One of the best ways to drive traffic to your company’s blog is to make sure it appears in search results as much as possible.

Although most search engines use an algorithm to decide the priority of the search results, there’s no need to try and figure out a complex mathematical formula to get your blog found. Instead, try these five simple ways to make your blog appear in search engines.

1. Submit Your Blog to Search Engines

After you’ve created your blog, you’ll need to submit it to the major search engines including Google, Bing, Yahoo, and Ask. When you let the search engines know that your blog actually exists, your pages will get indexed faster and blog will begin to appear in search results. We have a guide that will tell you exactly how to submit your website to search engines in case this is something you haven’t done before.

2. Create Social Media Profiles

Having a great presence in search involves more than just getting your blog listed. You want to dominate the first page of search results so that if someone is researching your blog by name, they will see properties related to you and your blog at the top of the results the results. Create a Twitter profile, a Facebook Page, and a Facebook Networked Blogs page for every blog you manage. For Twitter, be sure to use your blog’s name as your username and include your blog link in the Twitter profile.

For Facebook Pages, be sure to get your customized web address (also called a URL) to point to facebook.com/yourblogname. You’ll need to get 25 people to “Like” your Facebook Page before you can change its name to that custom address that’s known as a “vanity URL.”

3. Use Relevant Images and Videos

People love pictures and video, so why not include a few photos or YouTube videos in your blog? Not only will your readers appreciate the compelling content, but the search engines will rank your blog more favorably as well.

When you use search engine-optimized videos and images in your articles, your blog will come up more frequently in video and image related searches, and it will get more traffic. Whatever images or video you use, be sure to match your media to the audience you want to attract.

4. Get Into Google News

Want your blog to rank in the search engines for a highly competitive topic like “social media” or Foursquare? Google News lists and ranks stories on every topic imaginable by crawling the web and searching for relevant newsworthy articles. Google News readers search for those terms and get a list of the most recently relevant stories.

Your blog may be eligible to be listed on Google News if it produces timely articles and fits a certain set of criteria. For more information about how to get your blog listed in Google News, refer to Google’s page about Google News for Publishers.

5. List Your Blog in Directories

Finally, you’ll want to list your blog in “blog directories” — websites that list blogs by category, content, and so on. Technorati, for example, is one of the most popular blog directories in the world. Getting featured on its “Top 100 Blogs” list  – or even its “Top 100 Blogs for Small Business” – can drive an amazing amount of traffic to your blog.

Also, depending on your blog’s niche or industry, you may be able to find specific niche social sites and directories where you can create a profile for your blog. For example, if you’re in the photography business, you could create a profile on Cool Photoblogs for your company blog. Niche blog directories are out there; you just have to do a little searching of your own to find them.

Have any other great tips about how to get a blog to appear in search engines? Let us know by leaving a comment below.

[Image Credits: Starfish, Solo, liquidnight, nan palmero, Thomas Hawk ]