Improving Your Visibility in Search Engines

1. Choose the Right Search Phrases
The first step to search engine visibility is finding out what phrases people are using to find businesses, products or services like yours. Don't guess what phrases people are using -- research them. Use a tool like WordTracker (www.wordtracker.com) to find out how your target audience is using the search engines. Compile a list of ten to twenty phrases that are relevant to your business, and develop content around those phrases. This must always be the first step in a search engine visibility campaign.

2. Make your website worth linking to.
Inbound links are a key factor in SEO visibility. Links coming from quality websites to your website will increase your search engine visibility. You can think of links as votes. When a lot of quality websites link to your website, search engines will view this in a favorable way and rank your website higher in their listings.

How do you get inbound links to your website? Well, you can use articles, press releases and directory submissions (as mentioned below). But the most important thing is having a website worth linking to in the first place. If your website only talks about you, few people will link to it. But if you turn your website into a resource of helpful information, you make it much easier to gain links ... and increase your SEO visibility by extension.

3. Add 20 Pages to Your Website
Any website that adds 20 pages of relevant content will enjoy a boost in SEO visibility. That's because you have a much greater chance of ranking for a broad range of search phrases when you have a broad range of content. Better still, creating content is one of the easiest steps in an SEO campaign. Search engines love content because it helps them understand what a website is about (and thus how to categorize it and match it to search queries).

4. Publish Articles Online
When you publish articles online, you can increase the number of websites that link to yours. The more websites that link to your website, the greater your "link popularity." This is a major factor in search engine visibility because websites with good link popularity usually outrank websites with few links coming in.

Here's how it works. First, you write a great article. Then you submit the article through distribution websites like EzineArticles.com. If it's well-written, you article could end up on dozens or hundreds of other websites. Each article would link back to your website thus increasing your "link popularity." Greater link popularity will eventually translate to better SEO visibility.

5. Publish Press Releases Online
Much like the article publishing scenario above, you can also publish press releases online for wide distribution. Using a service like PRWeb.com, you can distribute your message through hundreds of channels, RSS feeds, websites and blogs. And by adding a hyperlink to each release, you're once again increasing the number of inbound links to your website (a big factor in SEO website visibility success).

6. Submit Your Website to Directories
We talked about inbound links (from other websites to your website) and how they increase search engine visibility through link popularity. You can also get high-quality links by submitting your website to web directories. An example would be the Microsoft Small Business Directory, or Best of the Web (www.BOTW.org).

Most of the directories that are worth your time will charge a review fee, but it's usually worth the price because of the additional trust your website will earn. Remember, the more quality links you obtain from other websites, the more you will help your SEO visibility cause.

Conclusion
I hope you've enjoyed this guide to making your site more visible to search engines. Remember, website visibility directly translates into more website traffic and more business. So though it takes time to achieve, it is well worth the effort.

Differences Between the Major Search Engines

Although the basic principle of operation of all search engines is the same, the minor differences between them lead to major changes in results relevancy. For different search engines different factors are important. There were times, when SEO experts joked that the algorithms of Bing are intentionally made just the opposite of those of Google. While this might have a grain of truth, it is a matter a fact that the major search engines like different stuff and if you plan to conquer more than one of them, you need to optimize carefully.

There are many examples of the differences between search engines. For instance, for Yahoo! and Bing, on-page keyword factors are of primary importance, while for Google links are very, very important. Also, for Google sites are like wine – the older, the better, while Yahoo! generally has no expressed preference towards sites and domains with tradition (i.e. older ones). Thus you might need more time till your site gets mature to be admitted to the top in Google, than in Yahoo!. 

Differences Between the Major Search Engines