i-Search Engines

The wild and often oddly mythical world of search engine optimization (SEO) is filled with old wives' tales, facts, and a mix of the two. Separating fact from fiction is often far more complicated than you might think possible but with a few cold and hard facts as well as the do's and don'ts of SEO, you will be well on your way to having a site and content that search engines like and that will receive highly targeted web traffic.

For most Internet users it's virtually second nature to use a search engine to look for information, products or services. As expected, when they search on a particular word or combinations of words, the search engines come up with a host of results. Each result represents a website that supposedly has the information, products or services the Internet user looking for. They can click on the link and ta-da! the website does or does not give them what they want.

A number of articles and white papers have been written on this topic. Before the days of Google and Web 2.0 there was little attention paid to the topic of Search Engine Optimization (SEO). In the early days of the Internet Era you could get a site listed on Yahoo! or Altavista by merely submitting it. As long as it wasn't too complicated for search engines to understand you could get your site listed within 2 to 3 days. But Yahoo!

Pay per click (PPC) is an advertising model used on search engines, advertising networks, and content websites/blogs, where advertisers only pay when a user actually clicks on an ad to visit the advertiser's website. Advertisers bid on keywords they predict their target market will use as search terms when they are looking for a product or service. When a user types a keyword query matching the advertiser's keyword list, or views a page with relevant content, the advertiser's ad may be shown.