How to Put Your Small Business Website on The Search Engines

by Mario Sanchez

One of the most frequent questions small business owners ask me is: Ive constructed my internet page , now, how do I acquire it on the search engines?

Actually, having your web site indexed by a search engine is not that difficult. However, generating it rank high and appear in the first results page is. Lets beginning with a brief explanation of how a search engine works:

Search engines store billions of pages in an archive called index. When a search engine conducts a search, it doesnt really search the web: it searches the index. Search engines add web pages to their index through the work of a "search bot", a powerful software script that "crawls" the web regularly, following links and adding to the index all the pages it finds.

So, step number one is to generate the search bots find your page. You might do this:

a) by directly submitting your pages URL to the search engine, or
b) by placing a backlink to your page on another page that is already in the index.

There is strong evidence that method (b) is the most workable.

Now, lets suppose that your page is already in the search engine index. How do you build it rank high? The different attempts to answer that question have given birth to a whole new discipline called Search Engine Optimization. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) involves following a series of techniques to increase the relevance of your page for certain search terms or keywords.

You must decide in advance what are the keywords you believe a user will type in the search engine window to find your page. This is probably the most important step in search engine optimization: if you pick keywords that nobody uses, or, to the contrary, keywords that are too common (too competitive), your page will never be found.

The keywords you chose must be used fairly often in different parts of your page, like the title , headings, sub-headings, and your page copy. The more your keywords appear on your page (without "over-stuffing" your page copy with them), the more relevant search engines will ponder your page to be for your selected keywords.

Now, you may be thinking that this SEO thing is too user friendly: you could just manipulate a few page elements and you would be all set. The search engines, however, are smarter than that. To avoid this kind of potential abuse, search engines rely heavily on links from other pages. In a nutshell, the more links to your page from quality pages with content related to your site you might get, the higher your page will rank. In other words, you might have a dazzling page, but if nobody is linking to it, you will not achieve high search engine rankings.

Thats it.

In summary: chose the right keywords, use them often on your page, and get as many links as you may from quality pages related to your sites content, and you will be on your way to high search engine rankings. The rest is just instant and patience.

While the target of this article is just to give you a quick overview of what Search Engine Optimization is, you might further explore this topic by reading this Do-It-Yourself Search Engine Optimization Tutorial. If you found this article useful, you may also want to expand your Search Engine Optimization understanding by reading Aaron Walls SEOBook (http://www.accordmarketing.com/seobook/ ).