A couple of years back, I heard a colleague of mine in a company conference describe Google as the “big brother Google”. The phrase sounded oddly funny and I had a mental vision of a stern moustachioed man with hawk like eyes, dressed completely in black – “big brother Google is watching over you”… But since then I have heard so many people describe the all mighty search engine with the same exact words. Google dominates the online environment and controls more than 75% of the online market share.

Google gets more than 81.9 million visitors a month which makes it an enormous source of potential traffic for your online ventures. It has a plethora of exciting services, advertising avenues and promotional tools to assist people promote their business on the web. So it’s a lot more than being merely a search engine. So here are the some of the easiest ways of using Google to spread your online presence:

Getting your website ranked

1. Web Search: The easiest way of using Google for web promotion is to show up on the organic search results of its search pages. Getting listed on the highly coveted first page of Google is never easy and to do it, you will need to tweak your website by following a procedure known as Search engine Optimisation, in order to achieve the highest possible ranking on Google. For this you would need to optimise your content and get the right keyword density and also enhance your "link popularity", by building one way and reciprocal links with websites dealing with things similar to yours.

Expert Tip: An interesting fact that not many people know, is that as per the current algorithm of Google, an optimised content is one that has around 300 words in the first paragraph with about 8% of it being the keywords. So make the first paragraph of your article count.

2. Sitemaps: While it’s true that Google's search engine spiders constantly index website pages, its practically impossible to calculate precisely when they'll visit your website. Moreover, you can’t be sure that they will index all your webpages. The Google spiders are a temperamental lot. They may choose to just index the main page and ignore the rest during a single visit. So invest in optimising all your pages, and don’t just focus only on the main page.

3. Google Adwords: If you don’t have the time and money to invest in optimising your website and desire instant results then Google adwords are an excellent way of marketing your products. Google adwords are basically small text based pay per click ads that are displayed on the right side and sometimes on the top of the organic search results of Google. It just takes a few minutes to set up a Google adwords program and your website can start making good money within a few days.

Making money from Google

Google AdSense: Though it’s true that to make your site more attractive to organisations, and get lots of adds you will need huge amounts of web traffic and the promise of excellent ad placement on your site. But even don’t have a powerful web presence you can still mint money using Google. The easiest and by far the most successful way of making money is to use the Goolge AdSence program:

Google's AdSense program allows websites to make a lot of money by placing short text based ads on their web pages. These ads appear in small rectangular boxes with the words "Ads by Google" mentioned over the top. These ads basically are in accord with the content of your site. So if you are selling self help books then the ads that you will get might be from retailers selling yoga and motivational training cds. When a visitor clicks on your ad, you will be paid for that click. The click-through rates vary from ad to ad. Best of all, the program is absolutely free to join. Everything is managed by Google, you just need to pocket the cash.

These are of course some of the most rudimentary ways of using Google for website promotions. Newer and more innovative optimisation techniques are being developed by SEOs (search Engine Optimisers) on a daily basis. So in order to effectively use Google and other search engines like Yahoo and MSN get a professional SEO team to optimise your website.