The essential steps involved for promoting a web-site, are : a) Ensure your web pages are search engine friendly. b) Ensure that the pages are optimised for relevant and quality keywords (and keyword phrases) i.e. your pages are designed with regard to how your customers are going to use the search engines when they are looking for information which your site specialises in. Of course, you want them to come to your site! c) Submit your pages to at least the major search engines and directories.

We will talk in a bit more detail on the above steps, in a moment.

It is important to supplement the essential steps by maximising your link popularity (getting as many good quality links to your site as possible). We have dedicated another section of this site to the significant topic of link popularity.

The above are not the only ways to promote a site. Other methods include word-of-mouth, opt-in e-mail, banner-advertising and joining viral-traffic schemes such as TrafficSwarm and StartBlaze (both of which you can join for free).

Viral traffic schemes (a.k.a. viral marketing) are a highly effective way of propogating your ad around the Net. You can get do much of this web promotion work on your own, through the advice that is available on the web, or get a professional to do it all for you. Our recommendation for both of the above directions is the Alcander web site. They have extensive do-it-yourself web promotion advice on their site, but they also run a sensibly priced web promotion consultancy business. Let's go back & expand on those essential steps, a little.

Achieving Search Engine friendly pages

Search engines rank pages according to a number of criteria. They favour pages which are not heaviliy laden with code (as opposed to the readable text). Web professionals have skills to optimise pages in this respect, or you can get yourself a copy of the excellent HTML Validator tool, which is a superb way of ensuring that your HTML code is syntactically correct and void of redundant code. There are ways of seperating out much of your HTML from your main pages, by using something called Cascading Style Sheets (CSS). The product also helps you validate your CSS. Buy CSE HTML Validator Standard or Professional. Other things to try and achieve are : a) Make sure your site has good navigation. Make sure each of the main pages can be reached by one click from any page. Also ensure that the look and feel of the navigation is the same on each page. When the search engine robots visit your site to index it, they'll try and follow all the links to index all pages. You need to make it easy for them to do so, though, of course, good navigation will make it easier for your human visitors. b) You need good quality content on your site. If you present the robots with loads of images, this tells them little about what your site is all about. They'll come looking for text. For any images you do have, make sure you use the alt tag appropriately. c) Test your site to make sure that the links work (e.g. use the free W3C link validator service), check that your site will open in at least the main browsers, and also check your site for various screen sizes.

Optimising pages with regard to keywords and key word phrases.

How do you maximise the chance that people who type in relevant search criteria for your website actually find your website as opposed to all similar competing sites. The art is to a) find good keywords and b) optimise your site (or individual pages) for those keywords. If your site, for example, specialises in business opportunities, is the keyword phrase "business opportunities" a good keyword phrase? Actually not! It is far too competitive, you stand little chance of getting to the top of the search engine results for that phrase. Many people will be searching on it, that is true, but there are countless sites competing for that phrase. Something like "Business opportunities for single parents" will have a much better chance. You need to ensure that there are enough people typing in your chosen keyword or phrase without it being over competitive.
In order to track down suitable keywords, we recommend a service called WordTracker. It will help you find the right balance between keywords people actually use and the competition with other sites.

Once you've chosen your keywords, you need to optimise your site pages with respect to those words. A product called WebPosition Gold (in particular it's Page Critic function) is our recommendation. The Page Critic function will feed back advice to you on what adjustments you should make to your web pages to optimise its page ranking potential. It will advise you on whether you need to repeat your keywords more on a page, position more of them higher up the page and so on.

Submitting Your Pages To the Search Engines

This step can be done for free, just by finding the relevant links for each search engine. We recommend you at least submit your site to Google. Here is the page where you can submit your main URL to Google

And here are some more important 'add url' pages :
Altavista, Dmoz, Fast, Northernlight, LookSmart, Aol

You will need to wait weeks or months, usually, for your site to get listed when you use the above links. You also have the option of paying to get your site listed with a faster turnaround. For this, we recommend the service offered by PositionTech.

If you are looking to target the UK market, we have a page on this site dedicated to that (click here).