Lets say that you've already created and "uploaded" your awesome Web-Site and it's an on-line store, featuring shopping card, secure credit card processing, the works. Now, assuming you have a limited budget for getting the word out to the public, you should be brain-storming on how to maximize your web-site visibility! With any luck, you should come up with two basic goals: (1) optimizing your Web pages so that search engines suggest your site when the public asks for the type of product you are selling, and (2) engaging in promotional efforts so that your site stands tall above others competing for the attention of Web searchers. What follows are strategies and techniques culled from a variety of sources.

Web search engines are operated by "for-profit" businesses, and competition among them is very fierce. As such, they are reluctant to share their "secrets", but they do provide a lot of very useful information that can significantly improve your chances of being found. Apart from adhering to this official information, increasing Web site visibility is as much an art form as a logical process. The best course is to read as much as you can, take advantage of the tools and resources available to help you, and create your own strategies for optimizing and promoting your site. Let's start with one of the easiest things you can do.

The Bottom Line: "Get Your Own Domain Name!"

Free Web page services like Geocities and Tripod are great for learning HTML and establishing a personal presence on the Web, however if you're serious about driving traffic to your site, you really must register and maintain your own domain name. Here's why. Your potential customers will scan a list of search results and will almost always visit a "branded" domain before a site that's a subdomain of a larger server (the exception to this may be sites located in .edu or .gov domains). Even if there was identical content at www.goodstuff.com and www.free.com/zone51/gifts/~178687/, which site do you think most searchers would visit first? The bottom line is that it's easier to promote a simple, meaningful and "direct to the point" domain name than one that requires typing a lot of dots, dashes, slashes and tildes. (Most search engines also use a meaningful URL name in computing relevancy rankings).

It's very easy to research and register your own domain.

Make sure the name you choose is meaningful and be careful not to use a registered trademark. If all the names you want are taken, don't despair! There are new names - .info, .biz, .pro, .areo, and others - that will be available soon.

Probably the most important thing you can do to achieve good visibility on the Web is to make sure the content on your pages is first-rate. Rankings at some search engines are determined in part by the number of Web sites that link to yours. Reason: if other people include links to your site on their own pages, they think it's worth recommending to others. This is the equivalent of "word-of-mouth" advertising on the Web. Don't be afraid to ask others to link to your site, especially if you link to theirs. Reciprocal linking can be a great win-win for both parties.

Don't overlook details. Make sure your writing is grammatically correct, properly punctuated, and that all words are spelled correctly. You should always use "keywords" to describe to the public what makes your site unique. Keywords should be as specific as possible, and you should combine them in phrases that searchers looking for a site like yours might use. Try to make them as unique as possible though, so they don't return millions of matches.

What keywords do "typical" searchers use? You can find out which keywords are being submitted to search engines at this very moment. Magellan's "Voyeur" shows you a dozen or so requests it just received (only the words; nothing about the identity or location of the searcher). The keywords are hyper-linked so you can see the results generated by the request. Every ten seconds a new batch appears. MetaCrawler's Metaspy (filtered and unfiltered for "decency") and Webcrawler's Search Ticker operate in much the same way. Spend some time with these. As you watch, notice that misspellings are common. You might want to include a few easy-to-mistype variations of your critical keywords to help the fumble-fingered find you (in your meta-tag keywords only; more below). Also note that, despite the availability of honing tools like Boolean, adjacency, and string operators, many searchers don't use them. Your keywords should be descriptive two or three word phrases people might use to search for you. Many search engines will automatically insert an "and" between keywords if none is explicitly supplied by the searcher.

A good way to come up with keywords is to use the search engines themselves to tell you how popular (useless) keywords are. Simply enter the keyword or phrase and observe how many references are found. Play around with different combinations of words. Eventually you should be able to find keyword phrases that aren't commonplace, but will still help searchers find your site.

Search engines often ignore adjectives and articles, or words that are simply too abundantly used on Web sites (called stop words). Alta Vista even ignores the words "Web" and "Internet" when you use them in a search query!

