Most search engine companies make the bulk of their revenue from advertising. They give away their prime product in return for the attention of the millions of people who use them.

It’s all about page impressions. A search Engine is in the business of advertising to as wide an audience as possible. They can offer highly targeted advertising by analysing what people are searching for and offering advertisements and links relevant to the user’s interest.

Consider this: it’s Mother’s Day and you’re searching for a supplier of flowers who deliver. You got to your favourite search engine and type in “flower delivery”. The results that come back are pretty disappointing - everything from flower power save the whale to the history of flower and bread.

So you try another search engine. Rhis time you get the results you expected, find an online flower delivery service, place the order, they deliver and your mother is happy.

Where are you going to search next time?

Page impressions count. Search engines live on traffic, and they achive that only by giving people the results they want. If you run a flower delivery service, you want your site to be found by people who want flower delivered. And that’s exactly what the search engines want to bring you. So if we all want the same thing, why do we need to be so clever?

The Internet is a bit like the Wild West. There’s always someone pulling a stunt and the search engines have suffered in the past. If you were searching for flower delivery, and the search engine directed you to an ex*licit ad*lt site you’d be understandably upset. But this has happened in a great many cases as a result of thoughtless Website owners who are looking for hits at any Price, whatever the relevancy.

Having been tricked in the past, the search operators have introduces a range of tricks of their own to protect themselves. They now take a far more gestalt view of a page to judge what it’s about - leading, hopefully, to more relevant results.

So the largest part of search engine optimization isn’t trickery, but simply logical cinstruction of your information to make it easily understood by the search engine spider.

A good rule of thumb is to ensure your site is relevant to the search. Don’t try to trick a search engine, with hidden text, keywords etc., aim for commonality among the header text, the text in the pages, the graphics, even the domain name.

Tags: google, search engine optimization, SEO, yahoo