Search Engines are hard to tame, that's for sure. But if you can get on their good side, search can be your biggest ally when it comes to generating tons of free traffic to your business web site. Not many people understand how search engines think. So, search engine "optimization" ends up either ignored or left up to highly paid experts.

You can do this yourself, or at least very affordably

Here's a quick tip that you can put to use immediately that doesn't require any specialized knowledge of the Internet. You can do this yourself if you know how to program HTML. Or, if you don't, you can hire someone far more affordably than a Web Marketing guru to handle this for you. In fact, if you're considering hiring a Web promotion expert to maximize your website's placement in the search engines, you're really better off doing as much of the housecleaning yourself as you can, before you call in the big guns. Otherwise, you'll waste your money having them take care of trivial things you could handle yourself.

What Do Search Engines Think About?

Before I let you in on this simple secret, let me explain a little bit about how search engines "think". You see, the job of a search engine, like Google, for example, is to make sure that people find a web page that's incredibly likely to have the exact information they're hunting for. The search engine does this by measuring and comparing two aspects of billions of pages: Popularity and Relevance.

Don't get me wrong, just because it's two things, doesn't make it easy. To compute popularity and relevance requires tons and tons of processing power. In fact, Google only updates its popularity information once a month or so because it's such a huge effort.

Is Your Page "Relevant"?

To determine whether your page comes up when someone searches, Google asks of your page: "Are you relevant to this search?" For example, a certain page might be the most popular page about socks and have the best information about socks you would ever want. But, if you're looking for a new muffler, that page is not at all relevant, now is it?

Is this Accident Making Your Whole Site Less Relevant?

Having the world's best information on mufflers isn't enough to get you to the top of the heap, either... not if you make this easy mistake that seems to happen on nearly every web site at one time or another.

What is this silly mistake made on too many websites? Broken Links. You might recognize the error you see when you click on one and your browser says "404 Not Found" or "404 page not found".

Intelligent search engines will subtract points from your search relevance if you have broken links on your web site. Not just your home page, mind you ? anywhere on your site at all. You see, the search engines view broken links as "stale" content. And as we covered earlier, the job of the search engine is to give the best possible results.

Maybe you've kept old links around when your web site was redesigned. Maybe you've linked to a buddy's business, and now that web site is long gone. Maybe it was a simple typo... Hey! It could happen to anybody.

In the end, having broken links anywhere on your website will hurt your placement in search engine results. Before calling in an expert to help you with your search engine placement, make sure you double and triple check your web site for broken links.

Daiv Russell is a Web Marketing Strategist at Envision Software ? http://www.Envision-Web-Promotion.com - Learn the secrets behind Envision's 4C Web Marketing System and see how we turned our web site from a dull, zero-traffic dead zone into a lead-generating powerhouse. http://www.EnvisionSoftware.com/Internet-Marketing-Secrets.asp