Many people inexperienced in internet marketing wonder why your search engine positioning is important.  As they become more involved online, however, it soon becomes apparent that the difference in cost between free and paid advertising can be considerable.

Let’s look at way to explain this that most people can understand. Let’s assume that you have a national newspaper that offers two types of adverts.  With one you can pay for every time somebody looks at your advert, or even a fixed sum for every thousand people who read that particular newspaper, and with the second you get free advertising if your advert is good enough to attract readers.

In the first case your advert is bound to be seen, but not necessarily by people interested in what you have to offer, and in the second it will only be seen if you construct a good advert offering people exactly what they are seeking.

Probably the former is the better deal, where you pay for each time somebody decides to look at your advert, but unless that advert is highly targeted to exactly the product you are selling, you are likely paying for views that will not lead to sales. However, what would be your response if you were informed that you could have a free advert if the newspaper editors believed that you product was exactly what their readers were looking for?  You would jump at it, and make sure that your advert was designed to attract just these readers.

That is what search engines are offering you, by providing good search engine positioning if you can demonstrate that your web page is just what the user of the search engine is looking for.  If you can do that, you will be listed in the search engine.  However, there are so many other people like you trying to advertise on that search engine, that you have a lot of work to do if you are to persuade that search engine that your page should be positioned higher than the others for any particular topic.

For topic read keyword, and for your advertisement read your web page that is optimized to provide good relevant information about that keyword. You could take the option of using Google Adwords, for example, as a pay per click advertising program or of paying for advertising on ezines (the first option in the second paragraph above), but if you can persuade the search engines that you web page can provide the information needed by the user of that search engine, then you get your advertising free (the second option).

Taking the newspaper example again, a front page advert is far better than one amongst the classifieds in the middle of the paper. That is equivalent of search engine Page 1 listing, and is what all of your competitors are also looking for. However, any free advertising is better than none, and even getting your web pages listed anywhere on a search engine such as Google is going to be of benefit to you.  The search engine positioning, however, will determine how much traffic that listing will provide to you, or in newspaper terms, how many readers will actually read your advert and perhaps respond to it.

Have you ever seen these newspaper ads with a form for you to fill in?  Yes?  Well you get the same online, and you should also provide a form like that.  If somebody clicks on your listing, you want to make sure that you at least get their name and email address so that you can get back to them even if they didn’t stay much longer on your web page than it took to fill in your form.  If you offer them an incentive to fill in the form, then even better, because more people will fill it in to get the incentive, which could be a free ebook, a special report or some free software. Even a regular newsletter attracts people and persuades them to join your email list.

It is all very well being listed in the index of a search engine like Google for a specific search term but it is the position of that listing that is important to you.  Although a Page 1 listing is best, you can also get good results if you are listed on the second page since many people will look two pages deep for the information they are looking for.  Nor is it necessary to be listed at the very top of Page 1, since almost everybody will scan down the page until they see a listing that appears to provide them with the information they are looking for.

Your page title is what generally appears as the heading for the listing, and either your ‘Description’ meta tag or the first few words of your web page will appear under it. Then will come your web page URL.  All of these should be designed to attract somebody seeking the information that you provide, hence the importance of your Title tag that appears right after the HEAD tag and before the BODY of the text.

Whether or not you believe that search engines use your ‘Description’ meta tag, believe me that they do. Word it in such a way that your potential visitors will feel compelled to click to your web page for the information that they are looking for.

Your web page URL should also be carefully chosen.  While the URL itself might not affect your position very much, it does make a difference to human beings.  If you are seeking information on lighthouses, would you rather click to a page entitled ‘/lighthouses.html’ or one with the file name ‘/shipping.html’ (for example).

These are only the minimum requirements for your web page (search engines list individual pages, not complete websites) to be listed in a good position, and there is a lot more needed before you can expect a Page 1 listing.  However, if you want the free advertising that the likes of Google can give you rather than pay for it, then it is important for you to understand why your search engine positioning is important, and how to achieve a sufficiently high listing for you to make best use of that free advertising that a high search engine positioning can provide you with.