The placement of your content is equally important. If you are selling something obviously you want it offered as easily as possible, and you don't just want it to be available - you want to sell it. There are many ideas to consider when deciding on placement of certain content. A great read that really shows way a visitor looks through your site can be found at http://www.poynterextra.org/eyetrack2004/main.htm. Taking a look through this information can give you lots of tips to work with in deciding on product and special offer placement etc. In above-mentioned article you will be able to see way an average visitor views a website, pattern in which their eyes follow information, advertising positions that are most effective, etc. This is a great resource for you and your company.

Quite possibly one of most useful tools available is found at http://www.clicktracks.com/ananlyzer/. This tool will show you all very specific details of how visitors are navigating your site. This tool is many steps above your typical web stats, it will show you details so specific that you can not only see search term a visitor used to find you but what search engine they came from and path they followed through your site right down to which search term is selling most on your site. This highly detailed information can be an incredibly valuable tool for you. With access to such info you can, over time, adjust your content, navigation, and SEO based on these reports - watching changes happen and see effects not just make good guesses.

The value of having an average visitor test your site and get real feedback is huge. You have no choice but to be a little biased when viewing your own site and this outsider information can give you tips that you may have only wished you had. Don't put your site out there and wonder what all visitors are thinking and doing, just ask! You may even go as far as having a poll included on your website, so long as it's not popping up every time they click a link. A simple "we welcome your feedback" email form on your contact or profile page would be a professional simple way to keep up with what visitors are liking or disliking on a continuous basis.

Next Week

Now that your site has been designed, had SEO elements added, tested and edited, you are ready to submit it to search engines and get those visitors coming. Stay tuned for next article in this 10 part series "Submissions".

To simplify this process you can visit "search engines" page on Beanstalk Search Engine Positioning website where we link directly to submissions pages of major engines.

But What About The Other Engines? Surely They Provide Some Traffic?

Quite honestly, they may. You may get a visitor or two. Is it worth $19.95/mth or some such amount? No. You can get a better dollar/visitor ratio on any of many PPC engines out there.

An additional point to note is that you may want to actually visit some of lists of engines on sites offering these services to you. You will discover a couple of important facts:

• Many of these so-called "search engines" are not engines at all but rather FFA (Free-For-All) pages and classified ads sites. They will not help your rankings, you will not see traffic from them and your listing will probably last about as long as spam in your Inbox.
• Many of actual search engines and directories are topical. What this means is that they are focused on a single area and unless your site coincidentally is about space exploration, topographical mapping, etc. you won't get listed. Submitting should not be confused with "guaranteed listing". Submitting your site to thousands of engines is not same as getting your website indexed on thousands of engines.

The Submission Myth

The truth of that matter is, submitting your website at all can realistically be considered a waste of time. Aside from a few key general directories (DMOZ, Yahoo, etc.) and a number of SEO directories, we did not submit website www.beanstalk-inc.com to any of major search engines. It's true, not a single submission.

Are we indexed? Yes we are.

How did we get indexed without submitting our site? If you take time that you would be spending submitting your site and spend it instead finding quality inbound links (which we will write about next week) your site will be indexed and much quicker than you think.

You've probably heard term "search engine spider". Search engines crawl websites. This means that they visit a page, follow all links on that page and so on. If you have a link on a website that is already known to search engines it is only a matter of time before your website will be found by default. If fact, when Beanstalk site went live and first link was established to it, it did not take weeks that are estimated through use of submissions pages for our site to be found. The homepage of beanstalk-inc.com was index by Google three days after site went live and other major engines followed within a week or so.

Final Notes

If there are any points that I hope you take away from this article they are following:

1. Automated search engine submissions services are not worth money they charge.
2. You do not need to be submitted to thousands of "search engines". The vast majority of traffic comes from top few.
3. You will want to consider whether it is even worth time to submit to search engines or whether that time could be better spent building quality, relevant links to your site and submitting your site to major and topical directories.

An additional failing to automated submissions systems not covered above is their inability to take into consideration exact characteristics of your website for their directory submissions. When you're submitting your website to directories you will have to choose exact category your site falls into. Most directories have slightly different category hierarchies and more exact you are in your submission, higher chance you will be listed. Automated systems can never be as exact across multiple directories as a human can.

Submitting your website, even correctly, will not guarantee you top rankings however it will leave you with money in your pocket to spend on other promotional endeavors that may actually produce a solid ROI. And THAT'S what it's all about.

The rankings? You'll have to read other nine steps of series to find out how to attain those.

Next Week

In part eight of this search engine positioning series we will cover importance of link building, how to attain high quality, relevant links to your website, and tools to reduce time it take to do so significantly. With importance of inbound links to your overall rankings you won't want to miss this very important step in website optimization process.