People aren't flocking to the search engines just to look for information these days... they've often got buying on their mind! According to Enquiro Search Solutions, about 55% of all purchases made over the Internet are a result of people finding products or services via the search engines. That's more than half of all online sales!

You can see how a top position in the search results can really secure the success of your business.

But which search engines should you focus on? Well, even though there are literally hundreds of search engines on the Web, only four really matter:

• Google
• Yahoo
• Windows Live Search
• Ask

According to Hitwise, these online search giants account for more than 98% of searches conducted by US Internet users!

Over 90% of Internet users start with search engines when they're looking for information online, so you want to make sure your site ranks as high as possible in their listings.

There are two ways to use search engines to drive traffic to your site: getting ranked in the "organic" search results, and using pay-per-click (PPC) programs like Google AdWords (http://adwords.google.com) and Yahoo! Search Marketing (http://searchmarketing.yahoo.com).

• Use pay-per-click (PPC) advertising to drive traffic to your site. Pay-per-click ads are one of the best marketing tools available on the Web. They can drive a swarm of highly targeted traffic to your site in a matter of minutes... for potentially very little cost! You'll learn everything you need to know to make PPC work for your site in Step 7.

• Optimize your site for the search engines. You'll need to make sure your top-performing keywords are embedded strategically throughout your copy, as well as in your HTML code.

This ensures the search engine "spiders" have no problem reading, understanding, and indexing your site — plus your potential customers will be able to easily find you when they're searching online.

You should start with PPC, as it's the best way to start driving immediate traffic to your site.

Once you have some paid traffic coming to your site, and you've figured out which keywords are performing best, you'll want to optimize your web pages for those keywords so that your site starts showing up in the organic search engine results as well.

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