You've gone ahead and launched a Web site. How do you get anyone to notice you online, with the millions of sites already there? You need to be ranked on various search engines so that visitors can find you. More visitors means the potential for attracting more customers, which is why you went online in the first place. It's important to get your page ranked as highly as possible (preferably in the top 10); Web surfers are notorious for having a very short attention span and want to find what they need quickly and efficiently. They simply are not going to wade through 100's of sites to find what they are looking for.
So how do you actually get listed? Well, you can sit back and let the search engine spiders find your site or you can submit your site to search engines and web directories on your own. Most people use a combination of the two methods. The search engine spiders will go out automatically and put your site into their list of sites by examining the keywords on your pages or in your site's meta tags.
When choosing keywords, try to put yourself in the place of a Web surfer: How would they find your site? What words or phrases would they use to search for you? It's a good idea to start with a general category first and then add words that are more specific. Be sure to include your company name, a description of your product or service, and your geographic location when choosing keywords. Don't be afraid to include alternate ways to spell words, if appropriate; and don't be concerned about using initial capital letters on proper names. You never know how a person is going to search the Internet to find information.
When you get to the point that you are ready to have your site listed on search engines you can submit your information to one or more individually or you have the option of having a submission service look after this for you. If you use a submission service, your Web pages may well end up in places you have never heard of, but don't be discouraged by this fact: someone is making use of the lesser-known search engines, otherwise they wouldn't exist.
To promote themselves online, webmasters also have the option of submitting to a directory that has people acting as editors to choose which Web pages should be listed and where. There are not many of these types of directories; it is simply more efficient to have a piece of software crawl through cyberspace to perform these tasks. If you choose to submit to a human-edited directory, it may be several weeks before your site is approved; it then takes a bit more time for it to actually appear in the listings.
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