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If You Build It-He Will Come-Not!

How can we forget the movie “Field of Dreams,” about an Iowa corn farmer that hears voices and interprets them as a command to build a baseball diamond in his fields. He does, and poof, the Chicago Black Sox come. How easy Internet Marketing would be if this expression were true! Unfortunately, web site owners are going to be unpleasantly surprised by their web traffic if they trust this conviction. Visitors will not come unless your web site is built using search engine friendly procedures. Launching a site on the World Wide Web is a far leap from building a trendy café on a city’s main drag. On the Internet, the three most important rules of real estate no longer apply (location, location, location). If you build it, you will be one more amongst the billions of other web sites. At the end of the day, your mom and her 20 closest friends are not going to generate the traffic you need to promote your business. Nevertheless, Hollywood did bestow upon us another cute quote.

So, how do you generate quality traffic to your web site? To answer this question, we must understand the importance of the Internet, search engines and how search engines work.

Miniwatts Marketing Group reported that the number of Internet users worldwide is currently 1,093,529,692 individuals, and has grown by 114.7 % in North America and 391.3% in Latin America from 2000 to 2007. The Pew Internet & American Life Project reported findings in 2005 that 84% of Internet users have used search engines, and I expect that number has remained steady or increased as the quantity of Internet users grows. Furthermore, approximately 82.6% of searches conducted on the Internet are performed through Google, Yahoo! and MSN. The remaining percentages are distributed among AOL, Ask and other engines. (Source: Nielson/Net Ratings). So, what do all these numbers mean? Essentially, if you want to be seen by the hordes of people surfing the web, then you want high rankings in these search engines, especially Google.

Search engines function in the following manner: A robot, affectionately called a web spider, crawls the entire web feeding upon information provided by a site’s html code and content. The spider creates a list of words and where they were found. Then, the spider creates a directory of web pages and assigns each one a ranking based on its relevancy to a particular term. When a user performs a search, the spider compares the search terms to its directory, and returns the most relevant results.

For the spider to be able to crawl your site and catalog it in the appropriate directory section, it is important that you implement search engine optimization (SEO) techniques. SEO is the “art and science” of creating a logical framework that is accessible and attractive to the search engines. SEO is a subset of search engine marketing that primarily seeks to improve the number and quality of visitors to a web site from “natural” (“organic” or “algorithmic”) search results, as opposed to sponsored listings, which is the basis of Pay-Per-Click advertising. Effectively, SEO is marketing by appealing first to search engine algorithms to increase a site’s relevancy and secondly to human visitors.

Search engines operate using algorithms, and each algorithm is different. Though the search community understands the general components that are involved in ranking algorithms, including both on page and off page factors, search engines keep their exact algorithms under lock and key, considering it information more sensitive than their financials. Not only is it a search engine’s distinguishing characteristic, but search results would become unreliable and irrelevant due to spammers. Concurrent with the norms of the World Wide Web, there are no norms. Search engines are constantly altering their algorithms and the weight they place on certain criteria. Some feel as though this makes life easier, but the end goal is to provide the user with the most relevant information to their search query.

Above all, though the search engine spider is a robot, the people behind the machine are human. Not only are they human, they are extremely intelligent and logical people from the Silicon Valley, and do not like to be fooled. So, though individuals may discover loopholes in their algorithms, they will eventually discover the loophole, and ban the sites utilizing these “black hat” methods. If any SEO professional claims that they have special techniques or that they can guarantee rankings, then turn around and run as fast as you can because this is not possible. If you need to implement questionable techniques to improve your rankings, then you may need to start from square one and think about how valuable your web site is to the Internet community.