Prior to 2000, promoting your web site business was a much easier process. By placing "Meta Tags" at the top of you html web page code, which at that time was about 3 lines of code and then submit your web pages to the online directories, submitting them to search engines was pretty much unheard of at the time. However, today is much different, while you can still do the meta tags, they only serve to confirm what the search engine finds out about your page. They play a role, just not as significant as it once was.

   Promoting a web site has become a full time gig for many web developers who use to code websites, in fact they now call themselves Search Engine Consultants or Firms. Marketing websites is now a class you can take at college or online. The fact is just about everything they teach you goes back to the basics, firm concise structure, with short to the point ads win every time to the business person with money. Anything large and extravagant, is pretty much listed as entertainment. Why do you think search results look very similar to old ad listings or telephone directories? Google knows this, that is why there is a director to keep the simplicity of Google's webpages and search results as plain and simple as possible.

   So how do you rethink, rework or consider hiring a web consultant, you better make sure they are on the same page as you. While they may have some new gimmicks, the fact is the web has a human element that must be considered. So in looking for your client base, your desired audience, sit and listen to the consultant, do they match your corporate image, your mission statement, or do they want to change you business through their marketing ideas?

Here is a complied list of simple yet very effective ways to trim the fat on your website and get it noticed by both search engines and people, or your potential client base. This list is by NO way an order of what is important, because it depends on the type, quantity and quality of traffic you want on your site. These are general guidelines to follow to have a better overall productive site that will attract both search bots and visitors.

1. Build a strong, solid business foundation. Design a business plan, marketing plan, ideal client profile and 30-second elevator speech.
      Okay elevator rides never result in a GOOD 30 second speech and guess what, neither do web pages. If your web page doesn't capture the visitors interest in 7 or less seconds, they are gone. I almost forgot to mention, do a baseline on your website so you know what changes resulted in a positive move. Install an Analytic tracker for 3 months and get some base line stats, don't change your marketing, advertising or anything. These stats are very important to changing your website.
2. Be consistent and "Brand" your company. Use the same colors, logo, motto, etc. everywhere on your business web site!
      Here is where you should spend some money on a logo and color combination, something that fits with your corporate motto, tag line, slogan, etc.. If you haven't done this and you are starting out small, have a marketing firm help you design this, it could be the best $2500 you spend. You need to have your company "Branded" so that when your image pops up, others recognize it and it is meaningful.
3. Make your business web site trust-able.
      Offer a guarantee and then stick behind it, make sure you send out a random survey to those have used your services or products and get their feedback. Having their feedback on your website can build this trust.
4. Create policies that build trust: customer service, code of ethics and newsletter privacy policy.
      This became more and more of a trend after the dot com bust back in the early 2000's. Many companies died and those that got badly beaten up needed a new way to provide proof that they will stand the test of time or at least behind their services and products.
5. Ask your webmaster to name each of your pages using a keyword you have supplied them with.
      A keyword is a single word that describes the main point, services or product of eacy page. Often you will have several keywords per page, but a single one should give a good description. If not, then those pages need to be reworked.
6. Offer added values on your business web site that make sense to your business and ideal client. This can include affiliate programs, books, and recommended links to web sites.
      This is just a very simple solution, each business is different and how they operate is different, but the key here is "What Value can my potential or returning clients get from this page?" If you don't know, then that page needs to be redone. Each page should offer up genuine value in service or information to each visiting guest. An analytic program can really help narrow this down, but it may take up to 6 months.
7. Add a "favorites or bookmark this site" script to some of your business web site pages.
      While this is not used as much any longer, if the value of the page is so great as evidence by your analytic report, it would be a good idea to add this code on that one page only.
8. "Recommend This Site" on your site. If someone visits your business Web site and knows someone else who may appreciate it, this feature will e-mail the page's link to a recipient.
      This is a bit outdated, and has for the most part been replaced by more of a Web 2.0 preference in adding social book marking code to the site page
9. If you have pages on your business web site that you update monthly (like an articles page or recommended links page) say so on the page.
      Again this advice is old, as many web sites are now dynamic, meaning they are generated out of a database and technically new every time they are served up. However if you have a good Content Management Program (CMS), it will handle this mundane task for you and even update your site-map file and resubmit it to the search engines.
10. Join a few Web rings. For additional information, visit Web-Ring and Bravenet.
       Web Rings were the FIRST social network, while they worked much like recommending sites, the user had the option to jump to a random site in a web ring that should have dealt with similar content. Unfortunately web rings were rarely monitored good enough to become effective as social networks as the content in many rarely was complimentary to the web ring topic.
11. Provide a subscription box, to your e-zine or business announcement list, on your most viewed business web site pages.
       This has been replace again with Web 2.0 preferred content of RSS feeds and to some extent mailing lists. Where this is very relevant is in lead generation, especially if the data collected is fed directly in to a lead generation program such as SalesForce.com
12. On large business web sites, create a "What's New Page" or even better, ask your web designer to design a "Site Map" for your visitors.
       Old advices again, a good CMS application will have a plugin or module that can be configured to show new content in summary or in whole anywhere on the site. As with a Site map this should also be edited or built dynamically with a good CMS, if it is not, it is time to find a new CMS or webmaster

