Before putting any effort whatsoever into creating any web pages you should have considered how you intend to get people to visit and ‘consume’ your content. It doesn’t matter if you’re in business, indulging in a hobby or trying to inform others with your web pages you are going to want to attract the attention of other people. You need a significant proportion of your traffic to come from the search engines. If you are just starting out there is no better form of traffic than the type that comes from the search engines as it wont cost you a penny and it very targeted.

Search engines make money through presenting searchers with answers they are looking for. The more relevant and precise the search results the better the user experience and therefore the greater the chance the user will user will return. User loyalty directly translates to a stronger brand and higher revenues for the search engines. You and your web pages face a similar challenge.Position yourself in the mind of your users as a relevant source of information and make them visit over and over again.

So what should you do?. There are two paths to achieving this and the good news is you can if you have the money do both. You can submit high quality content to the web or you can use advertising often called Pay Per Click (PPC) or in the case of Google ‘adwords’.

As far as all of the search engines are concerned nothing exists on the internet without a keyword or a key phrase. The user typing a keyword or phrase into the search engine starts the search process. The search engine performs a look up on its enormous indexes to fetch a list of web pages that contain instances of the keyword and returns them in a predefined order of relevance. The search engines decision about what pages to display in the results are based upon two key factors relevance and authority.

Relevance means the page contains the keywords and authority means the page has back links to it from other web pages. Search engines calculate the position of a web page in a returned list of results by measuring the authority and number of backlinks to each page.

Back links are the most important factor in optimizing your pages for the search engines.

Back links have two key uses – influencing the search engines ranking decisions and directing traffic to your web site from other internet properties. Users will follow links they find in content if the back link is labelled with relevant text. This text in the back link is known as ‘anchor text’ and this too is taken into consideration by the search engines. Back links can vary in value.

Back links from web pages that contain content related to your web page have an impact on the authority of your web page.The higher the authority of the web page ‘sending’ the back link the more authority is likely to received by your web pages.