A major search engine's main objective (say Google) is to provide a user with the most relevant search results based on a user's search query. It does this by regularly crawling and indexing over 266 million pages on the net. It also must dodge what must be thousands of spam websites trying to capture your attention.

Your ranking is based on several factors, but the most notable are the quality of your site's construction, strategic keyword use and your overall popularity and prominence on the web. It's important to note here that we are talking of organic search results and not paid advertising.

For Google to effectively index your site, not only does the code used to build your site need to be clean and validated, your content must be effectively flagged with very pertinent, concise keywords or phrases which describe who you are, where you are and what you do. These flags are implemented into your site behind the scenes (meta descriptions, page titles, image titles, ALT text, etc.) and what you see on screen (text headers, hyperlinks, text content). Let's take a look at a simple example to illustrate this process:

Without keywords like MONTREAL in the title and meta description, it’s unlikely Luigi’s will ever be listed among the first few pages of a user’s search for local Italian restaurants. Luigi gives some thought to what words or phrases he thinks users may enter to search for a local Italian restaurant.

He compiles a list and uses Google’s keyword tool to verify which of those are most popular and pertinent. He selects the following keywords for his site’s home page: Luigi’s, Luigi’s restaurant, Italian, Italian cuisine, Montreal, downtown, authentic, homemade. He then makes the following changes to his site:

This process gets repeated for every page of Luigi’s site as he wants to not only promote his fine Italian cuisine, but also his wedding reception services, world-class wine list, etc.

These steps, among others, are put into place when planning and constructing your site. Once launched, your developer will help you with your site submission to the major search engines and help get you set up for site monitoring (See the Google Analytics Product Tour for a complete overview of this great, free site monitoring tool)

So you’ve done your SEO homework, your site is launched and now’s the time to sit back, relax and wait for your customers to come knocking. If only. The real work starts here.

Link Building: From a search engine’s perspective, the more quality links that are pointing to your site, the more popular and relevant your are to its search results (quality links mean authentic, trusted links and not using link-scheming tactics…more on that in future blogs). See Wikipedia’s Methods of website linking for a more detailed explanation. Links can be made in many ways, such as other personal or business websites, industry-related directory listings (free or fee-based), news articles, blogs, social media, etc.

Social Media: According to the results of the 2011 Search Engine Ranking Factors report from SEOMOZ, getting Shares and Likes on Facebook strongly influenced (to varying degrees) a site’s ranking on Google. (Note: the Facebook SHARE button has since been replaced with the LIKE/ RECOMMEND button.)

That means that having a Facebook business page is smart, but if you want to earn those ‘likes’, you need to offer valuable content that will draw attention; coupons, helpful links, photos, videos, anything you think will give users a reason to visit and share you with others. Check out 6 ways small businesses can win with facebook from the Social Media Examiner.

You can register your business with Google Places and Foursquare, Create your own channel on YouTube, create a profile on LinkedIn or, use Twitter if you plan to demonstrate an active role with your audience.

Blog: Share what you know best

This is the age of transparency. Being open, sharing valuable information and inviting and addressing feedback contribute to making you more credible, trustworthy and popular.

However a Blog is not for everyone. It requires a commitment from you to put aside enough time and thought into writing and posting fresh, valuable content on a regular basis. Some half-decent writing skills wouldn’t hurt either.

Most popular Blog platforms today: Blogger, Wordpress, Tumblr