How to Make Money on the Internet

When people want something today, they go to the Internet and “Google it” . They type some words that (to them) indicate what they are looking for, into the nearest search engine “search window”.  (There are many search engines: Yahoo, Google, MSN (now “Bing”), etc. They all work in essentially the same way.)

What next emerges on the screen is the search engine’s idea of what you are looking for.  This is called the Search Engine Results Pages or “SERP’s”.

If you are an Internet Marketer, selling let’s say, “dog collars”, you want your website to appear in the SERP’s whenever anyone types “dog collar” or “dog collars” into search engine search window.

Since an estimated 70% of the people who want to buy something on the Net use the search engines, it is essential to most marketers that their listings appear on the SERP’s whenever anyone searches for their products or services.

The best place to have your listing appear is on page 1 of the SERP’s.  Preferably “above the fold”. There are typically 10 natural listings (plus some paid ads) on the first page.  The top 5, the first 5, appear on the initial panel. You will  see these 5 first, without having to scroll down. That position is called, “above the fold”.

Now, as you might imagine, there are lots of sellers.  And ALL want to be on that first page.  But the search engines try to put the most important, most relevant sites first.  So they “rank them”. The top 10 get on the first page, in order, with number 1 at the top down to number 10 at the bottom of the page.  The next ten get on the second page and so forth.

So how do you convince the search engines that YOUR website is important enough and relevant enough to be on the first page?

Aha!! That’s the question. And, in a nutshell, that is what Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is all about!

SEO is the art and science of getting recognized, of being important and letting the search engines know it. Of getting high search engine rankings. Of getting YOUR website listed on the first page of the SERP’s.

How do you do that? Well, there are two elements:

1. The internal, in-house things you do at your website to be recognized

2. The external, links back from other entities on the Net (websites, blogs, squido lenses, social networking sites, etc.) that show the search engines how important you are.

Details? Well… That we’ll cover that in other postings here…

Jorge Chavez

Related posts:

1. Making Money on the Internet – From Basic Principles to Building Backlinks