General
Why Search Engines Are Important?
By Jason Cunningham
Feb 8, 2008 - 2:07:36 PM

As a webmaster, you want to get targeted online visitors to your online properties (websites). Unless you buy an enormous amount of web traffic, you should expect the majority of your website visitors to come from the search engines, until your web domains become household names, such as ESPN or Bankrate.

Unless an individual is familiar with a specific website, the majority of times a person will use some form of a search engine, in order to find what they are looking for. Needless to say, most of us have a particular search engine that we like using and it might be our internet homepage; the page that appears when we use a web browser (i.e. Internet Explorer). While there are other search engines available on the internet, the majority of searches are done using Google followed by Yahoo and MSN. Therefore, it is important to be listed on these search engines.

What does it cost a webmaster to be listed in the top five searches on Yahoo or Google, for a particular search term? In actuality, the answer is always no. There is no empirical evidence that any of the leading search engines have taken payment so that a website can rank higher on a search engine. Consequently, unless you decide to advertise on a search engine, all of your web traffic is free of charge. Unfortunately, being a webmaster is hard work if you want to make money or wish to attract online visitors solely to provide information

You never want to be banned from the search engines or penalized for not following their rules. In most instances, the major search engines have similar guidelines for webmasters to follow. You will need to create a robots.txt file; otherwise, you might get dropped from the search results as I did from one search engine, and I have yet to get back in that particular index. Also, do not cheat; I know a few webmasters that have been caught. By not being listed on the search engines, it cost them some income. So, you should read the webmaster guidelines with great care and if you have any doubts about a particular technique, then e-mail the search engines for the proper answer.

Many webmasters depend on the search engines for almost all of their web traffic. Because of this reason, you should take advantage of the free traffic by delivering web pages that comply with the standards of the major search engines including Google, Yahoo and MSN. Without the search engines, most of us would not be familiar with as many websites; and therefore, as webmasters, it would be harder for us to create a “brand” for our web properties.