How do I make my web site show up in Google’s search results?

It sounds like a simple question, but in fact search engine optimization has become a very complicated subject these days.

The two major players in the search engine business are Google and Yahoo. Google accounts for about 70 percent of all searches online, second is Yahoo with searches at about 20 percent, followed by MSN Live Search at 6 percent and Ask and others with 4 percent of all searches.

To show up in the Google search results as well as the search results of the other search engines, your website of course needs to be listed in their databases. But simply submitting your site to Google or Yahoo is like purchasing a lottery ticket – it will put you in the drawing, but it doesn’t mean you are the winner of a top position. Search Engine Submission of a website simply means that the search engine knows your website exist.

If you have no or little competition you might already rank well for your particular terms without any additonal efforts, but if you are providing services similar to many other companies, you probably won’t find your website on Google’s or Yahoo’s search result page anywhere near the top. So, going back to our example with the lottery ticket – what can you do to increase your odds of winning?

The answer is: Search Engine Optimization. Optimize your website and you are likely to get a top position in the search engines for your particular keywords. Without a proactive approach to optimizing your web presence, you website’s only visitors will be you and your family and friends.

How does search engine optimization for my website work, and what are ‘keywords’?

In the beginning of the internet, all you needed to do to rank well with the search engines was to put a ‘META’ keywords list in your HTML code. As the search engines search algorithms become more and more sophisticated, this unfortunately doesn’t work anymore. These days you have to work hard and smart to get the search engines to rank your website high.

The ranking of your website in the search engines is determined by two important factors: On-Site and Off-Site Search Engine Optimization.

On-Site Optimization means you need to ensure that your website’s content is relevant and indexable by the search engines. For example, your website must have relevant content containing the keywords you want to be found for on Google or Yahoo. For the HTML part of your website it means among other factors that you need a targeted Title and Meta description, headers and image alt tags. It also helps to ‘tell’ the search engine robots how you want them to crawl your website by creating robots and sitmap files.

As your ranking in the search engines however is mainly determined by the ‘link popularity’ of your website, it is even more important to do Off-Site Optimization. Think of ‘links’ to your website as ‘votes’. The more other relevant and high ranking websites link to yours, the more popular it will become in the eyes of the the search engines and the higher they will position it in their search results. You can get a good part of such ‘backlinks’ to your website by listing your website url in local or specialty directories, submitting it to the many social bookmarking websites, writing articles with links to your website, or posting and commenting in Blogs and Forums. Very important is here to have a keyword relevant ‘anchor text’ in your link. This means, don’t link to your website with the (in the eyes of the search engines useless) standard terms ‘click here for more information’ or ‘Read more about ABC company’, but using your keywords as shown in the following example:

GOOD: < a href="http://www.websitesare.us" >Web Design in San Diego< /a >

BAD: < a href="http://www.websitesare.us" >click here to visit our website< /a >.

When your website is optimized On-Site, and you also do strategical and consistent Off-Site promotion, you will see a dramatic improvement in your website’s positioning in the search engines.