But remember a good website ranking is virtually FREE advertising and will bring in a steady flow of traffic, so it is worth going to some lengths to get a good position.

First, sit back for a minute and ask yourself what exactly you are selling. What keywords are people going to search for to find your page? Getting a good ranking on a search engine depends on keywords you are using - or more specifically keywords people are using to find you!

Your aim should be to create a few HIGHLY FOCUSSED doorway pages for your site, each one optimized for a particular keyword of phrase. But be honest with yourself. Use keywords or phrases that describe your product or service as closely as possible.

To help you find out which keywords are most searched for, and how likely you are of getting a good ranking, there is a very good tool called WordTracker. It emails you a free weekly report of top 500 keywords (phrases) that are requested on major search engines. It also filters out all pornographic words which account for 25% of search engine requests. However it also does more!

You can enter a keyword or phrase that you want people to find your webpage with, and it will return a list of 100 other related keywords. You then click on any of those keywords and you will get a list of how many searches have been made for it in last 24 hours. Then Wordtracker compares results with number of pages ranked on AltaVista for each keyword or phrase and compiles a report for you.

Now here is why this tool is so valuable. You can see which keywords you have more chance with in obtaining a higher search engine ranking - those keywords with a lot of hits but relatively fewer pages listed on AltaVista - and create doorway pages optimized for those keywords. The doorway pages you create will now have a better chance of ranking in top 20 or 30. Wordtracker has a free trial.

Now after choosing your keywords, create a doorway page for each one.

Most search engines place a high importance on keywords and description "META" tags on your web pages. For a more detailed explanation of META tags, look at our HTML tutorial at http://www.TheWebsEye.com/HTML.htm.

A new approach, Informative Advertising, does.

The Advertising Cemetery

Since inception of commercial Web, advertisers have been busy trying innumerable techniques. I look briefly at major ones:

1 - PUSH - Early in game they decided to send news together with advertising directly to Net user. Did not get off ground

2 - BANNERS - At first banners seemed to work. But after awhile they faded away. The cemetery is full of them.

3 - ANIMATION - You still see animation, though not as much as was prevalent at first. It will die soon

4 - FLASH - This seems to be time for Flash. But it is so irritating it will die soon too

5 - POP-UPS - You try to visit a site and up pops a window with an ad. Annoying. I don't give it much time to live

6 - POP-UNDERS - Instead of window popping up in front of window you want you see popped window afterwards. This too will die

The Latest Approach: Contextual Advertising

Now advertisers have gotten brilliant idea of grabbing visitor's attention while he or she is in a related situation. They say that if a person is at a search engine entering a keyword, this is a good place to advertise a product or service that fits under this keyword. This particular approach, it seems to me, is an excellent form of advertising. It has been done successfully by Google and other search engines. Some call this "contextual advertising." But I have a better name for it, as I will show below.

Here is an example of "contextual advertising." An outfit called EZula sells keywords. But instead of supplying a search engine EZula distributes a program called TOPtext. When a user of TOPtext visits a site, he sees highlighted words, which enable him to jump to sites that have purchased ads for these keywords.

These words are not highlighted by website owner. They are highlighted by TOPtext. The jumps take visitor, not to a site chosen by website owner, but to a competitor site. Do you think competitors will put up with this? More important, do you think visitor, when he finds out about this "contextual stealing," will trust advertiser for anything? This is most outrageous form of advertising invented so far.

Wells Fargo Bank, I hear, is one such "contextual advertiser." Does this increase your trust in Wells Fargo?