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The key to increasing your exposure on the web is to leverage search engine marketing strategies to help you build your web presence for competitive advantage.  Search Engine Marketing is a mix of online marketing strategies that can help you get to the top of search engines so you can be easily found when someone searches for you online.  People will typically search either by someone's personal name, company name, product name, or keywords of their interest, which could be the type of expertise they are seeking, types of products, types of services, etc.   The goal and desire is of course to be referenced on the first page of the search results when someone searches for such information that is relevant to you or your business.  However, getting to the top of the search results requires work and the understanding of not only what tactical methods you need to use to get there, but also what foundation you need to build and have in place to be most effective !

Here are 3 tips to help you in this process:

Tip #1 -  Know your competitive advantage and communicate it through a sales and marketing process that is aligned with your target market's buying cycle

The first step is to study the market place, understand the competition, and understand your target market so you can package your products, services and marketing message in a way that differentiates you.  The more you can narrow your focus and your niche, and the more you can identify your differentiation, the easier it is for you to communicate to your audience in a way they can hear you. So know your audience, their characteristics, their needs and their habits and why they would be interested in you. Then understand their buying cycle and what they need to make a decision so you can align your sales process accordingly and develop a strategy for how you will engage them, lead them and nurture them through the sales cycle.

Tip #2 - Optimize Your website with 3 things in mind:  your buyers, your sales process, and search engines

Here are some key points to take into account for your website to ensure it is optimized for your buyers, for your sales process and for search engines.

• Design your website in a way that first grabs the attention of your visitors so they stay when they make their first split-second decision. Include the necessary information that they need to clearly understand how you can help them and what you specifically offer. Make sure of course that your site is also appealing and easy to navigate so they have an overall positive experience.
• Interest them to give you their name in exchange for information that is of value to them. Then use an automated  process to follow up and keep in touch with them. Use drip campaign messages  that provide them with tips, advice, and entice them in your follow up emails to take action to engage with you.  
• Support your site with the needed technology to effectively capture, manage and nurture your leads once they start coming. Learn what web marketing software can do to help you maximize your sales and marketing efforts, and use it as part of your competitive advantage.
• Make sure your site is search-engine friendly and includes the keywords that you are using to find your target market.  This will significantly help your site's search engine rankings.  Making a site search engine friendly requires many different factors, including updating your title tags, and what is referred to as the "meta tags"  - which are the keyword and description tags that robots use to index and rank your site. It also includes ensuring your content, internal links, image tags and headings on the page are using relevant keywords that can help your rankings.  That along with other factors such as having a sitemap and other technical details will contribute to make the site most optimized for search engines.
• Embed an analytic tracking tool like Google analytics to measure your progress. The great thing about search engine marketing is it's very measurable. You can measure the number of visitors that come to your site,  where they came from and how long they stayed. You can compare the number of  visitors to the number of leads you get in a given month to see the conversion rate from visitors to leads.  By also measuring your lead and sales conversion, you can then measure your cost/lead and your cost/sale based on the search engine marketing effort and expense you put into it.  In turn you will know your ROI and will have a real quantifiable way to see what is working and getting you the most returns and what is not.

Once you have your site optimized and equipped with a software engine behind it, you are now ready to start driving traffic to it.

Tip #3 - Start driving traffic by getting listed in directories and engaging in popular sites

Driving traffic to your site is about promoting it "offsite" .  What that means is you need to go to the different search engines and directories and let them know you exist. You can go and post your site to all the popular directories and sites that provide you the ability to submit your site.  Some are free and some have a fee. You can post to local search directories and build your local presence.  Local search  directories are very effective to get you to the top in very little time.  You can make brief presentations and put them on YouTube and other popular video sites and slide sharing sites. You can write articles and post them in the article directories.  You can search for blogs in your area of expertise or industry and participate in a way that can help you drive more traffic.  You can start your own blog and get active in social networking. You can also of course advertise on many sites or use the search engine, pay per click advertising.  There are hundreds and thousands of sites and ways you can use to promote yourself or engage on sites of similar interests.  Learn what your options are, understand the different ways you can promote, get a list of these sites, and start promoting yourself as part of your daily activity.  If you don't have the time or patience to do that yourself, outsource it to a firm to do it for you.

These tips are meant to provide you with a model on what you need overall to grow on the web. Search engine marketing is not a magic bullet that gets people rich quick.  It is a marketing tool that every business professional needs to use in their growth and competitive strategy, with sound business practices behind it, so it can effectively yield returns.  The more you understand the bigger picture of what drives the effectiveness of search engine marketing, the easier it is to execute the detail.