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

Title The title of an HTML page helps users keep track of what they're viewing as they browse, and it also identifies page in history and bookmark lists. If you don't title a page, page will appear in browser window, bookmark lists, and history lists as Untitled Document.

Search engines also read as a user and identifies page from its title. Therefore, keywords in title help in getting good ranking in search engines. Title must not contain more than 80 words. It must be limited to 10-15 words with company name, product name and four words brief.

Keywords Many search-engine robots read contents of Keywords META tag and use information to index your pages in their databases. Some search engines put a limit on number of keywords or characters they will index, and some ignore all keywords if you go beyond limit. For this reason it's a good idea to limit your keywords to a few well-chosen words.

It is recommended to limit keywords to 255 characters, all followed by a comma with no space after comma. Put most important keywords first with different variations like capitalized and lowercase.