Search Engines

Getting your site indexed by the top Search Engines is critically important.  This is where most of your traffic will come from.  Even if you have the most unique, innovative and visually stunning website on Earth, if it's not indexed by the top Search Engines, you will get very little traffic and obviously very few sales (assuming that you're selling a product or service).

Obviously, Google is the number one search engine in the world and has been for several years now.  It is followed (distantly I might add) by Yahoo and then MSN.  If you can get your site indexed by these three sites for some of your main keywords, then you will most likely get a good deal of traffic from them.

However, don't overlook the 2nd tier search engines such as AltaVista, AllTheWeb and Gigablast.  It may actually be much easier to get listed by many of these 2nd tier SE's than it is getting listed on Google.  If your keywords are fairly unique, it may be somewhat easy to get listed by some of these smaller SE's on the first or second page for your particular keyword.

If you are lucky enough or possibly clever enough to get listed on the first page of Google for your keyword, then look out cause you may be in for a flood of targeted traffic to your site.  One thing to keep in mind though.  Just because you are on the first page of Google for a particular keyword today, doesn't mean you'll stay there for very long.  Not only will you be competing for those top spots with a lot of other website owners, but Google has a tendency to change their indexing/ranking rules on a fairly regular basis.  This could be good or more often it could be bad because what made your website stand out to the search engines one day may not carry as much weight with them tomorrow. 

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is something that you need to tweak every so often just to maintain your site ranking.  If you're really serious about getting and then maintaining a high ranking with the search engines, I would suggest reading everything you can get your hands on about SEO.

Please try some of our SEO tools to see where your site stands with the search engines.