First, let me tell you how I got started with making money online, which led to my learning how to get my sites listed well in the search engines. It was 1997 and I had just got true internet access through my phone company. Previous to this I had been online at local Bulletin Board Systems (BBS) and was used to exchanging information with people all over the country. These places were great for posting a question and getting an answer in the days and weeks ahead. They were a lot like a forum, or in some ways, blogs, that we know of today.
Once I was online I began to experiment and click around to see what everything was all about. In my browser I found the "View Source" button and clicked it. What I saw was very, very similar code to what I had been using for years as a computerized typesetter. My original career was in graphic arts where I was a typesetter. There wasn't a lot of difference in setting up a page for a book, or an advertisement in typesetting than it was for setting up a web page. I taught myself how to write HTML code by viewing source code and then by getting information online. I soon purchased a domain name, which cost $100 back then! Today I get the same thing for about $10.
During the course of getting the my own site online I happened to see a banner ad on the top of a web page I visited. It touted how I could earn money just for putting one of those banners on my website. Well, I didn't think much of it really, but I joined this site and put one of their banner advertisements on the top of my webpage. I promptly forgot all about it and went on with my new online life and learning HTML.
Not too long later I received a letter from that company and when I opened it I found a check for $19.95. I was dumbfounded. I couldn't believe my eyes. Of course $19.95 isn't exactly a lot of money but it was for all intents and purposes free money. I had invested some minutes into putting that banner on my site and I had already made money from it.
Of course I expanded my site and learned how to get better listings in the engines and worked that one small check up into a $2,000 per month income, which was really very nice! I mention this only to explain to you how I got involved and why I wanted to have better search engine listings.
Back in those days there was a search engine called "InfoSeek". They had something called instant indexing and it worked really well. If you put the URL to your site into their submission form they would go right to the site, crawl it and index it. Right there in real-time. The advantage to this was that I could make changes to my site, submit the URL again and then instantly see how their algorithm responded to those changes. The algorithms back then were no where near as complex as they are today, but it gave me an insight into how it all worked that I would not have been able to get otherwise. I soon learned what type of things I could do to make my site be in the number one position. And I did!
There was also an engine called "Excite". Excite did not have the instant indexing feature that InfoSeek did, but I was able to figure out parts of their algorithm and how to get a website ranked well. At one point in time my website was listed in all of the first three pages of that site for an important keyword. That is all of the top 30 results pointed to my site!
Of course this scenario wouldn't happen today. I don't think anyone can get results like that anymore. To my knowledge, there is no longer any instant indexing engine, and algorithms have been updated to avoid situations where people like you and me could occupy the top 30 positions. But something else has happened that really levels the playing field, at least somewhat, across the board. The one thing all engines want to display is "the best website of all for the keyword that was searched for". I know there is more to it than just this, but the bottom line is: if you can create an excellent site that meets the needs of, or answers the questions of, the people searching chances are good you will get to the top spot on many of the major engines.
Robert D Kelsey works on SEO in CT where he operates Ethical SEO Service and writes on many topics from SEO and online marketing through any topic that his clients need as part of the ongoing website optimization campaigns for their market. Search engine algorithms are here because people abused the system and tried to get their sites listed where they didn't belong or didn't have the merit to be. The bottom line though has always been that a quality site with pertinent quality information is going to do well because it will meet the needs of what was searched for.
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