How a Search Engine Works

Today, the 8 disciplines of online marketing all intersect at landing pages and optimization practices. Content management, conversion optimization, key term searches and the like are all under your company's control using Google Webmaster Tools and Google Analytics.

When you are ready to be indexed by Google, there are a few straight forward steps to take.

1. You must authenticate with Google that you are the owner of the website.

2. You must install tracking code into your website.

All of the instructions for achieving these steps are available online. To authenticate you can either access the html of your website and paste a snippet of code provided by Google or you can ask them to visit your domain provider and look into the background of your domain for proof that you are the owner.

With certain Content Management Services such as Wix and Wordpress, you cannot access the html source code (because all users of the same template depend on the same code). This means that your ability to track to a granular level is somewhat diminished. Weebly and Jimdo do allow access, which makes them a little more versatile in this manner.

Armed with the information that an indexed website brings, you can tell what key words people used to access your website (so you can adjust yours accordingly), you can tell what parts of your website are performing better than others and you can run A/B splits on landing pages to see what works better (again, to adjust accordingly).

Analytics is dull, dull, dull. Until it is done right, that is. Once established, analytics contain so much hidden goodness that everything else becomes easier - including getting the buy-in you want from the executive branch for doing really great stuff online like conversion optimization and search engine marketing.

Google has the tiger by the tail for now, and other search engines are out there that you may want to register with, but when you want some hard facts on which to base your online decisions, you can't beat a nicely laid out dashboard from Google and analysis from your marketing guru.

There is no shame in being the biggest and most powerful presence online.

Data rules.