web site promotion: search engine promotion - internet promotion - hosting, development and design at ASA, International, Inc.

Choose keywords and tweak your site for the search engines. Once your site looks good to humans, the next step is to try to make it look good to the search engines, so you get the coveted high ranking. This involves choosing the right keywords and adjusting your page title, meta tags and first paragraph to showcase them. This is where most webmasters screw up. They choose the wrong keywords because they don't spend enough time thinking about how people are going to try to find them. Here is an article on preparing your pages for the search engines takes you step-by-step through this process.

Submit to the major search engines. Now that your site is all ready, you next submit to all the major search engines. One of the key components of ASA International is an extremely powerful and comprehensive automated submission tool that can properly promote your site to all the major search engines and indexes. The good news is that it'll only take you about 10 minutes to create an account and promote to the search engines. The bad news is that at present, the major search engines are taking months (that's months, plural!) to add new listings.

Fortunately, while you are waiting for the search engines to get their act together and list you, there are other things to do.

Submit to the major indexes. While ASA International will submit your site to many places, it does not autosubmit to the major indexes such as Yahoo, Open Directory and Inktomi. The reason is that listings in these indexes are sufficiently valuable that a hand-done, optimized submission is worth taking the time to craft, not to mention it cost money to submit to these engines properly.

Yahoo is the most important place to have your site listed on the Internet, yet most Yahoo listings are awful. Once you understand how to craft a proper submission to Yahoo, you'll not only greatly increase your chances of getting in, but you'll get many more hits than you would otherwise. If you are already in Yahoo, don't despair; my initial listing in Yahoo was awful, but I managed to double the number of clickthroughs I get from them by successfully requesting a change to my listing.

Writing the site description you submit to Yahoo is the single most important step you will ever take during site promotion, so spending some extra time on this step is highly recommended. We get emails all the time saying things like "I've been trying to get into Yahoo for 6 months, but after following your instructions, I got listed in less than a week." It's great ego massage, so we want to get one from you too!

Submit to the general indexes. There are many "2nd-tier" indexes that are worth submitting to, though not worth crafting an specially optimized listing for (although the advice in the previous step is still valid). I've broken these down into a variety of categories (including general indexes, British and Canadian-specific indexes and search engines, international indexes, indexes that accept adult sites, and special-purpose indexes) so that you can submit to them in small chunks as time permits. ASA International can autosubmit to over 50 of these, and provides manual links to several hundred more (mostly the special-purpose and international/foreign- language ones). You can also look at the list of sites if you so desire.

Consider paying for hits. The good news about listing in the search engines and indexes is that it's free. The bad news is that you don't have much control. While it is certainly worthwhile to tweak your pages in search of high rankings, it's not always possible to get the ones you want. There are, however, several places that can provide you with well-targeted traffic for pennies a visitor.