In Print
Whatever you are using now to publicize your business or organization—business cards, handouts, pamphlets, booklets—add your web address to them. If you advertise in magazines or newspapers, add your address. Add it to everything. Make a card announcing that your site is up. Make your web address a part of your identity.

Online
Two of the ways of “finding you” that we mentioned above—search engines and links—are actually two of the best ways to promote your site. Search engines allow people to enter keywords or phrases for information they are seeking. The engine will return a list of the most relevant results, based on how the keywords are entered and how that particular engine ranks sites (this varies—choose a topic and try doing a search at google.com and altavista.com, for example, and see how different the results are). Search engines index the material in sites by using “spiders” which “crawl” through the web independently, but they also index sites which are submitted to them directly. Take advantage of this by using the “Add URL” or “Add a site” link on search engines’ home pages. (To get to these pages directly, visit this page: submit a URL) It will still take a while for your site to be indexed (from a few days to a few months, depending on the engine), but generally it will be a shorter wait than if you just sat back and hoped to get noticed.

Which search engines should you submit to? If you spend any time online you have probably seen many offers to submit your site to hundreds, maybe thousands of search engines. How useful is it to submit to this many? Consider how many search engines you have heard of and how many you use routinely. The vast majority of people use only a few search engines: Yahoo, MSN, Lycos, Netscape, Excite, LookSmart, AltaVista, Google, AskJeeves, HotBot, and Open Directory are among the top search engines/directories. You should submit your site to any or all of these engines (see the link above or at the bottom of the page for quick submissions).

Even submitting isn’t enough, though. When you do searches, most engines will return hundreds if not thousands of results that match your keywords. If you are indexed and placed in the 700th position in the search results, no one will find you. If you aren’t listed in the top few pages of results, it’s hardly worth being listed. How do you get top rankings in the search engines? Click here for an in-depth look at some Dos and Don'ts for getting top search engine rankings.

There are other online promotion methods, including banner ads, tile ads and paid click-throughs. However, a January 2001 NPD Group study determined that 55% of online purchases originate with search engine listings, while only 9% originate with banner ads and 7% with tile ads. You may want to take this into consideration when developing your marketing strategy.

Here are some additional web promotion resources:

Wordtracker. Their trial is free and easy to use, and their services may help you find your niche—a keyword or phrase that people look for often which doesn’t have a lot of competition.

WebPosition For those interested in a software package that helps to optimize your site for search engines. A free trial version is also available.

http://www.highrankings.com/

http://www.webpromote.com/

http://www.smithfam.com/news/current.html The Internet Marketing Newsletter

http://www.bruceclay.com/web_rank.htm Search Engine Optimization Promotion Tools

http://jimtools.com/keywords/ Keyword Analyzer Tool

http://searchenginewatch.com/ Search Engine Watch