Midway in afternoon, you stop what you're doing to check your traffic reports...You're excited and eager to confirm just how successful your Web site is. Waiting for your site statistics to finish downloading, your glee turns to dread when you learn that only two people visited your Web site all day.

What's a disillusioned Webmaster to do?

Here are a couple of "musts" to add to your to-do list to help you get started marketing yourself and your Web site.

SUBMITTING TO SEARCH ENGINES

Search engines are by far most popular way to find information on Web. Getting your site listed, however, is a chore, and it is oftentimes frustrating because results are not quick to see.

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.

Set up a tickler file to do site submissions on a monthly basis. Resist temptation to submit more often, because your hard work will go up in a puff of smoke if your URL gets banned for spamming Search Engines.

The following list is not all inclusive, but it is a good place to start with your Search Engine submissions.

Free Submissions ----------------

Ah-ha http://www.ah-ha.com/list/list_addurl.asp

AllTheWeb http://www.alltheweb.com/add_url.php

AltaVista http://addurl.altavista.com/sites/addurl/newurl

Ask Jeeves E-mail: mailto:url@askjeeves.com

Direct Hit http://www.directhit.com/util/addurl.html

Dogpile http://www.dogpile.com /help/addurl

Google http://www.google.com/addurl.html

Hotbot http://hotbot.lycos.com/addurl.asp

Lycos http://home.lycos.com/addasite.html

MSN Search http://listings.looksmart.com/info/msn_free_submit.jhtml

National Directory http://www.nationaldirectory.com/addurl/

Northern Light http://www.northernlight.com/docs/regurl_help.html

Open Directory Project http://dmoz.org/add.html

Scrub The Web http://www.scrubtheweb.com/addurl.html

Voila http://www.voila.fr/Informations/Moteur_guide/submit.html

WhatUSeek http://www.whatuseek.com/addurl.shtml

Outlined below are some tasks to add to your marketing checklist. I will begin with most obvious--you wouldn't believe how many people don't think of these things!--and will finish with some more advanced techniques that really work.

DESIGNING SEARCH ENGINE FRIENDLY WEB SITES

Getting listed in major search engines is important, but do not fool yourself--it is not "be all." How many times have you conducted a search and ended up with over a million results? If your site is listed at 999,000, how many people do you think will visit? If you rely *only* on search engines for your customers to find you, they probably won't.

That being said, there are some things you should do before you submit your Web site to search engines. To make your site competitive, you need to "optimize" your Web pages. What does that mean? It means making your pages "search engine friendly."

Although meta tags do not weigh that heavily anymore in search engine rankings, they are still important. The two tags that *must* be included in each of your Web pages are:

Description Meta Tag--Summarize your Web page using lots of keywords. This tag is very important, because many of engines will use it to summarize your site in search results. (Note: The recommended number of characters for description meta tag is 150.)