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Much of your business web site traffic will come from search engines. Here are some search engine submission tips to keep in mind.

13. Search engines look for certain things - titles, headings, meta tags - so it is crucial to make sure your site is "search engine friendly". Visit the Search Engine Optimization page on this site for additional resources on search engines and search engine submission tips.
    

1. TITLE tags: Title tags should be 60 or so characters and include some keywords.
      Do your research, many sites will say 60-65 characters, including 3-5 key words. Yea, that worked well from 2006-2008ish, however once again, search bots read sites, so you might want to include a your abbreviated slogan and contact number. Your slogan should have 3-5 of your keywords in it. And as always make sure that those words are used in regular speech throughout that page.
2. Header tags are numbered from 1 to 7: (typically 1-3 are only used) some search engines recognize Header tags. So make sure you use these tags for each of the titles on your page.
      More importantly use your key words, remember your days of English class, when your teacher said to put the one or two word subject in your title heading or intro paragraph. Search Engines know these rules now, so follow them and it will make more sense to your reader.
3. Keyword Meta tags: Add no more than 15 to 20 keywords to keep the search engines from flagging your site for keyword spamming. Prioritize your words. The best way to submit to search engines is to submit to each search engine individually.
      This isn't so true any longer a good search bot will determine a pages keywords, despite what you say they are, so the best thing to do is write a page with 4-5 keywords in mind and use them in natural speak on that page, don't bunch them in once sentence or paragraph.
4. Use keywords in the text area of each page. They are especially important at the beginning of sentences and higher up on the page.
      Most stand alone and quick scan SEO programs still tout this as the truth, however the new top search engines (Google and Bing) actually read the content and determine if it has keyword stuffing or if it is natural language speak. Other search engine may still rely on this method, so it depends on where you want to rank.

LEFT OUT of a few original lists

5. Meta Description: This is still important to search engine results. When a search engine displays results it will show a summary of what the site is about. It takes it from 1 of 2 places depending on what it thinks is relevant to the search result. It will take it from the Meta Description if written well enough for the result OR it will take an excerpt from the content on the web page. It usually does the later if there is NO Meta Description Tag. So this tag is still of vital importance to the person reading the search results. Make your Meta Description Tag a good tight summary of what the content of your page is, try not to go over 145 characters including spaces. In most cases anything after 145 characters gets truncated and is NOT visible to the user or reader or the search results.
6. Fill in your "tags": To often webmasters forget to fill in crucial information tags for both pictures and links. If you want a search engine to understand a link you would NOT want a plain link like <a href="http://www.linksomewhere.com">Go HERE</a> YOU WOULD WANT TO DO THIS INSTEAD <a href="http://www.linksomewhere.com" title="Go to link name sits">Go HERE</a>. This makes it much more relevant to a search engine.

   Image Tags: You would want to do a similar thing with images, but instead of using the title tag (which you could for a quick pop up note if the mouse hovers over the image) you would want to use the <alt> tag. This tag is useful to not only search engines, but blind people surfing your site with a browser reader.

7. Have other sites link to you: That is NOT to say have everyone on any subject link to your site, specific page or your article, but you do want them to if they are talking in their article about your article. How do you think Wikipedia grew so fast and shows up almost all the time on the first page of any search result?
8. Localize your site: If your website only deals with a certain geographic area, then let the search engines know that. Your site will most likely get to the top faster in that local areas. (read more on WikiPedia for Geotagging)
   Here are some examples of that code to put on your web site/
      <meta name="geo.position" content="50.167958;-97.133185">
      <meta name="geo.placename" content="Rockwood Rural Municipality, Manitoba, Canada">
      <meta name="geo.region" content="ca-mb">
   
   You could also do this for images on your site, called Microformat, this is where if the geo information is not attached digitally to the image, you can specify it with a microformat by using the <span> tags.
9. To learn more about meta tags and choosing keywords, read "THIS ARTICLE".

