Organize well and be found globally

No matter how hard you have worked on creating an online presence through your personal or professional website, you will need to plan on spending time to make it “searchable” and “findable” for major search engines. A post over at the Globalpreneur points out these key concepts as SEO (search engine optimization) and SEM (search engine marketing).

The post mentions “choosing words, content, and design. . . to meet the needs of search engines” - this translates into having a well-organized website that has a clear hierarchy (e.g., home page, other main pages, sub-pages) with links that can be followed by the search engines. There are a few ways to achieve a search engine-friendly structure for your site:

• Small content = fewer pages: if your site is concise and can express all of your key messages in just a few pages, you can have a very simple website structure that is easy to follow and index
• Rely on a content management system: when you have more content, it needs to be organized logically and a content management tool (such as WordPress, Joomla and Drupal, just a name a few) can help you build the structure and maintain your content with less emphasis on coding and more on writing.

Search engines want to find new and changing content. When you take the time to create a website, you should expect to invest some time each week into maintaining and expanding your online identity. When you consistently update your site’s content, search engines will create new index connections and make it easier for other internet users to find your site and link to your content.

When you supplement the standard search engine results with search engine marketing, you can draw attention to specialized content on your site or highlight new services and products. Google AdWords is a popular example of search engine marketing. You can spend some time and learn about how to use AdWords at the Google AdWords Learning Center. If you are just getting started, the online training can provide some practical background and explanations about online advertising and website promotion.

Good luck and don’t forget about other major search engines and the importance of looking at more localized resources and multi-lingual tools. You can find examples of international search engines with local language versions in the Wikipedia article on search engine marketing.