Another thing you can do is to make sure that you provide useful and plentiful content on your site, for good indexing and good inbound links. You could include a press page on your site for all your media releases and mentions (you can submit press releases online at www.prweb.com , amongst other places), or you could write useful articles to put on your site and submit them to relevant places online (good places to start include www.GoArticles.com - there are many others, try to ensure you include a link to your site at end of article).

Other online places to promote your site (if you have time) include newsgroups and discussion lists. Use google groups to find appropriate discussions and make sure your 'signature' includes your website link.

When submitting your site to search engines, avoid plethora of free programs on internet that promise to submit you to 300+ engines - this is largely a waste of your time. Most search engines are powered by few major ones, which usually have at least some sort of a free submit service. (If you are thinking of paying for a high search engine ranking, pay-per-click options offered by search engines such as https://adwords.google.com/select/main can be a cost-effective option.) Make sure you submit to major engines and directories, including www.google.com , www.yahoo.com , www.altavista.com , www.dmoz.org , www.lycos.com , www.overture.com , www.askalix.com/uk/index.php3 , www.thomsonlocal.com .

Also, look for specialised directories for your sector. There are hundreds of these to be found, so take time to search web for them (www.google.com is a good place to start) and get yourself listed; with a link to your site if at all possible as this will help with your search-engine positioning. Similarly, there are specialised search engines you can submit to: try www.searchengineguide.com/searchengines.html for this.

Of course, you should make sure that your website address features on all your company stationery and literature.

Finally, a few words about use of email to promote your site... Ensure all emails you and your staff send have a signature which includes your website url; put a feedback form on your site and encourage users to leave their email to receive updates and offers from you; but whatever you do, don't send out bulk, unsolicited, untargeted emails - it will do more to damage your credibility than almost anything else.

There are, of course, many more strategies that can be used to better your search engine position and you should bear in mind that website promotion has to be an ongoing process. However, hopefully methods described above will help you start your quest for a top search engine ranking.

This article is copyright Fire Without Smoke Software 2003. Please contact www.fwoss.com or info@fwoss.com for permission to reproduce.

What about redesigns?

The first and foremost role SEO has when a site is being redesigned is to ensure that web designer doesn't change all page names when performing a site update. Otherwise, when new site is launched, traffic to site may substantially drop off when people click on search engine listings that no longer exist.

To combat this phenomenon, consultant will advise designer to re-use old page names as much as possible. If that's not possible, there are two ways to deal with this problem:

1)A custom 404-error page can be installed to inform visitor that page(s) no longer exist and present them with several options to continue into site. 2)Redirection pages can be set up which use old page name and an informative message for visitor. The pages should offer one or more clickable links, and might include a timed-redirect that should be at least 30 seconds before taking visitor to page with new name.

The second option is more desirable, since it allows search engine to note change, follow link to new page and add it to its index at some later point. And of course, if new pages are added, or filenames have to change, it provides a chance to use filenames that can be optimized with keyword phrases.

Just as you are unlikely to turn an SEO consultant into a web designer, you can't turn a web designer into an SEO. However, SEO consultants and designers should work together to bring all of their skill sets to table. The SEO needs to understand that graphic images can be very important in visual appeal of a well-designed web site, just as designer needs to understand benefit of having a home page title that says more than just “Home.”