On Mon, Mar 10, 2008 at 8:47 AM, Kenneth Gonsalves <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > > > Both are related. Increase in business is an absolute goal for most. > > Being near the top in google results _gets_ you more business, > > anecdotally > > speaking. It's one of the aspects for most online businesses > > so which comes first? the chicken or the egg? the aim of a search > engine is to rank the sites according to some criteria - I assume > usefulness and popularity would be the main criteria. So if your site > is useful and popular, it will rank high - and you will get more > business (but only if you remain useful and popular).
If only it were so simple. This is already a quite a bit OT, and going into details would be stretching it too far (and I have stretched a bit - see below) But you can look for some guidelines from google itself: http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=35769 SEO has acquired a bad connotation due to unscrupulous elements, as can be seen from the tone of: http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=35291 But, the first link (above) is what 'good' SEO-ers will do. As a very simple example, if you have a page with many advertisements/partner links (needed for business), and useful content of your own, then one SEO guideline would be to use a (non-standard, but search-engine recognized?) "nofollow" attribute within the URL tags. Or, to have better sitemaps. Else, the number of outlinks on a page would drain your "rank" into those external ad/partner links, reducing your own estates' pageranks. Another example: search for "subversion" on google.com. and see what additional information you see along with the first result. See the various categories "found" on subversion's website. These are the kinds of things "good" SEO should help you do. It helps both the business, and search engines. Search engines aren't _exactly_ as intelligent as we would want to believe! They put in place some logic to be "more useful" (this example), and then more people start making sure their pages are designed in a way google will "extract" structure from... Best wishes, jaju -- http://mm.glug-bom.org/mailman/listinfo/linuxers
