Not much longer than two decades ago the Internet came into the life of people and by now for most it took over the position of radio, TV, phone, maps, postal service. A lot of things that we thought couldn’t be done in other ways are now done through the virtual space. Since the internet took the world by storm it has become the number one way to do things such as the following:

• Keeping in touch with our family
• Reading news
• Looking for employment
• Buying products

So one might think that there are huge business possibilities in the online services – and one would be right.

Internet advertising is one of these huge possibilities. Just as in all the “old media” that presents the new fashionable products on the television, tells us about it on the radio or delivers samples and colourful fliers to our post box , the world wide web can do all this and more – but we need to learn the rules this virtual world is governed by if we want to get ahead in it.

Once you put something on the “net” it will be there for everyone to see. But with millions of sites online it is not very likely that someone will find yours just by mere chance. This is where services such as Search Engine Optimization come in to the picture. This process is rewriting and reformatting a webpage in a way that the things the page is about becomes more visible for the search engines. And to be honest, not many people would go and browse through all 25 pages of found sites in Google; they would probably pick the site most to their liking on the first page.

Search engines use complicated algorithms and a number of automated programs to decide what is relevant and what is not. These programs look for certain keywords that they then use to rank the sites. So in a way you can have a great site, if it is not built with the thinking of the programs that rate the site in mind, it will not seem as worthy to mention to them. This is why it is a key feature in every site that intends to attract the greatest traffic possible (and most sites do, be it your car-rental company, your beauty salon or your personal travel blog) to be built in a way that “attracts the attention” of the programs ranking them amongst other websites. The higher you rank, the more visitors you will receive, the more visitors you receive the more revenue you will get. It is as simple as that.

Of course there are other methods, for example you can rent ad-spaces on other more popular sites, and in fact a lot of the major online service providers are in this business – namely holding auctions to give popular keywords to the highest bidder. This through a very banal example works like if someone types “travel” in the search engine and you won the bidding for this keyword, then it is likely that this person will meet your banner. Of course in reality it is much more complicated, it depends on your location (it would make little sense to show your New York based beauty parlour’s ad to someone that is at the moment in Melbourne), time of the day and so on.

One might conclude that having a site well optimized for the search engines is a much safer bet, but what is for sure it will only improve on the visibility on your site.

Author Bio: Sophie works for an Internet Advertising agency but in her spare time loves to write about her knowledge of the SEO world.