how do i get my web site to show up on google searches?

When discussing Web sites, this is by far the most popular question clients ask. The first thing to understand is search engine marketing (i.e. - getting your site to show up in Google or other search engine results) is not something that can be accomplished with a simple directory submission or adding keywords, and anyone who tells you it is is grossly oversimplifying.

Paid Search

Search marketing takes two forms: paid and organic. Paid search marketing is also known as pay-per-click advertising (for more information on this topic read What Do I Need to Know About Online Advertising?) and can be a very effective way to make your site appear in Web searches. However, to effectively utilize this search marketing technique, you must have the budget and the time to test keywords, ad copy and placements.

Organic Search

Organic search is when your Web site shows up in a search based on its content and not because you paid for the placement. Like paid searches, organic search success takes time and diligence to achieve.

Search engines employ programs referred to as robots, bots or spiders that "crawl" the Web indexing sites for later searches. When a user performs a search, the search engine references its index and displays related sites in order of how relevant it deems those sites to be.

Search engines use hundreds of factors to determine the relevance of sites, analyzing things like page titles, meta tags (tags in a page's code that can contain keywords and descriptions), content (text and images), site architecture, navigation and links.

There are things you can do to help your site achieve higher organic search rankings, and these techniques are called Search Engine Optimization. The first step is to be sure the search engines have indexed your site. If your site is relatively new, there is a good chance the bots have not crawled it yet, so you may submit your site to the search engine.

Search Engine Optimization

In addition to ensuring your site is indexed with the major search engines (primarily Google and Yahoo!), you may optimize the site's content and structure by using the following techniques:

• Use meta tags to give each page a unique title, description and keywords based on the content of that particular page. Some search engines (Google being one of them) use the page title and description from the meta tags when displaying search results, so this is a useful technique for dictating how your page will be shown to searchers.
• Content is king when it comes to search engine rankings, so make sure your site is content rich. A good rule of thumb for measuring content is make sure pages contain at least 250 words. Of course, it may be unavoidable to have some pages with fewer words, but if most of them meet that guideline you'll probably be in good shape.
• Avoid oversaturating your site with keywords. While keywords are an important part of search engine optimization, using them inappropriately can actually damage your search marketing efforts, not to mention annoy and possibly confuse visitors. Use keywords legitimately, making sure you don't sacrifice the quality of your site's information in your quest for a high keyword count.
• Always use alt tags to give your images relevant names and use a real-word naming convention for your image files that will help search engines understand what they may be depicting.
• Use headline (<h1>, <h2>, etc.) tags to title important sections of copy within your pages so search engines can understand the hierarchy and organization of content on the page.
• Include a sitemap - search engines love them.

There are numerous other tips and tricks for optimizing your search rankings, but if you develop a site that is useful to your target audience and focus on continuing to provide information of value, your site's users and search rankings will benefit.