If advertising is the meat & potatoes of bringing visitors to your site, the searches are gravy. If you get some activity generated, that's fine, but don't count on it being there. There are several large Internet Search engines such as Google and Yahoo which have special software that reads web site after web site and catalogs all the information it reads in a giant database. They "score" each site not only on what words are used, but where they appear, e.g. the words "car security" appearing in the heading of a web page are considered more important than the words "car security" appearing in paragraph text. When a person enters the specific keywords they are interested in, the software looks for matches in the database (we are talking about millions of web pages!).
Sites that use the words in their TITLE tag, i.e. what appears in your broswer as the site name.
Sites that use the words in a major H1 heading tag.
Sites that use the words in the first few paragraphs.
When you are designing your page think about what words you think a person would use if they wanted to find a site such as yours -- then make sure you use those words often, in different combinations, and on the heading of your home page. Don't emphasize the company name, emphasize the keywords! And yes, some things never change, a site called "AAA Car Security" will still be listed first among sites with a similar score!
There are also special parts of a page, not normally visible, called META tags, which must occur inside the HEAD tag. These allow the web page designer to tell the search engine what description to display and what keywords are important about this site -- a very useful tool. For the NAME part of the META tag you would use "keywords", for the CONTENT part you would give the words specific to your site. Use the word "description" when you are supplying the text you would like to see the search engine display in its report, e.g. if you were listing rooms for the olympics:
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