T he content is cool, the gifs are animated and the back-end applications are tightly bound to the server. And yet, in spite of the time you've invested, you seem to have created a stealth Web site. All that wonderful functionality is going to waste because nobody can find you. But when people use Internet search engines to find you, they come up with 126,023 links to other sites that mention your company, your products or services, or your subject matter. The actual link to your site is number 126,021.
Search engines are highly pragmatic.
They don't all work the same way but are, by nature, very programmatic. In so doing, the search engines actually evaluate your site for the prospective customer on the other side of the mouse. It's not hard to finagle the search-engine rankings to get a better slot at or near the top of the page. But that raises an interesting problem, which occurs right where three distinct needs converge. First comes the need for Web site publishers to make their Web sites visible.