Promotion services

First some free advice.

The first step is to have a good web address. Getting the address you want these days is very difficult and unless you have a large budget you will probably not get your first choice. Having an address that could be guessed is very helpful in getting traffic.

The next thing you need to do is get your site "search engine friendly". The means you need to put your meta tags together and make sure there's useful information in them since search engines may use these to index sites.

The meta tags are:
<meta name="keywords" content=" ">
<meta name="description" content=" ">
<meta name="location" content="Your City, Country">
<meta name="robots" content="all">
<meta name="author" content="Your Name">
<meta name="copyright" content="&copy 2008, Your Company">

Most of these are obvious, here's what the others do. The "keywords" are just that - a list of words and phrases that describe your site. These should be words you think people will search for. Keywords should be separated by commas, should not be repeated and you should try to keep the list short.

The "description" is a description of what the site is about - try to keep it under 200 characters. And don't use it like keywords - that's what that field is for. This should be a grammatically proper sentence or two that really talks about what your site does.

Finally, the "robots" entry, robots are little utilities that search engines send out to index your site. The term "all" tells the program it can search all of your site.

Next you want to ensure that your front page also has the terms that you want to have in the search engine. This will help if the engine doesn't use metatags. You should also ensure that the site is easy to navigate.

Once you have these in place, you are ready for the search engines - you can either go to the main engines and submit your site personally, which is the best choice since you will be able to control where it goes. You should plan on periodically re-submitting your site, anywhere between once a week and once every two months.

Of course, search engines aren't the only way to drive hits to your site and there is a growing body of thought that search engines aren't that effective (unless you pay for a better ranking). Other choices include banner advertising on other sites, link exchanges with other sites, posting to newsgroups, SPAM e-mailings (not recommended and not supported on our server), and of course news print, radio and TV.

We are happy to help you with all of this, from helping you determine the best keywords to writing the marketing material. For our e-commerce customers we include this as part of the package.