Online Services

Making use of search engines to send prospects to your web page is one technique of how to make money online and may also be labeled as search engine optimization or SEO. There are numerous other methods to acquire visitors other than using search engines, such as forums, blogs, content syndication, article directories, classified ads and lots more.

When ever I refer to search engines, I really mean Google or Yahoo or MSN or the like. Google, however, is probably the biggest search engine with nearly 80% of all search engine traffic.

Google scores or prioritizes pages of a website and not the website altogether. It's particularly important for a marketer to understand this specifically if you desire to grasp how to make money online. A website could contain hundreds of different pages and Google would read each page and make a determination about the value of that page and whether that page will come up when anybody does a search.

The descriptions someone puts into the Google search bar or any search engine's search bar is considered a keyword or keyword phrase. The results of this search are relevant to the keyword terms and are confirmed to be relevant by Google. Google achieves this by crawling the millions and millions of web pages in cyberspace and looks for content relevant to the keyword search terms.

The results are also known as SERPS or search engine results pages. Inside the SERPS are two kinds of results. There are the free organic results in the to the left in the middle and the Adwords ads on the right side and sometimes at the top placed above the free natural results.

The paid or sponsored ads are actually zero cost to the advertiser until somebody clicks on the ad. The advertiser is then charged a fee for each click. This is known as pay per click advertising or PPC and the advertiser has bid for a spot on the page.

Interestingly, the lowest portion of clicks are the paid ads on the right then the paid ads on the top get just a few points more but the free organic ads bring the highest clicks on average. A marketer can, however, get a paid ad on the page really fast for a fee but the organic ad placements especially on page one, take time, effort and skill to obtain. But, they are worth every bit of it as you'll realize as you learn how to make money online.

Google loves content and will compensate you with high rankings in the SERPS. Google also loves back links. What I mean is that when other websites are linking back to your site Google believes your site is valued and relevant and will reward you in the SERPS for this too. The more established the site linking back to you the better Google likes it.

Probably the easiest way to get content on the web and get a high ranking in the SERPS for no cost is to write an article pertaining to a certain keyword, as long as it's not too broad of a keyword or too competitive, and then publish to a high authority article directory like Ezine Articles.

You will place a link to your web page in the resource or bio box in the article directory so targeted prospects can find you.

One additional benefit to having an article on a high ranking article directory is that other website owners will eventually link back to your article and you'll get valuable back links.

You now know how to make money online using the search engines so go and originate content and build back links to your website.