I highly recommend taking time to research meta tags of your competition. Don't steal their tags; just look to see what they're doing to get ranked where they are. It is best to use phrases versus individual keywords. What phrases do you think your visitors will use to find you? I think this is an excellent activity for a brainstorming session with your peers, employees, and friends--better yet, your customers. Once you start showing up in search engines, reexamine your tags to see if you can tweak them to rank higher.

For an excellent overview on meta tags, visit:

WebLecturer.com http://www.weblecturer.com/lecturenotes/meta.html

For help choosing right keywords, visit:

Wordtracker http://our.affiliatetracking.net/wordtracker/af.cgi?2581

Title Tag--More important than meta tags is your title. The title tag displays your Web page's name. Be sure to include lots of keywords in your title tag, because most search engines consider these keywords in their relevancy calculations. (Note: The recommended number of characters for your title is 60.)

SEARCH ENGINE SUBMISSIONS

Although there are automated services that promise to get you listed on thousands of Web directories and free-for-all (FFA) links pages, it is recommended that you manually submit your site to top search engines. Be forewarned that it takes weeks (sometimes even months!) to get listed.

For a list of top search engines and a link to their submission page, request my article, "Site Promotion 101," mailto:sitepromotion101@sendfree.com

In addition to search engines, you should get your site listed in specialty directories--this also helps in link popularity. For a directory of thousands of specialty search engines, visit:

Search Engine Guide http://www.searchengineguide.com/

Why pay a referral fee you ask? Simple. What you give up on front end, you'll more than recoup later on back end. How? Well, lets look at who they'll need after they've done business with you? Maybe they'll want to go on a honeymoon...which means they will probably want a good travel agent. Now, you contact (ahead of time, of course) travel agents and propose a similar joint venture to one you used with jeweler. Only this time, you'll be receiving referral fee.

We're not finished yet! Keep these names on file in your database, we'll be using them to generate other streams of revenue for our (um..I mean your :) business. You have their anniversary date...it was date you helped plan remember? Well send a postcard to husband about a week or so before asking if he would like some flowers sent to his wife's job (women love that). What about sending a postcard about a month before date offering a special discount on jewelry? Or maybe its their fifth or tenth anniversary and they've been talking about another vacation. Send a postcard a month or two offering a discount on a vacation package.

How will you be offering all these discounts on these services...through your 'joint ventures' you'll set up ahead of time! You're only limited by time and effort you put into this strategy. Next time, we'll discuss how this technique can be implemented on Internet.

Best of Luck,

C. Wright, Guerrilla Marketer "Free 100+ Ezine Article Database" www.GuerrillaPromotions.com/TrafficMagic.html