The new customers you’re seeking are very likely to use a search engine to try to find you. According to a study by Jupiter Research, 82% of online shoppers know exactly what they want to buy by the time they hit the web, and over half of them use a search engine to track it down.

Unfortunately, it’s difficult to stand out in the very crowded search results. Try doing a Google search on the name of your profession. It’s very likely the search will come back with millions of listings. Before your new business can find you in that haystack, you need to know how search engines work.

Get Indexed
The very first step to showing up in search engines is to get yourself seen by them – getting “indexed� in the industry parlance. But only 10% of the Internet is indexed. Conservative estimates show that the “World Wide Web� has over 30 billion pages, growing at 10 million pages a day. Google – the search engine with the highest number of indexed pages – has 3 billion pages indexed and is only adding 1 million pages a day to its index.

Every Market Hardware website is submitted to all the major search engines and up to a hundred of the minor ones.

The bad news is that indexing is not enough .

First, It can take the major search engines weeks or months to index a site once it’s submitted, and there’s really no way to hurry them up.

More important, since most searchers never look past the first two pages of a search, you have to do more than just been seen; you have to win a fairly high placement in the rankings. For that, you have to make your site search-friendly.

Have “Spider Food�
Spiders are automatic programs sent out by search engines which use the information gleaned to help establish rankings. Unfortunately, many sites don’t give the search engines anything to index. Text embedded in Flash or graphics and photos or fancy code can’t be indexed at all.

The more content you can provide in plain text, the better for your search engine rankings.

Market Hardware provides appropriate content to start with as well as content that’s customized for each client.

Additionally, we’ve built the platform that our sites use to be search engine friendly:

*We don’t obfuscate information in Flash, graphics or fancy code

*Each site lives in it’s own domain instead of being invisible to search engines behind hidden redirects and frames

Get Noticed: Two types of Search Results

• Natural search results. These are typically in the center “main bodyâ€� of search results

• Paid results. In most search engines, these are along the top and/or the right-hand side of search results. These are called “Pay-per-clickâ€� or PPC ads as advertisers pay search engines based on the number of clicks their ad generates.