How do you get search engines to rank your site so potential customers can find you? Here are three basic strategies.

ORGANIC SEARCH—BUILDING FROM WITHIN

Reinforce inherent qualities of your site that will gain the attention of search engines as they examine your site by content building and blog building.

Content Building Counts!

Content building is important, and best of all, it’s free! The first step: build keywords for your page. Ask yourself, what is the customer looking for? Include specific product names, features and uses. The second step: write descriptions using your keywords. Always use regular narrative to ensure that your key word to normal text ratio is balanced. Simply listing lots of features or products often backfires because search engines may be able to identify “keyword spamming.” Remember that these descriptions, while written in regular English, are not really meant for customers, they’re meant for search engines to identify. 9 out of 10 customers skip over this copy, but search engines catch it.

Blog Building—a Favorite of Search Engines

Blog building is a manageable way to get industry information to your customers, and search engines eat this stuff up! You also get lots of help from customers and readers. It works like this. You write an article on relevant industry information, relevant to your site. Customers and other readers will respond to your article in their own words. Without even realizing it each time they mention the product or a name relative to your site, you are in turn getting great keywords in plain English. You can also provide links in your blogs to certain pages on your site. When you do, make sure the links are relevant topics so they’ll get the appropriate attention from the search engines.

PAID ADVERTISING—BUILDING WITH MONEY

Remember the old saying: if you can afford to advertise you don’t need to. Advertising isn’t an expense—it’s an investment.

Sign Up For Feeds To Shopping Portals

Not all advertising is expensive. Froogle offers free feeds, a free way to advertise your items. This gives you a way to get your products out there and get them noticed by potential customers. There are many shopping portals as well; decide which ones are best based on your budget.

Pay Per Click Gets Your Message Out

Pay Per Click puts you in the paid ad space of the big engines like Yahoo! , Google and now MSN. Even if you are new and have not made your way up the natural search results, you can still be on top of the paid listings. You pay each time someone clicks on your ad. You bid on the key words you want listed by the search engines, and clicks can run from as little as a dime to more than a hundred dollars depending on the industry. Be sure to track the Return on Investment (ROI) with one of the many tracking services available. This will help indicate how much you should be bidding based on each keyword. If you do not track your Click through Rate (CTR) and ROI you may be wasting money instead of making it.

Ultimately you sell to humans, but first you want to be recognized and ranked by the search engines. Remember, the search engines put you in touch with those humans, so build your message accordingly.