Google says it themselves in the first line of their company overview. Their mission is to “organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful,” not the world’s largest business directory. No one really knows every exact detail that search engines look for, but we do know that what they’re looking for is content, content, content.

Because search engines are in the business of organizing information, if you have a commodity product and want to survive in the internet world without spending hefty dollars in advertising, then you may want to get into the content game.

This is the main reason why we decided to develop Easy Website Builder with simple content management. We noticed a big increase in the number of custom development clients that were asking for a way to add and edit their own content after seeing smaller companies beat them in rankings.

We knew that if any small business or individual could easily add and edit their own content then for the first time in internet history, they would have a chance to truly beat their larger competitors if they could just consistently provide enough relevant, quality content.

Search engines use spiders to look for relevant text within the pages of your website to make a decision about its topic. To get the most from your content, you’ll want to target a keyword for each page and make sure that it appears strategically throughout the page. This is called SEO Copywriting and is a way to maximize the value of your content.

There are some quick ways to fill your content like free distribution articles from places like eZine Articles and RSS feeds which are great benefits to your customers but may not help you with search results. Original content is best because Google doesn’t want to fill up the result page with 10 copies of the same article.

Google is able to recognize duplicate content and instead of displaying all of the results will display the site with the highest page rank. Therefore, if you’re using free articles from sources like eZine Articles is great for helping your customers but probably won’t help you get traffic based on content.

However, writing articles for distribution is a fantastic way to get other to link to your site when they use your article as content. Google and Yahoo determine how popular your site is based on how many other sites have linked to it.

Getting a link on just one site with a page rank of 5 or more is worth exponentially more in terms of determining your popularity than being linked to 50 pages with a low page rank. Linking to sites deemed as part of a "bad neighborhood" can cost you ranking also. When your site is new, you won’t have a Google page rank, which is no fun, but something that everyone experiences when starting out.

The way in which pages are linked also seems to have an affect. Use text links whenever possible instead of or in addition to image links. If the anchor text on the link describes the page you’re linking to instead of “click here” or “read more.” When the spiders follow the links and find similar content to the anchor text, this works in your favor. When using image links, enter a descriptive title as the images "alt" attribute.

Some reputable companies are also stating that the length of time your domain name is purchased for also has an affect on your ranking. The logic is that if you’ve secured your domain name for 10 years as opposed to 1 year, you’re less likely to be a fly-by-night company.

nGenuity Solutions is committed to helping small businesses become successful in the ever changing online world. Drop us a line if you've got an internet business success story, a horror story, or are just plain frustrated and have a question. With your permission, we will post your story below the article so that others can learn from your experiences!

Christine Harrell is a small business internet marketing consultant and the cofounder of nGenuity Solutions. nG's flagship product Easy Website Builder gives small businesses the necessary tools to build profitable websites through real time visitor analysis and push-button web publishing.