Every website that is online on the web, has a purpose. For businesses, it's to be seen, with an ultimate goal to make money.

The Search engine market is occupied by players. But the most notable is Google, followed by Bing. They have become great tools that put together the web into one place. For businesses, Search Engines have proven themselves useful in bringing their websites to their desired audience.

However, there are challenges.

To succeed, web owners and webmasters need to do many things to achieve that goal. And with search engines, they need make their websites able to communicate with search engines in order for the algorithms to work as pleased.

First of all, they need to know the differences between search engine marketing (SEM) and search engine Optimization (SEO).

SEM is a practice that includes paid marketing campaigns. What this means, marketers can bid to rank for keywords that their targeted audiences are searching. Marketers then pay for advertising placements. SEO on the other hand, is the practice of improving digital content to organically make websites more visible in search engine results pages (SERPs).

Knowing the distinction between the two should help marketers and business owners in better identifying where to focus and dedicate their time. But regardless where they are investing their marketing efforts, below are the steps they need to know in order to get seen by search engines:

Focus On Local, Then Global

It's true that the internet can bring online businesses to anyone, anywhere on the globe. However, businesses, especially small ones or those that have just started, need to focus on local SEO and SEM.

First of all, if a company has just been founded, going local means to focus on their own local market. To do this, they can choose their own country code top-level domains for their website For example, businesses in Indonesia that want to focus on the local market can have the advantage if they purchase .id or .co.id.

The reason for this is because people tend to trust websites using their country’s extension.

But if they want to use the more common .com or .net, they need to at least localize their website by creating contents that are written in the language spoken by the locals.

The next step, is to set up a Google My Business profile. This will register a website, and the company, to Google for better SERP results. Registering to local high-authority business directories is also a good practice since it allows search engines to qualify the website as something worth to rank.

It's advised to always put the company's name, URL, address, phone number, etc.. And make sure that they are consistent everywhere on the web.

Many businesses lose SEO and SEM advantages because they register their businesses under slightly different names, or inconsistent phone numbers.

After doing all the above, they can then create social media profiles.

Search engines monitor brands' social media activities. If they see that a business social account has active pages, they will certainly help that business rank higher.

Keywords And Backlinks

Search engines use a lot of variables to determine where a web page should rank against one another on both paid campaigns and SERP listings.

The first important thing a website needs to appeal search engines, is to use proper keywords. It's wise to put a lot of contents inside a website's page, or at least put many links on it.

Websites need to target more and more quality keywords by adding contents as frequently as possible.

What this strategy does, is creating as much information to help people on the web. So when they are using search engines to learn about something, showing a great web page that may answer their questions will certainly be on the search engines' to-do list.

SEO is giving search engines' algorithm the signals they need to rank your website higher. By using human-friendly search keywords that are both short and long. websites can appeal to more audience. If you don’t target and use your targeted keywords accordingly, there’s a very good chance that search engines will miss the point of your page, or rank you on page 100 of their SERPs where nobody is going to find it.

Then is the backlinks. They are signals to search engines that a website is valuable. When someone links their website to your website, that is their vote of confidence that your web page has something important to say. The more backlinks your website has, the better. But one high-quality backlink is a lot better than a bunch of low-quality ones.

Read more: How To Do A Keyword Research And Achieve The Highest Return To Your Marketing Investments

Structured, And Created For Humans

Your web pages should have contents that reflect your targeted audience's needs. They need to be created for humans, and humans only. Because after all, humans that convert to leads and sales, not bots.

However, websites should also make that content with search engines in mind.

What this means, the website needs to be properly structured so that search engines' crawlers can crawl and index them properly. This includes proper link, less to no redirects, no errors and a proper navigation tool. A well-created websites should also make search engines able to categorize them accordingly and correctly.

This strategy involves a knowledge of HTML markup code that include the title tag, meta description, header tag, image description and others.

Not just keywords and backlinks, your contents should be meaningful for visitors to acknowledge you as an expert on your niche.

Your web page should have contents that answer questions people ask to search engines. If you can make compelling contents that may address people's problems, with the combination of targeted keywords and great backlinks, search engines will definitely put you into its SERPs.

The better your content is, the more visitors search engines think it will attract, the higher up your page will rank.

Focus on creating contents that your customers care about, but craft them in a way that machines can easily digest.

Further reading: Visitors Are Expecting Things When They Are On Your Website. Show Them, Tell Them