Internet search engines exist to organize the seemingly immeasurable amount of information available on the web. They direct people to pages that are relevant to their searches, pages that discuss the exact keywords they are looking for. For a business that receives the majority of its clientele from search engines, search engine rankings can make or break an e-commerce company.

Search Engines

Search engine optimization (SEO) is the marketing technique of enhancing a website and its content in order to increase the chances of achieving a high rank on search engine result pages (SERP) under relevant keyword searches.

Search engines are very secretive about their criteria and ranking systems, they continuously update and revise their algorithms (a mathematical formula used to determine which web pages are displayed in search results), and therefore, there is less likelihood of webmasters and search engine optimizers being able to achieve higher rankings by manipulation and spamming.

Each search engine has its own formula and criteria for indexing and ranking pages. One can analyze SERPs and backward links (all the links pointing at a particular web page) and attempt to determine a search engine