Getting customers in the door has always been a priority for small businesses. On the Internet, the process of helping customers find your website is known as search engine optimization or SEO. While online advertising may also be a key part of your strategy, SEO can actually get visitors to your website at little or no cost to you.

Your website can look great and your products can be the best in your industry, but unless people can find your website, you will have difficulty building your business online. Search engines like Google, Yahoo and Bing use sophisticated programs that constantly search the Internet. These programs, more technically known as algorithms, identify keywords within the text of websites to determine what the sites are about. They catalog sites in huge databases so that the sites can be located by people who use their search engines.

Getting listed by the search engines is just the beginning. You have probably noticed that most searches turn up thousands or even millions of results. Websites that are far down the list of results will get little or no traffic. The key to your SEO strategy is to get onto the first page of the search results. Customers rarely dig too deeply into the list the search engine produces. So, if you want people to find your business online, you need a clear plan for scoring well in the search results.

The exact formulas the search engines use are trade secrets. However, the companies give some information about their methods and SEO experts have been able to determine many of the factors the search companies use to shape their systems. Two significant factors are the use of keywords and the number and significance of the web pages that link to a particular website.

The keywords on your site can be individual words, but they are more frequently short phrases. Choosing phrases that potential customers are likely to use when searching for a business like yours is a vital part of your SEO plan. Tools are available to determine how often a phrase turns up in the search results.

Most small businesses will not be able to compete for the first page for extremely competitive keywords that receive millions of searches. However, small businesses can gain a substantial amount of traffic by focusing on phrases that are ignored by the big companies that compete for the highest ranking keywords. You want to choose keywords that fit your product or service that have a significant number of searches without getting into the cutthroat competition that the most popular keywords attract.

The second major factor in a good SEO plan is to create links to your website. These links, often called backlinks, improve your ranking with the search engines while also drawing people to your website. Backlinks on web pages that are relevant to your keywords are the most helpful. A variety of tactics can be used to develop links to your site. You can create guest articles on websites that accept free articles or you can participate in forums that discuss your topic. Most of these formats do not allow overt advertising, but they may allow you to put a link to your site in a signature or short biography. You can also utilize social networks like Facebook, Twitter and MySpace. Material that directly promotes your website is permitted on these networks. You need to produce meaningful content for this type of promotion to be effective. While this is time-consuming, it is free and many businesses have been successful in promoting their websites in this way.