Most of us know by now that having a website doesn't mean much if nobody knows about it. There are many ways to market your website online, including pay-per-click advertising and banner ads on other websites. But by far the most effective and comparatively speaking cheapest way of getting your website "out there" is to optimize the content so that search engines enjoy "crawling" your website and therefore rank your website highly compared to your competitors.

A very quick crash-course in search engines: Search engines like to show their users the most relevant content for a specific keyword. They make use of so-called "spiders" to automatically visit your website to see what your site is about. Only in rare circumstances will a human user from a search engine company actually visit your website. You can imagine that for human users it would be impossible to physically go through millions and millions of websites on a regular basis to check what they're about.

Therefore, the search engine spider will see which words are repeated frequently throughout the content of your website. If your website is about vacuum cleaners, but you often refer to the term "lawnmowers" in your website's content (more than "vacuum cleaners"), the spider will incorrectly assume that your website is about lawnmowers.

But wait, there's much more to it than just that. It's also about how you use the keyword. If you use the keyword "vacuum cleaner" six times on your page, but you are using "lawnmower" in a header to a page or in italics or bold text, the search engine might still think that your site is about lawnmowers instead. The proper use of keywords in the title of your website, as alternative text on images (that pops up when you move your mouse over it), the distribution of your keyword throughout your page (top, middle and bottom), the use of your keyword in text-links to other pages on your website as well as the use of your keyword in headers, are all important factors that search engines look for.

No, that's not it, yet! This covers probably only around ten percent of search engine optimization. The next item would be keyword popularity. By keyword popularity I mean to say you should investigate how popular your targeted keyword is among search engine users. For example, I might be very impressed with myself for optimizing a site for the term "blue socks" so that my site shows up as number one in each and every search engine when you type in the term "blue socks" and hit Search. But if on average only two people worldwide searches monthly for the term "blue socks", will I get the necessary traffic from search engines? The answer is a very clear "NO". If I instead see that 2500 people worldwide are searching for the term "sock suppliers" monthly, I would be much better off optimizing my site for this term, right? Correct, but also bear in mind that more popular search phrases normally brings with them more competition. In other words, it might take more of a constant effort to optimize a website for the term "property" than for the term "cape town property", because you are competing with others who are also trying to be number one for that keyword.

What we've learned so far: We need to make a website more than just user-friendly, but also search engine-friendly by using keywords properly throughout our site, and thorough keyword research is very important.

And now for the most important bit, namely link popularity. A search engine such as Google (the biggest and therefore most important search engine in the world) places an incredible amount of importance on how many sites link to yours (reciprocal linking), the quality of those sites as well as the way in which they link to your site. In other words, it is very important to exchange links with other sites with similar content to yours. That is, you put a clickable link to their site on your site, and they do the same for you. It is also important that they link to your site with the correct phrase in the link text (the text that you click on to follow the link). If you want to optimize your site for the keyword "clothes hangers" but others link to you with the keyword "baby diapers" in the link text, the search engines will once again incorrectly assume that your site is about baby diapers instead. As far as the quality of the other sites linking to yours (your link partners) is concerned, this is a vast and complicated topic that we'll have to cover on its own.

There are actually many other factors that also determine your website's rankings in search engines, but these are the basic ones. I hope this helps you somewhat (yes, I know it's complicated and daunting), but if I only succeeded in confusing you more, then don't worry - there are many search engine optimization specialists out there. And yes, you'll find that the best ones are normally at the top of the search engine results pages! And if they are worth the money you pay them, you should see an exponential return on investment within the first year. It might also be advisable to have them monitor your web site's search engine rankings on an ongoing basis so that the goose doesn't suddenly for some reason stop laying those golden eggs!

* This article was originally published on http://www.ajcconsulting.co.za/content/search_engine.asp

About the Author
Chris van der Walt is a freelance writer of self-help articles for all kinds of subjects. He has a passion for Jesus Christ, beach volleyball (savolley.com), computers and the internet. He is also owner of AJC Consulting - Affordable Website Design.