How to Put Your Small Business Website on The Search Enginesby Mario Sanchez
One of most frequent questions small business owners ask me is: I've designed my website, now, how do I get it on search engines?
Actually, having your site indexed by a search engine is not that difficult. However, making it rank high and appear in first results page is. Let's start 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 doesn't really search web: it searches index. Search engines add web pages to their index through work of a "search bot", a powerful software program that "crawls" web regularly, following links and adding to index all pages it finds.
So, step number one is to make search bots find your page. You can do this:
a) by directly submitting your page's URL to search engine, or b) by placing a link to your page on another page that is already in index.
There is strong evidence that method (b) is most effective.
Now, lets suppose that your page is already in search engine index. How do you make 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 relevance of your page for certain search terms or keywords.
You must decide in advance what are keywords you believe a user will type in search engine window to find your page. This is probably most important step in search engine optimization: if you pick keywords that nobody uses, or, to contrary, keywords that are too common (too competitive), your page will never be found.
The keywords you chose must be used often in different parts of your page, like title, headings, sub-headings, and your page copy. The more your keywords appear on your page (without "over-stuffing" your page copy with them), more relevant search engines will consider your page to be for your selected keywords.