The Webmonkey.com Article: Sending Search-Engine Traffic to Your Site

In the three years I worked on HotBot, I read thousands of email messages and handled dozens of phone calls from people trying to get better placement for their sites in HotBot's search results. There is actually an entire consulting industry based on tweaking Web pages to get them to the top of search-engine results in the hope of capturing more traffic. The specialists call it search-engine optimization, but search-engine workers just label it spam because it usually involves some sort of trickery.

But after looking at search results for years, it's become obvious to me &#151 and to the search engineers I talked to while writing this article &#151 that most sites could get their pages much better placement on search engines without using deception.

Getting users to pick your site out of the sea of cluttered search results is a matter of how effectively you implement the three precepts of successful search placement: get crawled, get ranked, and get clicked.

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