E-mail lists
These are another great way to publicize your site. Again, avoid spamming by sending e-mail messages only to people who request information. Try to build a list of loyal readers by including useful content in your messages, not just promotional fluff.

Promote offline
The Web is big, but its audience is a fraction of that served by traditional media. Don't ignore the real world in your enthusiasm to conquer cyberspace - make them work together. Be sure you have a good, easy-to-remember URL and publicize it everywhere you can. It should appear on every piece of marketing collateral your company produces, from business cards to brochures.

Create a signature file
Create a signature file and add it to the bottom of every e-mail message you send. As well as your e-mail address and the URL of your Web store, an effective signature should include a hook - something that entices the reader to visit your store. Keep your signature brief. It should be not more than six lines at a maximum width of 65 characters.

Setup affiliate programs
Allow other Web sites to sell your products. You still fulfill all orders but pay your affiliate commission on each sale generated.

Print your URL everywhere
Make sure the URL of your Web store appears prominently on every printed piece your business generates, including stationery, ads, brochures, flyers, packaging, labels, accounting forms. Like any other message you want noticed, repetition is the key to recognition.

Keep your content fresh
It's difficult enough to entice someone to visit your store once; to increase the chances that your visitors will return, you need to provide fresh content on a regular basis.

Cultivate the media
Remember that the best advertising is third-party recognition. As part of your regular PR campaign, be sure the media is aware of your Web site, along with everything else that's newsworthy about your business. An area within your site, for example, that provides resources tailored to your target market may be just the hook you need to get noticed.



A BRIEF EXPLANATION OF SEARCH ENGINES
Over 90% of the web traffic coming from search engines.

A bit about Search Engines
Search Engines are easily the most powerful and most complicated traffic tool a web site owner has at his disposal. The amount of traffic you can shake out of search engines is limited only by your knowledge and abilities. The traffic converts far better than most other traffic sources because the people using the search engines are generally newer.

So then why doesn't everyone just use search engine traffic and live happily ever after? Because search engine traffic is very difficult to master and it gets more difficult all the time. Getting search engine traffic involves intense study of complicated computer topics and there have been many who have set out to master the search engines never to be heard from again. What I will cover in this section will be only the beginning of what you need to know about search engines. If you really wish to become effective in the search engines I recommend going to the Search Engine Matrix and putting in some serious reading time.

Search Engines and Directories
First, it will help you to know the difference between a search engine and a directory. They are not the same thing although it can be confusing since most directories contain a search engine. A directory is a site on the web that starts off with very broad categories and then allows the surfer to click onto more and more specific categories until they find what they are looking for. Yahoo! is probably the most famous example. You could go to Yahoo and click on Arts and Humanities and you would get a list of sub categories for that. You could click on the Art History sub category and get more specific categories and so on until you get a list of web pages that will contain what you want. Similar to a link site, a directory will have a human editor who comes to your site to determine whether it is suitable to list in their directory.

If you can't find what you're looking for in their directory, most directories will have a search engine to fall back on. A search engine is a little box that you can type words into and a program searches all the web pages that it knows about and tries to give you the best results based on its programming. Many people spend weeks, months, years and lifetimes getting to know these programs and how to get the programs to rank them well and that is why it takes so much time to learn and produce results.

Search Terms
The good news about search engines is that all you do is submit web address on their form and then sometime later their program (called a spider) will come, look at your page, and store parts of it in their database. Not too hard. The problem is that, as I've said, you'll have a hard time getting listed anywhere close to the top for popular search terms. A search term is those words that people type into the little box before they click search. You can include words like "Auction" and "online auction" on your page and the spider will come to your page and may add to its database that your page contains those words, but the likelihood is that you will be listed on page 1,234,567 and no one will ever find you there. One way to get good results without a ton of practice and study is to identify search terms for which there is not a ton of competition and let the spider know you have those words on your page. Of course if you put in a search term that no one ever searches for that isn't going to help you much so the trick is to find new things that people have just begun searching for where there isn't a bunch of past competition.

Another good strategy is to go to a place like GoTo Suggestions and type in one word that relates to your page. GoTo Suggestions will then give you a bunch of related search terms in order of how often they were searched for and the number of times they were searched for. You can then take a list like that to the search engine you want to target and search for them and see how many results each one turns up. You can look for the combination of which search terms were searched for the most but have the least competition this way. That will help you a little bit in your quest to get noticed for a popular search term.

Meta Tags
If you are a beginner web site owner, you may never have heard of meta tags or may not think they are important. To many search engine spiders, your meta tags are very important. A spider will look most closely at your page title, the words at the very top of your page, and what is in your meta tags. It is a good idea to have a short description meta tag that contains the words in the search term you are trying to target. Then you will also want a keywords meta tag that has those same words again grouped into search terms. Your keywords meta should look like a bunch of two or three word search term phrases separated by comas. However, you do not want to repeat any one word too much because most of these search engine spider programs regard that as spam and then they will not record your page in their database. Complicating matters worse is that each search engine has a different tolerance for word repetition, so that can be part of the science of studying the search engines. Finding out what is the greatest frequency they will allow you to repeat a word before they think it is spam, and the people who figure out the answers to that are the same people who spend large chunks of time studying the engines.

