Introduction
The first place almost anyone looks these days when they are trying to find a company to work with is a search engine. Getting found on search engines isn’t as easy as it might seem. There are a few fundamental concepts to look at when trying to get your company’s website higher in search results.
- When you submit a search on a search engine (e.g. Google, Yahoo, Bing, etc.) you are not actually searching the internet. Rather, you are searching that particular engine’s index of the web. If a website has not been submitted to a search engine by a search engine optimization specialist or doesn’t have any other websites linked to it, it will most likely not be indexed by the search engines.
- Search engines are impartial in their results. Their customers are the searchers, not the businesses that come up in results; so they will not show favoritism to one site over another.
- Most companies use search engine optimization (SEO), so you are competing against other organizations that are using similar practices.
- Search engines crawl sites with programs called spiders. Spiders are automated programs that continuously click links on the web pages the engine has indexed in order to find new content. They also search through the pages they have already indexed to check for updates.
- Simply having a website does not mean people will be able to find it.
