On Mon, Mar 10, 2008 at 8:47 AM, Kenneth Gonsalves lawgon@au-kbc.org 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=3576...
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=3529...
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