Making use of search engines to send prospects to your web page is one technique of
how to make money online and is often labeled as search engine optimization or SEO. There are plenty other methods to acquire prospects other than using search engines, including forums, blogs, content syndication, article directories, classified ads and lots more.
Anytime I refer to search engines, I mean Google or Yahoo or MSN or other search engines. Google, however, is by far the biggest search engine with approximately 80% of all search engine traffic.
Google values or prioritizes pages of a website and not the website as a whole. It's really crucial for a webmaster to understand this particularly if you want to know how to make money online. A website could include hundreds of different pages and Google would crawl every page and make a determination about the relevance of that page and whether that page will come up when somebody does a search.
The words someone types 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 determined by the keyword terms and are confirmed to be relevant by Google. Google determines this by browsing the hundreds of millions of web pages in cyberspace and seeks out content pertinent to the keyword search terms.
The results are also termed as SERPS or search engine results pages. Within 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 periodically at the top placed above the free organic results.
The paid or sponsored ads are actually at no cost to the advertiser until a person clicks on the ad. The advertiser is then charged a fee for each click. This is called pay per click advertising or PPC and the advertiser has bid for a spot on the page.
Interestingly, the lowest percentage 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 reasonably soon 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 discover as you learn how to make money online.
Google loves content and will repay you with excellent 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 liked and relevant and will reward you in the SERPS for this too. The higher ranked the site linking back to you the better Google likes it.
Probably the best way to get content on the internet and get a high ranking in the SERPS for free is to write an article around 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 insert a link to your website in the resource or bio box in the article directory so readers of the article can find you.
Another benefit to having an article on a high authority article directory is that other website owners will probably 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 grow back links to your website.