Directories, Indexes, and Search Engines

All search sites have search engines. By definition, a search engine scans a database of information looking for keywords, and lists the results according to some rules of relevance. In a nutshell, the two key factors that influence what search engines find are 1) how the database was created, and 2) how the search engine attempts to match keywords to entries in the database. Let's start with how the databases are created. One type of database is called a directory. Just like a yellow-pages directory, Web directories are carefully structured by subject and topic, and entries are located in very narrow, specific slots. Web directory structures are usually hierarchal, starting with very broad categories narrowing down a logical path to very specific, focused topics. This structure, combined with hyperlinks, makes them very easy to browse without using a search engine. Or, if you're not sure which subcategory to use, the search engine will examine your keywords and make suggestions. Yahoo and Look Smart are two well-known examples of Web directories.

The second type of database is called an index. Indexes often lack the hierarchal structure of directories, relying much more on raw computing horsepower to suck entire Web sites into their database, then analyzing the retrieved documents with indexing software. Some actually attempt to download every single document on the Web, then search for keywords among all those billions of retrieved words. Alta Vista, Hotbot, Infoseek, and Lycos are examples of Web indexes.

Think of a directory as a helpful librarian who is intimately familiar with the card catalog and can point you to specific entries based on your query. An index, on the other hand, is like an idiot-savant who can instantly pinpoint keywords anywhere in the library by racing through the building, scanning every book at lightning speed and handing you a list of every title where the words appeared. Understanding this difference is critical for gaining good visibility for your Web pages. There's a simple but fundamental difference in the way directory and index databases are compiled. Directories are assembled by people; indexes are generated by automated software called robots. You need to ask permission to be listed in a directory. To be included in an index you only need to tell the robot to visit your site and do its thing! Sometimes they'll find your pages without your even asking!

So Directory or Index? Take your pick. As the major search sites race to add content, most of the index sites also feature directories, though they may not be their own. Danny Sullivan's Search Engine Alliances Chart http://searchenginewatch.internet.com/reports/alliances.html illustrates the "co-opetition" between and amongst these companies. Take a look at the "Branded Versions" column to see who plays with who. [Netscape teamed with Excite for a while, Infoseek with Disney, Yahoo with Alta Vista, etc.]. Check his huge site out at http://www.SearchEngineWatch.com/.

With hundreds of thousands of new pages added to the Web each day, it's increasingly difficult to get your site listed in a directory like Yahoo without some good help from a professional listing expert (such as ShotgunBlast.com). At ShotgunBlast.com, the key engines receive individual "hand entered" information about your site, with emphasis on scrutinizing and rearranging your keywords in just the optimum way to help achieve the target goal of greater visibility.

Spiders, Crawlers, and Robots

Indexing robots are programmed to roam the Web's hypertext structure and return information about Web pages (or the pages themselves) to the index database. Some clever wag nicknamed his robot a "spider" because it worked on the Web. Since real-life spiders "crawl" on their webs, another robot was named "Webcrawler", and now almost all indexing robots (or 'bots) are referred to as spiders or crawlers. There are a lot of them creeping around on the Web gathering information. These robots find pages by following links from page to page until they can't find any new pages. Then they start over. In fact, the term "crawler" is a bit misleading because robots simply find links to other Web pages and request copies of those documents, rather than actually creeping around the Web like some insidious virus. They work much like a hyper-caffeinated Web surfer, clicking link after link, though obviously at much greater speed than a person with a browser and mouse.

In the past, it was possible to get high rankings form search engines by saturating web pages with "hidden" keywords. The tricks included repeating keywords in comment tags (which aren't displayed by the browser), repeating keywords at the bottom of the page where viewers are unlikely to scroll, and even more deviously, including keywords on the page in a font color that matched the background color, making them invisible to human eyes but not to spiders. Others sought to "steal" searchers by including highly sought keywords such as "sex", and "money". The search sites have caught on to this practice though. It's called "spamdexing", and if the search sites catch you doing it, the consequences are severe, i.e. permanent banishment from the index.

