to reach a very small percentage of its intended audience. You might ask me why.
You must understand that more than 90% of the people depend on the Search Engines whenever they need any information about a particular topic, product, location, event or personality. As you may have noticed, when you search for sometime using a Search Engine, say, Google lots of results are availed from which to pick the most relevant. For your site to appear and rank high in the search it must have the basic elements. These elements include; Meta keyword, Meta description, Page titles, sitemap, and keyword-rich content. It doesn’t matter how beautiful your website looks or how great you can write. What matters most is how you take advantage of those elements. Each Search Engine has a different algorithm (complex logic) which uses these mentioned elements to determine rank of a website.
How the Search Engine works.
Early Search Engines just indexed keywords and titles of pages of a website. However, the newest trend in Search Engines, and likely the future of search in general, is to move away from keyword-based searches to concept-based searches. In this new form of search, rather than limiting a search to the keywords the searcher inputs, the Search Engine tries to figure out what those keywords mean, so that it can suggest pages that may not include the exact word, but nonetheless are relevant to the search.
The algorithms used are very intelligent and well protected, to prevent people from specifically creating pages to get better ranks, or at least to limit the degree to which they can do that.
How to optimize your website summary.
Content management systems and blogs such as wordpress, blogger, joomla and drupal make the above process slightly easier since most of the steps are done either automatically or in a graphically more user friendly manner.
A Website doesn’t usually get to the Search Engine by default unless it has so many important links or it belongs to a universally important organization like United Nation. Therefore, it needs for you to submit it to a Search Engine. There are a number of tools (free) you may use, Google webmaster (www.google.com/webmasters/) and Bing Webmaster (www.bing.com/toolbox/webmaster) are the best tools I recommend for you to submit your website. The results after submission are not instant. It may take about 2-8 weeks to have significant impact and results. You may ask, “How does the Search Engine Company benefit when I submit my website?” Search Engine companies also offer sponsored / paid for Search Engine optimization (which is a whole topic for another day). But what I can tell you about it is that some people pay these Search Engine companies to rank high, and that is how they make lots of money. However, all this said and done, there is no sure guarantee that with all the above done your website will rank on the first or second page of a Search Engine. There are other determinants some of which are dependent on the Search Engine algorithm and the location (country) from which the search is made. All that side, one thing remains sure, you need your website Search Engine Optimization to stand a chance of reaching a greater audience and to rank higher. This is one think you cannot afford not to try out for your website.
