by P J Chandler

Yesterday I was talking to owner/editor of a local magazine that has just ceased publication. When I asked what caused her to pull plug, she told me that advertising revenue had fallen off lately. The commonest excuse given by local businesses when she approached them for advertising space was, "We don't need to advertise because we have a web site!"

Setting up a web site is a lot like opening a shop in an unfashionable suburb of a small town in middle of a desert. Unless you tell people about it and give them a good reason to call by, nobody is going to find you except by accident. If you operate a business that has anything less than a worldwide reach, one thing you almost certainly need to do it to advertise in appropriate paper media - if only to let people know where to find your web site.

How else will people find you? Search engine results are only as good as search terms entered: typically, they return thousands of pages, many irrelevant and few surfers follow up on any beyond first 20 or so. Despite claims of some site promotion agencies, it is often impossible to position your site anywhere near top of list unless you are dealing in a product or service so obscure that you have little competition.

Before submitting your web page, make sure it is ready. Make sure all links are working properly and check your spelling and grammar for errors. This is a must for submitting to directories. Directory submissions are reviewed by human editors.

Prepare a description of your page, 30 words or less. Again, reviewers will be using this when they visit your site. This description will also be displayed in search results.

Once this is done, make sure to include meta tags in your web page heading. Pay particular attention to keywords meta tag. This is important because this is how many of search engines that use crawlers will find and index you. A good search engine positioning article to read up on basics is:

"A Down and Dirty Guide to Search Engine Positioning" http://cynted.com/articles/dirty.htm

Be sure to include your targeted keyword(s) in your web page description. Include them in title of your site as well. Include your keyword(s) in "alt=" tag for images. Visit my site at http://www.cynted.com and view source code. From your browser menu, just click on "view" and then "source." You will see what I'm talking about.

Also, take a look at how many times "internet marketing" is used on my main page. This is called keyword density. Note My how my targeted keyword is used frequently but meaningfully throughout page.