Get Website Exposure Through Search Engine Optimization

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Search engine optimization is at the the heart of most successful websites. There are many different ways to get website exposure, but none of them costs less or gets better targeted site visitors than optimizing your site for search engines.

It all starts with understanding how search engines work. Search engines have robots that browse the Web 24 hours a day. They crawl around the content they find, following one link after another, in true Web fashion. Along the way, they create indexes of the content they crawl across.

When someone wants to find content on the Web, they go to a search engine and enter search terms. The search engine cross references these terms with the indexes they’ve created.

Those sites that appear to be most relevant to the indexed search terms are listed at the top, with each successive site listed being considered less relevant to the search terms.

The tricky part is that each search engine computes relevancy in its own way. They don’t even index in the same fashion, with Yahoo storing entire page contents and Google storing portions.

Index retrieval is similarly different, with Google using mathematical representations of word structures, meanings, and proximities. Most search engines use less complex relevancy computations related mainly to a page’s popularity. In fact, nearly all modern search engines assign popularity or credibility values to pages.

Keywords

Since content comes down to words and searches are done using words, search engine optimization is mainly centered around words. You need to determine which words your target site visitors will be looking for when they use search engines.

These words will need to be used regularly on your pages so the search engines know you are relevant to those terms. Otherwise, your website exposure among your target audience will be minimal.

If you need help figuring out which keywords to use, consider using tools for keywords research such as Google’s keyword tool or WordTracker. But it’s not enough just to know and use the right keywords.

You also have to place them appropriately. Search engines pay attention to certain areas of your site content, so you need your keywords in these areas. The main areas for consideration are the page meta tags, body, and title.

The body of your page is the main area for content. So it follows that this is where your keywords must occur. Textual descriptions are good around images. On content pages, you just need to be sure to include content that contains your keywords.

If you don’t have a lot of content on your site, consider adding pages centered around special reports, articles, forums, guides, tips, and any other content rich materials.

Site Credibility or Popularity

If keywords were enough, they could simply be tossed on a page and you could expect to achieve heavy website exposure. Since many people have done this, search engines use links pointing to your site to judge the value of your site. It is thought that if many people link to your site, your site is relevant to the topics of their sites.

Text links may provide additional benefits to your site, as some search engines assign the text in the inbound link to the index of your site. Also, it helps if you have links coming in to all of your pages, rather than just to your main site page.

This tells search engines that all of your pages have important content of their own and increases exponentially the amount of search terms that refer to your site.

Keep in mind that the search engine considers the content of the site linking to you. So if that site is of no value, the link will be of no value. If that site is not related to your site, then it doesn’t add credibility to your site as a credible resource for the content you provide.

If the site linking to you has many sites linking to it and is related to the content of your site, you get points for your site’s credibility not only from the site linking to you, but from all of the sites linking to it too.