Developing a marketing plan or strategy for your web site is crucial to its success. Before registering with search engines do some research at Search Engine Watch and check out the tips below. Take the time to get on the Internet so that you will have a good foundation when critical mass occurs.

1) If You Build It They May Not Come! There are already in excess of 18 million web sites out there. And the number of sites is growing at an exponential rate. Nobody will go to your web page unless you let people know about it. Keep this in mind as you build your long term marketing strategy on the Internet.

2) The Internet Should Be Only One Aspect Of Your Strategy - You should let everyone you come in contact with know that you are on the Internet. This includes having your site and e-mail address on your business card, letterhead, printed newsletters and any other marketing materials. Use every avenue to get your site mentioned.

3) Customer Service - No matter how many customers you have, use them as potential visitors to your site. The larger the customer base the better. What value-added services can you offer on your site? How about pricing information, FAQs (answers to frequently asked questions), brochures, newsletters?

4) Have A Newsletter - This can be anything that allows the you to communicate with your web site visitor. This could be a real newsletter, or an email one. It should include some periodic information or other helpful tips that relate to your business or specialty. Ask for your visitor's email address when they visit your web site.

5) Same Story ~ But A New Medium - The Internet is all about communication. Use it to get closer to customers, prospects and other resources. If you take all the mystery away from the Internet and bring it to it's bare bones, the Internet is a communications medium. That being the case you should use it to it's fullest potential. You will find that it works.

Basic Search Marketing Overview:
a. Get ready for the engines (optimize with keywords)
b. Get into the engines - through submissions or links from other sites
c. Work to improve ranking - further page optimization, improved incoming links
d. Explore paid search traffic
e. Measure traffic, ranking, clicks, sales - Compare ad spending to revenue (ROI)

Keywords Keywords Keywords

Between 70 and 80 percent of traffic that is driven to your web site originates from the major search engines. That metric indicates traffic, not sales. If most people share my surfing behaviors, they would type in a keyword at a search engine and then sort through the top ten to twenty results, actually clicking through an even smaller percentage. So, listing near the top and speaking to your target audience in the proper way are very important. There are six components of the web page that you should pay strict attention to when preparing a page for listing in a search engine.

The first step toward improved listing is selecting the best keywords to specific search engines. Applying the same keywords throughout each component is very important, so converging upon a specific collection of keywords is very important.

How do I choose effective keywords?

You should already have some idea of the keywords or keyword combinations (keyword phrases) that you will want to use. To get a comprehensive idea of all of the keywords that could assist you with your optimization, there are two things that you should do. First grab an online or print Thesaurus. Investigate synonyms for your original keywords. Write these words down on a sheet of paper. Next, perform searches at each of the major engines for your original keywords and keyword phrases. Pay close attention to the web sites that rank 1 through 10. You will notice that the sites do not always rank in the same location and some do only appear on one engine.

Search Engine Optimization - A Basic Checklist

~ Domain Selection: Are your keywords in it?
Examples:
your_business.com
what_you_do.com
what_your_customers_search_for.com
Adding multiple keyword domains are a very effective and affordable addition to your marketing strategies.
(Quick Note: Stay away from trade names and copyrights!)

~ MetaTags/Data: Title, Description, Keywords, Heading Tags, Alt Tags. Again, your chosen keywords should occur throughout these specific tag types. Don't go overboard and "stuff" too many keywords everywhere.

~ Web Content: Search Engines love links and text!
Does your page try to talk about everything, or a limited topic? Is it well organized? Easily readable by real visitors? These are important considerations. Write to convert humans, but do keep in mind the keywords you page is targeting.

~ Links: HyperLinks and Site Map
Anchor Text, or the visible text of hyperlinks, should also be keyword descriptive. A Site Map can be helpful for search robots, because from this single page, they can reach all of your site's other pages. A visible link (though not necessarily as part of your site navigation) to the Site Map will ensure that a search engine robot finding a specific page will be able to find all of your other pages.

~ Directory and File Naming
Is your site’s folder/directory structure well organized? Do your page names include keywords? For example:
http://www.ezstart.com/marketing/marketing.html
http://www.ezstart.com/domaininfo.html

~ Robots.txt File
All non-spam search bots check for the existence of the robots.txt file in your root directory. Some won't crawl your site unless it is present.

~ Link Popularity: Quality is better than Quantity
General opinion is that you should only link to maybe 20 external sites, but incoming links to your page will in part determine the page's relative "popularity". Many sites linking to your competition may also link to you, if you ask nicely! Check the Google PageRank and Link visibility of site/pages you want to link to you. If they are worse off than you, getting them to link to you is of little value.
When checking your page's ranking for specific keyword/phrases, don't forget that the engines change their method (algorithm) for inclusion and ranking quite regularly.
A note about Search Engine Submissions:
Automated tools can help, but don't overdo it! