How do you make your website known? How do you make yours stand out among millions of others? You can spend lots of money on advertisement, but that will not work if you don’t have money to spare on advertising. So what do you do? Make search engines work for you, that’s what!

Google, Yahoo, MSN, Lycos, Altavista - you want to be at top of their results list. The higher your site is in a search results page, better chances that it will be visited. The science behind making your site a popular search result is called Search Engine Optimization (SEO). Don’t worry, though - even if SEO is referred to as a science, it is not all that complicated. You just need to take note of a few things, and before you know it, your site will have more visitors than you could ever dream of.

Here are five tips to ensure that your site would be a favorite of search engines all around cyber world.

1. Give importance to substance over appearance.

Do you want to share your knowledge on a subject that you have authority on? Do you want to sell products? Do you want to build an online shrine for your favorite actress? Whatever topic you have chosen for your website, make sure that you are able to give useful information on it. Search engines work by scanning sites for keywords. They search text and completely ignore everything else. So if you have made your site rich in colors, don’t forget to make it rich in content as well. After all, a beautiful layout can make people look, but relevant content is what will make them stay. Remember, in this day and age: content is king!

2. Know your topic well

This author’s open-source marketing plan, as announced on June 29, 2005, is mainly for small and medium-sized businesses. By keeping it simple, this author hoped it can be useful to businesses with a limited budget, can get "more bang for buck".

The objective is to gain 3000+ inbound links within one year by sending:- A. 48 free-reprint articles in one year. B. 4 free e-books in one year. C. 4 free software similar to corporate gifts or freebies D. 6 press releases in one year.

Getting many inbound links is vital as a hits generator - sources for new visitors. Sometimes, internet users on reading articles, e-books or using freebies may visit originating site directly.

The site www.seecrets.biz started in early May 2005 with one article. In following two months, ten articles were submitted and two press releases were issued. All these are available at this author’s site with dates concerned.

After two months, over 300 inbound links were obtained. It is difficult to be accurate because Google does not list back-links from sites with PageRank of less than three. During first few weeks, counting was easy when number was less than 100.

The results from Google, Yahoo and MSN search engines on July 9, 2005 at 0800GMT are as follows (the figures within brackets represent total competing pages):

"Seecrets" got 1(7570), 1(1040) and 1(3681). "Stan seecrets" got 4(338), 1(215) and 1(737). "Joe Nogood" got 4(694000), 8(1330) and 1(2447). "Rebrand software" got NR(84000), 15(88800) and 11(31124). "Open source marketing plan" got NR(26.7million), 10(5.2million) and 12(1million). "Open source marketing plan" got 3&4, 6&7 and 2 through Press Release sites. (Please note that "NR" means not ranked in top 20.).

The first three keywords (seecrets, stan seecrets and joe nogood) are important to this author’s site’s brand.

The keywords (joe nogood, rebrand software and open source marketing plan) were only introduced in late June 2005. The last two are relevant to site’s activities.

These are preliminary results. Readers can always inspect this author’s website and decide that no unfair or illegal methods were used. Knowledgeable readers should be able to see meta-tags with ease.

This author’s take