According to the Internet World Stats database, at the end of 2006, Internet usage in the world reached 1,091,730,861 people surfing the web. In the United States alone, there were 210 million users. With a population of approximately 302 million people, that's 69.6 % of the U.S. that is online. With the internet growing every day, online marketing has become more and more important and ranking on search engines like Google, MSN and Yahoo! (among many others) has become a very hot topic.
If you are an internet marketing novice, you are probably facing the seemingly impossible and somewhat daunting task of trying to get your site listed on the first page of the search engines. The first thing you need to understand is that your search engine ranking will not improve overnight. With that in mind, the first step is to optimize your website for the keywords or phrases that people actually use when searching for products or services related to what you offer. For example, if you sell vitamins, you would want to improve your ranking for the phrases BUY VITAMINS or BUY VITAMINS ONLINE.
The next step is to submit your site to the search engines. There are hundreds of legitimate search engines and directories in cyberspace, and you should submit to all of them.
The last step, and probably the most important component of getting ranked higher on the search engines, is increasing your link popularity. The more websites that are linking to your site, the higher your ranking will be.
If you employ each of the strategies outlined in this article, you should be able to improve your search engine ranking while at the same time garnering the kind of traffic that you want. No website can improve its ranking overnight, but if you are persistent, your efforts will be rewarded in the long run.
info from Jim Pretin and Internet World Stats database.
