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 ome webmasters claim that more than a half the
total traffic on their sites comes from search engines. This
share, of course, will depend on the content of your site and the
sort of audience you're after, but in any case the importance of this
free and efficient web advertisement tool cannot be denied.
Admittedly, traffic generated by search engines always contains a
lot of "junk"---that is, useless visits from people who were mislead to
your site by "keywords divination" in search of something completely
different. However, those surfers who ended up finding what
they were looking for are a very valuable category---maybe the most
valuable of all your audience.
They might have never learned about your site from any other
source, and having found it themselves, without any advertising or
endorsement, they're more likely to be satisfied by the discovery. In
fact, search engines are the closest possible approximation to the
ideal of free and independent dissemination of information: You search
for what you need, and you get what you searched for, with no
marketing or political bias.
Of course this ideal doesn't come cheap. You'll have to learn some
techniques to lure and welcome at your site, first, automatic spiders
indexing your page for search engines, and second, search engine users
who might be interested in your content (these tasks are a bit
different, although interrelated).
This chapter contains two major sections. In the first section,
you'll get acquainted with how search engines work and what are the
main features of the major engines now in operation. In the second
section, I'll apply this knowledge to outline a set of specific
recommendations for an efficient search-friendly HTML design.
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