What do web sites and reality TV show contestants have in common? They both desperately want to be seen. If your site doesn't appear as one of THE top results in search for terms that speak to your business offering, you quickly become the Justin Guarini of "American Idol". Who? Exactly! Here are a few tips from a reality TV wanna be on how your site can be "discovered" and eventually become infamous.

Have a great "body"

Plain and simple, people with great bodies are often times more noticed. The same could be said of web sites. Spiders, aka casting directors, sent out by the various search engines crawl the body copy of your site to determine just how viable or relevant you are when it comes to phrases people are searching for. "Beef up" your copy and include keywords/phrases that your customers are likely to search for.

 Declare a role and fill it well

Casting directors are always looking to cast people to fill specific roles, whether it be the vixen, the girl-next-door, the heartthrob, etc. Casting directors rely on hunches and/or interviews. Search engine spiders rely on meta tags, which includes heading tags, the most important being the title tag, keywords tags and image alt tags. Combined with body content, it helps search engines determine your relevance for specific search terms.

Be accessible and "friendly"

Don't give people any reason to dislike you, especially if you have to rely on their support. Web sites should do the same with search engines. Search engines are currently unable to index or read most client-side scripting including JavaScript and Flash. Content created in this format is essentially invisible to them. If your site relies heavily on these, you risk alienating them.

Actively build your fan base (or have people do it for you)

You are only as popular as the number of fans you have. For a site, incoming links are viewed by search engines as a reflection of that popularity and relevance. The more sites that link to you, the more relevant search engines think you are and the more likely you are to show up in search as a result. Reach out to web sites with similar content especially and see if they would be willing to link to you (aka give you props). Blogs, syndicating content, articles and press releases are also good ways to build incoming links.

Be your own biggest supporter

Don't be afraid to cultivate a little hype for yourself and shamelessly flaunt/pose for the camera. Sites can use internal navigation, linking within your web site, to do the same. Pages that are poorly linked are often considered, by search engines, to be less important. Leverage comprehensive navigation and a site map to help ensure that important areas of your site are more accessible to spiders. Link to the camera now, click, click!

Whether you are a reality TV star in training or a webmaster, above are a few tips to help you achieve notoriety. Are you or your web site ready for the spotlight? And can you turn that 15 minutes of fame into a lengthy career? Now that is for a future entry...