Let us divert our attention from the topic of advertising for just a moment (we’ll get right back to it, I promise!) and discuss the role that search engines play in an advertiser’s career. If you have simply opted to slap your affiliate link onto blog postings and advertisements (and there is nothing wrong with that!) a great deal of this information does not apply to you. On the other hand, if you are attempting to sell your products through a website you are going to have to be very conscious of the role of search engines in your life.
Most people do not log onto the Internet looking for a product or a piece of information with the knowledge of precisely where it is that they need to go emblazoned in their minds. Instead, they employ the aid of a search engine such as Google or Yahoo! to surf through the web pages on the Internet and find the ones that contain the information that best suits their needs.
These people are not going to have the patience to search through hundreds of pages of results to find what they are looking for; the average Internet browser has an attention span roughly equivalent to that of a three year old when it comes to locating information. They want what they want and they want it now. Chances are good that if a web page is not listed in the two to three pages of results a search engine digs up while combing the Internet it is not going to be seen by that particular surfer.
Obviously, that means that in order for your website to bring in the greatest amount of traffic possible it is going to need to be located within those first two to three pages.
How can you do that?
There are a number of different processes that search engines use to organize their results. As Google is probably the most widely used search engine on the web we will use their system to demonstrate the ways in which a search engine will prioritize its search results.
A webpage is first brought to the attention of a search engine when it is spidered. A web spider will “crawl” through the page in all of its virtual arachnid glory, examining the content of the pages as well as the links it is attached to. It will take reference of certain lines of information that appear to be important (generally the first two lines and the title) as well as any keywords which are frequently repeated or specified in the Meta tag. It will also take the time to follow a site’s back trail and view the pages which contain hyperlinks to the site. These hyperlinks are considered to be recommendations; a website with more recommendations is going to fall higher on the totem pole of search results than one without any recommendations to its name. Of course, not all hyperlinks are created equal.
This is an important factor to consider when you are selecting sites to advertise on. Think of it this way. Say you are a doctor, fresh out of medical school, and you are applying for a job at a local hospital. They ask you for your references. You give them the names of the doctors who supervised your residency, the name of one of your professors in college and the name of the mechanic in your home town that has known you since you were a child. Whose opinion do you think is going to carry the most weight?
Obviously, the answer to that is going to be the doctors who supervised your residency, then your professor, then the mechanic, not because they are not equally important as people but because their roles in the field you are preparing to enter are drastically different. While the mechanic in your hometown may believe you are a fabulous person because you always took good care of your car and helped out in the shop on weekends when you were in high school he is not going to be the best qualified individual to offer an opinion on your ability to cope with the pressures of working in a hospital on a daily basis.
The referral system of web pages follows much the same design. There are certain sites whose “opinions” and “recommendations” will carry more weight with a search engine than others; it is important that you locate these sites and do everything in your power to ensure that they endorse your site in order to ensure that your site is at the top of that two to three page field.
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