14. Search engines do not find your site unless you submit your site's information to them. Below are four ways to submit your Web site to search engines:
       This isn't true any more, if some other site mentions your site in a link, a spider will crawl your site. However, who will do this if not you?

1. It is recommended that you submit to search engines individually.
      This used to be really time consuming, but since one big search engine has eaten another, there are only 3 major ones now, Google, Microsoft's Bing and technically Yahoo!, but it was recently "absorbed" by Microsoft. Once you have submitted to those 3, most other search engines will find your site in time.
2. Since some people prefer to use a free service to submit their sites to search engines, I recommend that they open a free e-mail address to use when you do "anything" for free on the World Wide Web. Two good search engine submission services are Submit It!, and Scrub The Web. You can pay for a program that will assist you to submit and critique your site such as WebPosition Gold.
      This isn't even relevant anymore, technically you want to use your business email to submit your site to a search engine as it brings credibility to your domain name. Assuming your business email ends in your domain name, which it should. If not get a Gmail Business account.
3. Hire a Search Engine Optimization Expert to handle your search engine submissions.
      While I would normally laugh at this, I am an SEO guru, so I do want your business. The real point to this is some times a SEO professional will spot stuff in your submission that a webmaster will not see or think of, so it is important to have someone who does know about SEO.

15. Visit these search engine information sites: Search Engine Watch and Search Engine Guide.
    

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Search engine submission is only one way to drive traffic to your web site business. Making sure your business web site is search engine friendly is only one aspect of Web site promotion. Here are some other web site promotion tips:

16. Find easy and secure ways for your clients to pay you. A shopping cart and a secure way to accept checks and/or credit cards work very well.
       PayPal is probably the fastest and most secure way to get payments on your site. If you are selling products and planning on having an online catalog, you should be looking in to E-commerce solutions.
17. Check your business web site's links regularly to make sure they all work. Use a free link checker such as Xenu's Link Sleuth.
       That is kind of an old way of doing it, while it still may work a better way is let Google.com/webmasters tools work for you or do a quick and dirty using the "validator.w3.org/checklink"
18. Provide monthly chats or bulletin boards (forums) to build relationships and community.
       Forums on your site are great, however they can run rampant quickly by rogue spam bots or users wanting to cause trouble. So you need to make sure there is a secure way of validating new users and have a team of people verify content, just don't go Nazi crazy as a content cop.
19. Conduct periodic contests and announce the winners on your site.
       This is GREAT way to raise money on your site, however there are rules and regulations in each state, so check your local laws before doing it. Often you can get one of your affiliate accounts to kick down a prize so it's a win-win.
20. Offer a free e-book or e-report on your site. The size doesn’t matter if you’re providing it for free and it’s specifically for your ideal client. Provide permission for the e-book to be forwarded to others for their personal use.
       This is probably the fastest way to get people to come to your site, especially if the information is of value and credible it will make them want more. There are great sites out there now that can assist you in creating an eBook, so look them up and use them. Make sure to promote them on your social network pages
21. Write articles, post them to your business Web site, and submit them to article banks.
       This used to be a GREAT piece of advice and while it still works, it could also shoot the author in the foot by having duplicate content on the web and discovered by the search bots. You want to write one 350-500 word article, place that on your site. Then you will want to write at least 3-5 different summary's of it for submission to the article site, making sure they get posted at least 6+ hours apart, there are services for this to make it easier. The goal here is to have similar articles talking up and about the main article on your site. This way readers get interested and you get links from similar content to main content and the links are of higher quality making your main article on your site an authoritative article. (read more about authoritative articles here)
22. Design some quizzes or surveys. Statistics show that visitors love quizzes and assessment tools.
       This has it's purpose for a certain segment of visitors on your site. If you choose to do this, you will want to make them in reference to an article or an article you plan on writing.
23. Participate in online forums as an expert. You get to "quietly" promote your business in your three or four line signature.
       CAREFUL, make sure you read the "Terms of Use Policy" or what you agreed to when you got your account on the forums site. It usually spells out that if you are not a participating member and you have come to advertise, you account may be suspended without notice. So comply with the forum rules. The best piece of advice, after running forums for over 10 years, is to either ask the moderators or email the owner for permission. Of course if you choose not to, the best thing to do is be very communicative with the members of the community. If your advice is good, they will private message you and you now have your warm contact for your services or products. AND believe me, the word will spread quickly to other members as they may write about how you helped them on your site....they promote you, which RARELY if EVER goes against any forum policy.
24. Place your business web site address on all your printed literature -- business cards, brochures, newsletters, letterhead, e-mail signature, ads - everything!!
       This goes without saying, it is the oldest and most conservative approach to marketing and still the best, especially if you are out meeting new people all the time.
25. Promote your web address in your signature for e-mails (change it regularly to highlight something new you're promoting).
       The BEST tool I have found, use the FireFox plugin WiseStamp-Email Signature Extension, after you read it, you'll understand.
26. Teach classes or speak to groups about subjects relating to your products.
       This one and the clue below, really can be the same thing. It is called NETWORKING. You want to network with people, so the best places to do this is Meetup.com groups, continuing adult education classes, social events, industry meetings or get togethers, etc...
27. Network locally to bring people to your site.
       See Above
28. "Permission Market" by gathering, in writing, the e-mail addresses of students, or an audience as part of your evaluation forms. Create index cards so that you can invite your friends, networking partners or associates to join your list. Keep any papers involved in this process for at least a year or two.
       This goes along with 26 and 27 above, obviously the more contacts in your warm market you have the faster you can get the word out, without spamming them. But AGAIN make sure if you are using an email campaign program, it has an OPT-OUT option and link IN THE EMAIL.
29. When your business web site is launched, updated, or you write a free e-Book, send a Press Release to the media, your clients, and friends and associates, too.
       This should be part of your business plan, if it is not, then make it part of it. Making others aware of your new site can be an invaluable resource to loyalty later, if not directly to them, to their contacts or warm market.

