The playing field is equal on the Internet irrespective of the size of the business and hence Search Engine Optimization becomes so necessary. Most surfers arrive at a particular web site after a search. About 75% of web users in North America use search engines performing about 4 billion searches in a month. Briefly put, search engines are responsible for directing visitors to a website. Sadly, not many business owners know how to get their web sites listed in the databases of search engines, nor do they know how to get their site a higher rank when related key words are searched for.



How SEO works?

Several ecommerce sites face the problem of shopping cart abandonment. Web sites face an average abandonment rate of 30% or more. The main reasons for shopping cart abandonment are:

If a website has to be listed in a search then either it has it to be submitted or has to be among the ones indexed by search engine robots (bots) that travel across the web in search of web sites to add to their database. In order to rank higher, web sited must be optimized appropriately. Ranking is important from a statistical point of view as in the first site listed in the results page of a search engine is visited by thrice the number of people than the fifth site, result sites found on the first page of search are visited 78% more than the ones found between 11th and 30th.

Having the correct key words and a high amount of link popularity is the key to SEO.

The higher the frequency of the keywords and the higher the number of links to you site especially from similar websites, the better the ranking.

Search engines like Google look at links for a web site as validation. More validation means that a web site is listed higher in search results, provided it is well optimized.

A few companies try an illegitimate techniques called ?black hat? to increase rankings by building link farms. The companies make these farms by creating numerous websites usually of similar content all linking back to the main site. However, web sites using this and other black hat techniques always run the risk of being caught and not being listed in search engines at all.

Web Sites with graphic content can be optimized to suit search engines, as the latter are incapable of transforming pictures into words. However, this problem can be overcome by placing key words in a concealed boot recognizable code (known as alt tag) connected to each image and by providing small captions above the images.

Other type of hidden text known as Meta tags can be inserted into the web page code for egg. Page header, description and key words found in the web site. Although search engines don't consider them as that important these days following Meta tag abuse, any type of optimization helps the web site.

Another way to optimize your web site is by using key words in place of hyperlinks in a web site. The key words in the links get captured by the robots that are in the search of them for adding to their database.