Although there are many different search engines out there I would only focus on two or three of them; Google, Yahoo, and MSN/Live in that order. Ask.com is also starting to get a share of the search market but I wouldn’t worry about them. The majority of your traffic will come from google and then yahoo. This has proven true for every one of my sites.
Now there is no way to know exactly how the search engines determine what site ranks number one but they have given webmaster an idea of what they are looking for to improve the quality of the internet. The main thing is content. Search engines Love sites with tons of useful, regularly update content. Let’s take one of the top ranking website in the word for example. wikipedia.org ranks on the top page of google for tons of different keyword! Why? Let’s look at how the wiki works. It is a site full of useful content. You can research pretty much anything on wiki and get an up to date answer. A what kind of answer? That’s right up to date. Every page on wiki gets updated almost every day. So the search engines are always seeing new content on it’s millions of pages. There is one more major factor to wikis success. Backlinks!! There are over a million web pages linking to wiki as a reference. The search engines see that wiki is a source of information for other sites and gives them votes from every website that links to wiki. It’s like saying that one site is vouching for another. in wiki’s case there are over a million pages voting or vouching for it so the search engines put it at the top of their search engine.
We will look into every aspect of SEO and get deeper into every topic throughout this book. I just wanted to give you brief overview, because trust me their are many other factors that can Improve your site!!Â