Search Engines--Need Know, Earn Money Ways

Part 1 of 3

If thinking of starting an at home internet business, there may be some things you don't know about search engines. Read on for a full picture and how they can help you make money with your online business.

A search engine is a computer tool people use to find what they’re looking for on the internet. Yahoo, All The Web, Google, Alta Vista, are just some of the many, many search engines available for people to freely use.

Also, it’s important to know that search engine technologies are ever evolving for a number of reasons. Primarily to improve the quality of the search results for the user as search engine technology itself improves. These changes may also render useless gimmicks and tricks devised by some marketers to deceive search engines into ranking a site high when the quality of the content isn’t relevant or any good.

As a general rule, the only way to achieve good search engine rankings (called search engine optimization or SEO for short), is to provide quality, relevant content that people are looking for and are interested in. (“Content” is web-speak for the useful and meaningful information you find on websites.)

Just how search engines know if people are interested in the content or not is by timing how long they stay on the site they found from the search results. If a person leaves a site quickly after clicking on the link, the engines think that that site wasn’t relevant and takes note of that and adjusts that page’s rank downward if this happens often enough.

If a person stays awhile on a site provided by a search engine, the search engine notes that too and may rank the site higher for it thinks the content is more relevant to what the searcher was seeking. So naturally the more relevant the search engine thinks your site is to given keywords, the higher your natural search rank will be, and how long a person stays on a site is one way how search engines determine that.

Keywords are words or phrases that people use in search engines to find what they’re looking for. For example, I might use ‘calculator repair’ or ‘calculator repair methods” or “how to fix a calculator” as a keyword in a search engine like Ask.Com to find out how to repair my broken calculator, with the hopes of finding a website that will give me details on this.

Search engines currently work off of keywords to find relevant content for your inquiry. The authors of content facilitate this process because when writing about a subject, they will invariably include keywords in their content. They have to; it’s impossible not to.

For example, it would be impossible to write an article on “calculator repair” without mentioning what the subject matter is; i.e., without mentioning terms like “repair” or “calculator” or other terms that show ways of fixing a calculator. So, if your article is really about fixing calculators, I'm pretty sure you won’t be mentioning how to cook a roast.

Keywords are what tell a search engine what your content is all about. And the most important keywords are what the searching public think up, not the authors or the search engines. So, find what keywords people are using to find your subject matter and incorporate them into your content to help search engines find your website. Otherwise, search engines are blind and are not intelligent per se.

Now you know the basics of search engines. Next learn how to optimize your website so search engines can find it. See Part 2 of this article titled Search Engine Optimization Overview to get started.