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.

There was an excellent article recently published about the 18 rules the best web developers follow and it highlighted an important idea for people who live and work internationally. Two of the rules struck me as particularly relevant to the idea of expat internet sites.

3. Be a source of information. Virtually everyone on the web is looking for specific information. Whether it is for a product, service, or just educational, sharing your expertise and experiences sets your website apart from the others and adds value to the content.

Your website can be a means to share advice, demonstrate your expertise, a way to promote a cause or organizatio or the starting point in a sales process. Regardless of what your ultimate goal is, you need to think about why people will want to visit your site and stay there once they have found it. If you are thinking about offering information that applies to more than one country or region, you have the added “adventure” of thinking about the different cultures of your audiences.

14. Take advantage of the “worldwide” web. The world is a big place and more and more people are coming to the web. Don’t be afraid to expand your web presence beyond your local niche or country. As long as the information you are providing is useful, the visitors will come to learn more, regardless of where they are. Ideas transcend borders.

if you have experience living and working internationally you already have an advantage when putting your website together. You can draw upon your own “lessons learned” and add the benefit of your foreign-but-local perspective to the topics you address on your site. When connecting with more than one culture, you can also draw upon the variety of popular icons or prominent themes from the cultures to make your messages more relevant.