There's an ongoing myth among website managers that simply submitting your website to the thousands of search engines and links pages on the Internet will result in thousands of new visitors to your website. That's just not true, because unfortunately submitting alone is not enough. When someone queries a search engine for a keyword related to your site's products or services, does your page appear in the top matches? Does your competition?

If you're listed, but not within the first two or three pages of results, you’ve lost that round, and often the war, no matter how many engines you submitted your site to. Research shows that most people searching the Internet will find what they are looking for within the first two to three pages and won’t bother to go any further.

There are three obstacles to solving this problem. First you have to know the many techniques that will move you into a top position (keeping in mind that search engines are more and more frequently changing the rules as to what they accept and how they rank pages - some seemingly innocent tactics, like using the wrong size of text, can get you banned for life from engines like AOL or Google!). Then, once you learn how to achieve a top search position, you have to monitor your progress while keeping a close eye on the most and least effective keywords - a critical step, and it can take hours to do it right. Finally, you must resubmit your website whenever your ranking starts to drop. Some people have reported that they spend close to 30 hours a week checking and improving their search positions.

Your plan for a successful campaign must combine all the following steps in order to launch and keep your website at the top of the search engine results:

1. Discover the best keywords for your products and services.
2. Create HTML pages designed to rank near the top of the search results.
3. Analyze your existing web pages and look for ways to improve them.
4. Upload your new and changed pages.
5. Submit your pages to the major U.S and International search engines.
6. Check your positions on each search engine for each keyword you are targeting.
7. Analyze the keywords that are working (and not working) for you.
8. Repeat.

A top ranking in a major search engine such as Google, AltaVista, or Lycos will often generate more targeted traffic than an expensive banner advertising campaign - and, a good search engine position is like highly targeted advertising that is both FREE, and effective! Millions of people each day turn to the major search engines to find information, products, and services. You can’t afford to be left behind in the race for Internet business, so a top search engine ranking is imperative to success.

And don’t be deceived by claims that someone will submit your website to 100’s or even 1000’s of sites. Most of these sites are nothing more than e-mail farms that harvest your valid e-mail addresses to be used by Web marketers so they can flood your inbox with spam mail. Even worse, sites listed on these sites are often banned from the real search engines as spam!

Topsail Consulting utilizes a number of tools to promote websites, and we'd like to highlight two of them, here. Wordtracker is an online database of words and phrases real people have searched for on the major engines - no matter how good your site, if you target the wrong words, visitors will not find you. WebPosition Gold performs all of the above steps - automatically. You can even run custom reports on your rankings and submissions status and have them delivered right to your inbox. The overwhelming majority of our site design clients have chosen to have us assist them with their choice of the most effective keywords utilizing our affiliation with Wordtracker, and then to use our experience with WebPosition Gold Pro and other professional tools to get those critical top rankings.

However you do it, get a top ranking, and watch your hits increase!

Too busy to do it yourself? Contact us today, mention this newsletter, and get 10% off a site optimization and promotion campaign.

Thanks for reading! We'll bring you more tips and news next week!

Ed Cottrell, Editor & President