How to get noticed in Google: Introduction to Search Engine Optimisation in the Era of e-Retailing

Diploma Thesis from the year 2009 in the subject Business economics - Offline Marketing and Online Marketing, grade: 1,0, Hamburg University of Ecomomy and Policy, language: English, abstract: The Internet has become a vital part of our society. More and more people are connected to the web using it for a variety of reasons. The latest statistics revealed that shopping and information research have been one of the most common Internet transactions in recent times. Not only the shopping behaviour but also the time spent on the Internet and away from other marketing distribution channels have caused a major shift in the nature of marketing and how it had been conducted. Consequently the Internet has risen to one of the leading platforms for businesses to communicate directly to its customers. Thus most businesses are now digitally represented in the form of websites to increase brand awareness and sales. Due to the vast growing number of websites in the World Wide Web (www) the majority of Internet users are now relying on search engines to find information of interest. The main tasks of these search engines are to organise the World Wide Web's digital information and to return a list of pages with relevant search results. Each query executed by the Internet user may result in millions of related search results; however research has shown that the majority of Internet users limit their research to a few matches within the first two to three pages. Therefore a fundamental goal of all Internet sites is not only to be found by search engines but more so to appear in the top position of business relevant searches. One way to achieve this is by creating search engine friendly websites that assist search engines to return queries with the most relevant results, this method is commonly known as Search Engine Optimisation (SEO). Thus the main purpose of this paper is to give an insight of some of the most important search engine optimisation techniques that not only