Innumerable business plans operate side by side on the Web. But all these sites — online stores, travel agencies, virtual magazines, community portals, even modest personal sites — share three fundamental goals: Chapter 1: Meeting the Business Side of Google 17 [1] Increase presence. Putting up a Web site is like mounting a billboard in a desert: Nobody sees it. Chapter 3 explains how to network your site to greater visibility by getting other sites to link to it. In the context of Google, increasing Web presence means increasing presence in Google’s Web index — the gigantic collection of Web pages from which Google derives its search results. And that means raising the site’s PageRank, which I discuss in Chapter 3. [1] Drive traffic. Traffic is the natural extension of presence. For our purposes, presence is visibility in Google, but that presence, by itself, doesn’t do a Webmaster much good. Google visibility must be turned into traffic, which happens when Google searchers click your link. [1] Convert visitors. T raffic is enough for some Webmastering purposes. In nonrevenue sites, the goal might be just to get eyeballs on the home page. But that simple ambition is rarely the objective of a site. Almost every Webmaster wants to get visitors to do something — visit a certain page, fill out a form, join a mailing list, travel across an opt-out page, buy a product, click an ad. Whatever the aim, the conversion of traffic from unproductive visits to productive visits is the final step that nearly all Webmasters seek. Google is a powerful ally in the first two goals. Nothing increases presence like a high listing on a Google search results page. If high positioning isn’t enough to drive traffic or isn’t possible in certain searches, Google’s advertising program (AdWords) can help divert the flow of traffic in your direction. Google can’t magically convert visitors, but it does help its AdWords users track visitors who do convert.