Optimize Your Pages For Spiders

Now that you've selected keywords and know something about how spiders work, take the time to "tune" your pages for maximum visibility. The first step is to work on your title. A good title is critical. Not only do spiders pay a lot of attention to them, but a title is used as the description of a bookmark. A good title is both descriptive of your page and contains your most important keywords in order of importance from left to right.

Since the title is displayed (logically enough) on the title bar at the very top of most browsers, few people take the time to read it. Write your title for the spider who reads it, and be less concerned with crafting a clever, pithy phrase that you might use for a magazine article. Don't shy away from long titles. In fact you should use all of your keywords. What you don't want to do is use a meaningless title like "My Home Page"! Once you've got a good title, work on the first paragraph on your page. Use the <H1> tag to describe the main topic of your page, and the <H2> and <H3> tags for subheaders throughout your document. Spiders pay a lot of attention to header tags because they implicitly indicate an organizational structure of information on your page. The first paragraph should be loaded with keywords. It should be concise, crisp, and to the point. Some search engines, particularly those that ignore meta-tags (see below) use the first paragraph as the description for your page. As a rule of thumb, try to keep it brief, i.e. no more than two or three lines.

Header tags and the first paragraph should be the first elements in the <body> of your page. I can hear many of you protesting that you'd much rather use the really cool 3-D animated graphic you spent hours creating instead. Don't! To a Spider, a picture is worth NOTHING! Spiders can read but they can't see. Resist the temptation to rely heavily on graphics and photos, no matter how cool they may be. Even if you include wonderfully descriptive text in your graphics, bitmapped text is invisible to spiders and won't be indexed. When you do use graphics, be sure to use the <IMG alt=> tag with a description of the graphic (preferably, if relevant, using some of those magic keywords). Some spiders will index the text in <IMG alt=> tags, and may actually penalize your rankings if you fail to include them.

If you use image maps for links, add another set of text-only links to the other pages in your site. This is necessary so that the spider will follow those links and index other pages on your site, saving you the time of having to submit them individually. Once you've taken these basic steps to optimize your pages, you can take an additional step that will help you with certain spiders by letting you specify the keywords and description you want the search engine to use. These are called meta tags.

Specifically, meta tags are optional HTML tags that are included in the <head> part of your page. The idea behind these tags is to allow page authors to provide information about Web documents in a standardized form recognizable to spiders but not displayed by the browser. The two that interest us are the keyword tag, which lets you explicitly list the keywords you want associated with your page, and the description tag, which is the short summary of your page that the search engine will display in search results. Meta tags are a great idea because you can get some degree of control and the indexes don't have to do so much work figuring out what your page is all about.

Unfortunately, the spamdexers caught on to this neat trick too. So not all spiders read meta tags. Nonetheless, you should definitely include meta tags for those that do use them. Each search engine handles them a bit differently. For example with Alta Vista, keep descriptions and keywords under 1024 characters; for Infoseek, use less than 200 characters for the description and 1000 characters for keywords.

Here's a quick glance at the big eight search sites.

Alta Vista
Hotbot                           = use Meta Tags
Infoseek

Lycos
Northern Light               =  partially use Meta Tags

Excite
WebCrawler                  =  ignore Meta Tags
Yahoo

Since each search site has their own submission requirements, you'll greatly increase your odds of getting listed by following each of their published guidelines. Or if you're like most over-worked business owners out there, you may want to consider our submission service, where we handle the repetitive submission tasks for you, and "calendar manage" the whole affair for you so you never get dropped off the engines.

It goes without saying that if you don't try to promote your Web pages by submitting their URL's to the major search sites, your effort will likely remain unseen by all but the accidental Web tourist, unless of course you have promoted your site using traditional (and very costly) methods such as brochures, newspapers, radio or television.

It takes a lot of work to create a great Web site, and probably even more to get people to come to it. You will definitely improve your chances of being seen by Web users if you follow the strategies and techniques mentioned above. Good luck and have fun!