There are around seven or eight popular search engines on the Internet, with Google and Yahoo being the most popular. Almost everyone is familiar with using search engines to find information but many affiliate marketers fail to realize the importance that these search engines have for their own business. Did you know that 90% of the traffic to your website comes as the result of these search engines? They are an affiliate marketers best tool for success in their online endeavors.
When you plug your query into a search engine, it immediately gets to work by looking through all the indexed pages and presents you with all the websites that match the written phrase that you applied. Those with a high ranking will show up first and, more likely than not, a visitor will click on the first websites at the top of the first page. It is only on rare occasions that a visitor will bother going past page 3 unless they were looking for something very specific. Getting on that first page really ought to be what you are striving most for.
So as an affiliate marketer, it is extremely important that you understand how a search engine works and how you can use it to bring in even more traffic to your site and get you that top page ranking.
The Importance of Keywords
When someone is looking for a particular answer for something, the words that they use to type into the search engine are called keywords. These keywords have the greatest capacity to carry traffic to your website and therefore you need to find out what keywords people are most likely to use when searching for the kind of product that you are promoting. If you are in a very competitive niche, it is better to try and find those keywords that have less competition and are hot and then work your website to try to get the higher page rank. When someone searches for the keywords that you are now using, then your website should come in on the first page to get the maximum benefit.
Another way in which visitors will find themselves taken to your site is with the use of emails, forums and other general websites. But these only account for around 10% of your overall traffic, so you really need to concentrate on getting that high page rank.
Algorithms are used by search engines to calculate the page rank of a website, but knowing exactly what these algorithms are are next to impossible to determine; we can only understand that the keywords used have great leverage as does traffic coming from another high ranking website. As an example, if you joined a forum which has a high page rank, it is wise to post there adding your website link. Whenever someone from that website clicks on your website, it will boost your page rank higher. Also, the more websites that have your own website link on their page with good rating, the better it is for your overall page rank. You can get your website link on these other websites by using the benefit of link exchange and banner exchange techniques.