You've finally finished building your website and published it online on your great new domain. So why aren't you getting any new visitors or sales?
Because no one actually knows it's there! Just because your website is accessible through a domain name doesn't mean anyone actually knows it's there. Major search engines such as Google find out about new sites by crawling known sites with their spiders at regular intervals, which is basically techno-speak for saying that they gather all your web site's content, analyze it, and present it back to us in the form of search results.
Here's the catch: since search engines can only find your site by visiting links on other sites, major search engines will not know about your site unless another site that's already listed in their search index links to your site (there are some exceptions).
Google (and now nearly all other search providers also) goes even further, sorting search results by (1) keyword relevance and (2) the number of quality links that point back to your site. There are other factors when it comes to search engine rankings, but these 2 are the main ones you should be concerned with. The work involved in optimizing your ranking in search engines is called Search Engine Optimization (SEO) or Search Engine Marketing (SEM).
