While many options exist to help you increase web presence and market a web site, this brief list of web-marketing basics goes over some of the more useful and widely-trusted tactics.
Search Engine Optimization
Search engines send out software 'spiders' that browse a web site's content and determine the site's rank; in other words, a site's importance or relevance compared to other sites. Following the guidelines below, you can begin to increase your site's ranking:
Page Titles:
Make sure you title each page within your site according to each page's particular content. The words between the <title> and </title> tags in the page's HTML code not only appear at the top of your browser window, but provide essential information to search engine spiders.
META Tags:
Though hidden, search engine spiders value these tidbits of code. Because of this, your META tags should be carefully crafted. For example, make sure that keywords used in a <META name="keywords"> tag reflect the page's actual content. Yet, if a page's content overuses keywords, your site can be penalized with a lower ranking.
Structure:
Text in HTML ‘header’ codes (<h1>, <h2>, etc.) carries more ranking weight than basic text. Search engine spiders index and rank web pages more accurately when you organize the page's content using standardized document structure methods.
Submit URL:
Submit your site for indexing to the larger search engines:
* Google: http://www.google.com/intl/en/submit_content.html
* MSN: http://search.msn.com/docs/submit.aspx
* Yahoo!: http://search.yahoo.com/info/submit.html
Linking:
Many search engines consider the number of incoming links to a site a good indicator of that site's importance. In other words, when other sites—especially other higher-ranked sites—link to your site, the higher your site's ranking will go.