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Newly added just for this list:

30. Do Social Marketing with your brand and domain name.

   Go to sites like namechk.com or knowem.com to see if your brand name, domain name or product or service name is taken, if not get an account ASAP and use it to market your eBook, products and services and the like.

31. Use the tools of the Major seach engines you plan to work with.
    Often Google and Microsoft buy other technology companies to integrate their technology, by using those tools, the search engine bots visit your site more often. For example on 10/01/2009 Google purchased reCAPTCHA
32. Affiliate Programs: These would be used mostly on e-Com sites, where you would offer an incentive in credit or cash to those who spread the word about your products or services. It can be used on any site, however I caution you to do your research in setting up an affiliate program, you need to track them carefully and they may be subject to business tax rules.
33. Search Box: Google offers site search if you are not using a CMS application to run your site.
34. Auto responders: With the growth in business the customers’ base increases and so do their needs and queries. These present and potential customers will be asking all sorts of questions. To satisfy them in the bet possible way auto responders can be used.
35. Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs Page): Not necessary on every site, but the more technical a service or product is, a FAQ page can help alleviate a lot of frustrated emails on issues, not to mention it adds more content to your website for the bots to digest.
36. Site Usability: Many webmasters fall in love with a certain style or look and push that off on their customers, however not every one thinks like them. A site should have good navigation and be able to flow well without a lot of disturbing ads or disruptions to lure a visitor away from the content they came to see.
37. Visit SEOMOz.org's article of "10 Remarkably Effective Strategies for Driving Traffic" This site has some great ideas in philosophy, about getting traffic on your site, even if it is a few years old, the philosophy still is valid.
38. BE PATIENT: Many people, even webmasters, are trying to push a site to the search engines. You can do everything right and still not be on the results page for months. The reason why, old domain names still have a LOT of weight, even if their subject material is dated. One of the best pieces of advice I give my clients is to learn HOW to use Search Engines. Here are my favorite two links I give out very often.
      • Google's Web Search Help: How can you find what you are looking for on Google if you DON'T know how to use it?
      • Google's Help Centers: Here are ALL of Google's tools and help reference guides to use them, learn them and discover the Internet!
      • Bing's Help Page: This Explains how to use Microsoft's new Bing Search (just note that Microsoft is always changing links, go figure, so go to Bing.com and look for the HELP link at the bottom of the page, if this link does not work.)

If this list of web site promotion ideas seems overwhelming, visit your favorite search engine to conduct a search for Search Engine Optimizers and Consultants or ask others who they use and would recommend.