When people first learn of the importance of meta tags, many just go crazy in their keywords meta tag and throw every great search term they can think of into them. That's why many of the search engines now check the text in your page as well to make sure that the words in your meta tags actually appear on your web page. Stuffing keywords into your meta tags may be doing you no good whatsoever if the words do not also appear somewhere on your page.

For the purposes of starting off you will just want to identify some search terms. Make sure they appear in your meta tags, your page title and in the text near the top of your page. Then submit them to the search engines and see what happens. You should not be expecting great search engine results to roll in when you are just starting off, but the quality of the traffic that comes from search engines will make what traffic you do get worthwhile, and you will never get any search engine traffic if you don't take a stab at it and try.

Link Popularity
A lot of search engines have moved more and more toward something called link popularity. Link popularity assumes that when people are searching for sites they will be most interested in the most popular sites. The search engine determines which sites are most popular by figuring out how many other sites in the search engine database are linked to it. Sites that are linked to by a lot of other sites are then moved closer to the top of search results and sites without a lot of links to it are moved lower in the search results. For this reason many web site owners link all of their pages together. It does work. The problem is that if you put these links to your other pages too far down the page the search engine spider may not find them. If you put them to close to the top you will have a bunch of links to other sites that you may not want the surfers to click on. The way web site owners get around this at the present time is to place non-clickable links. If you make an A HREF link to one of your sites and then put the /A right after without putting anything inside the link then you will have an unclickable link that the search engine spiders will find but that no one else will see or click on. I personally do not use that method because to me it makes no sense that spiders will look at non-clickable links since they don't do anyone any good, and it would be very easy for the search engines to reprogram the spiders to ignore them. I always think any day now the search engines will make this change, but they haven't so far. Other ways that you can get around this without using a non-clickable link include making links to your site and linking them with an invisible .gif file. Then the surfer can't see the link but the link will still be there and still add to your link popularity. Other easier strategies include linking to your other sites and putting a period or coma or underline character inside the link. Something that the surfer is not likely to notice or click on.

One good strategy that people used to use in the past was to use links that were the same color as their background color so that no one could see them. Most search engine spiders are now programmed to detect this trick and ignore links that are too close in color to your background as well as ignoring links that are made with font size=1. You should avoid those tactics if you want to increase your link popularity.

Naming Things
If you are like I am you like to name the files on your web page with brief but descriptive names to keep things organized. Well, descriptive is a good idea, but brief is a bad idea. The reason for that is because when the search engine spider comes to record things about your page it grabs all kinds of things that you wouldn't think about. It looks at what you named your pictures, what you have in your alt tags for your pictures, and what the .html files themselves are called. So if you name your pictures auction01.gif and auction02.gif, that will mean little to the spider. But if you name your picture something like one-stop-virtual-car-lot.gif, suddenly you will get the spider's attention for all of the search terms that can be made up with those words. Keep that in mind when you're naming your pictures and pages.

Keyword Pointers
This is a very important part of the project. You need to identify appropriate keywords. There are many pointers, which you will need to review before selecting your final keywords. The good news, is that for many search engines, you will be able to create multiple "doorway pages" so your keyword choice will not be as limited.

The ultimate goal in selecting keywords is to think of single and more likely combo keywords that are relevant to your web site's contents and at the same not too competitive with the millions of other web sites out there.

Where do I Start
The first place to start is to simply jot down every possible word that someone might type into a search engine to find your site. Below, are some additional pointers that will greatly enhance your chance of a top 20 position.

Combo vs. Single
You rarely want to target a single keyword. There are just too many sites to compete against. For example, real estate would yield 1000's of competitive sites and the chance of you becoming a top 20 site is remote (unless you buy a top position). However, if you change your keyword to Fairfax Real Estate or Waterfront Real Estate, you will be competing with fewer sites. In this case, being regional can help find you. Are there other words when combined can better describe your site? To check how popular a combo keyword is, you can visit a search engine and type it in and check. Of course, you don't want t a combo word that no one else will think of.

Be Creative
You can "carve out your niche" by selecting alternative words that people may think of when looking for you. Try the thesaurus in Word for other words you can use.

Related topics(doorway pages)
While many words are obvious to your site, think outside the box and consider words that someone might associate with your site. For example, a meeting planner might list the key cities they are experienced with or the type of meetings they work with. You can create additional pages for your site those emphasis specific elements of your site. For example, you might create a page that would grab one type of audience, but not appeal to another. You can use these multiple "doorway" pages to direct traffic to your home page.

Misspelled
If there are some obvious misspelled versions of your keywords, we may want to include them. People do misspell words and there is no reason you shouldn't be found in these cases. To see how others might misspell your keywords, you can ask others in your office to take a quick spelling bee - encourage them to be a little lazy and see what they come up with.

Stop Keywords
Most search engines will skip certain words including "a, the, and, of, that, it, too, Web, home page". If a stop word is part of your site name or title, put it in quotes or come with another name that doesn't include the stop word. For example, if you have the title "Web designer" and web is dropped, you would end up with simply designer. To check if a specific word is a stop word, you can check by searching on it and see if it is ignored on the results page.

Longer Keywords
In general, you will want to choose the longer version of a keyword. For example, a search for swim will also find swimming and swimmer. Therefore, you would not need to include the word swim. The same rule applies to using the plural form of a word.

Additional URL's
One of the strongest ways to leverage additional keywords it to register additional domain names that may or may not point to your same home page. To check if a specific name is available, visit http://www.silanta.net.