The art of developing a website to attain a viewable listing in the search engines is known as Search Engine Optimisation.

What is a viewable Listing?
A viewable listing is a position in a search engine that viewers actually get to see. For example, If you type "job application letters" in your favourite search engine (typically Google, Lycos, All the web, Alta Vista) you will probably find a listing from Engineers-International.com on the first page. Essentially everyone that conducts that search are exposed to their link. The chances that people will view the first few sites and find what they are after is quite high. The number of people going to the second page for a search falls off dramatically. Those that go to the third page are less than 10% of the visitors that went to the second page. Less than 1% of these go on to the fourth page.

A viewable listing is therefore a listing in the top 30, preferably in the top 10. 

What exactly is a search engine?
A Search engine is an index of websites created by software known as spiders or crawlers visiting a website, testing links and sending the information back to the index. When the index updates, it will add all these websites it found to their list, ready to serve the many users that rely on it as their information source. Search engines are different to directories in as much as directories are generally compiled by human editors who go and check the website before adding it to the index. 

What is best, A Search Engine or a directory ?
It is impossible to gratify that question without first understanding the difference in the content of their index. A Search Engine is likely to list half finished web sites with broken links and poor presentation. A directory on the other hand is likely to be loaded with quality websites built by professionals. On this example it would be easier to say that a directory would be better, but the directory content may be largely commercial and have few technical entries. The directory, by way of being human edited may also be slower to update than a fully automated search engine, so The choice is yours.

There are a large number of resources available on the internet that deal with Search Engine optimisation and you will soon learn it is a tricky task that is considerably time consuming. Even if you decide to build your website yourself, you may find a good return on investment in contracting a professional to handle this.

As a matter of interest, the preferred search environment at A-K Strategic Business Solutions is the Google search engine. It updates regularly has the largest amount of web pages indexed than any other Search Engine or directory.

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