On Mon, Mar 10, 2008 at 8:47 AM, Kenneth Gonsalves <lawgon(a)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=357…
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=352…
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