In theory, the principle of optimizing your website for search engines is very simple. What you want to do is have keywords on your site that match the keywords that people type into search engines. Search engines will crawl the content on your site and send you search engines that will find what you have on your site relevant to what search engines are looking for.

It’s as simple as that, in theory. Where it gets tricky is in the execution. For example, how do you get search engines to crawl your site in the first place? How do you know what people are typing into search engines to find your site? For the record, the programs that search engines send out to “crawl” the web are called “spiders.” Get it? Geeky humor… moving along…

Keyword research will tell you what people are typing into search engines to find you. With that being said, here are 5 things you can do to help your optimization efforts and attract search engine spiders to your website.

1. Social Media/Site Optimization. What this entails is going to the different social networking sites and creating a profile with content that is relevant to your niche. Social networking sites like MySpace, Facebook, Hi5, etc. may, depending on your individual terms of service, provide you with links to your sites and an audience for your content who will then return to your site. Be careful about spamming the site, as spamming can get you banned.
2. social bookmarking. This involves creating links to your site from places like stumbleupon, digg, reddit, furl, etc. On these sites, other users will link to your content, as long as your content is interesting/good enough. Traffic from these sites can come in spikes and may not be reliable, and some sites have different rules about how content enters the network, so “your mileage may vary.” As before, don’t spam and you should be fine.
3. syndicate videos. As with the sites above, videos can get both people and search engines to visit your site. Make sure the video is of high quality and provides some kind of value to the viewer. Try to make sure that your video is related to the content on your site and is not spam.
4. distribute images. Just like with video, images on image sites can draw both people and search engines to your site. Just like with video, you want to have quality photos, and of course, make sure you own the rights to the photos you distribute.
5. Link building campaign using our targeted keywords. All your links must use your keywords. Some of the above sites will allow text links, some will not. Regardless, you want to make sure you review the sites terms to make sure you’re not violating the guidelines.

My point is that spam is not being transmitted? Nobody likes web spam, so don’t be known as “that spammer” if you can help it.

Bonuses: Forums. Sometimes in some niches, web forums can bring you a lot of targeted visitors and customers. Be sure to engage and provide value to forum members before trying to sell them anything. Be sure to familiarize yourself with the forum rules before joining and/or posting in any forum.

Bonus #2: Articles and article marketing. Writing and distributing articles is a great way to showcase your knowledge and keep people or search engines coming back to your site. There are many different article marketing sites, each with their own rules and submission guidelines. Be sure to familiarize yourself with the rules before submitting content.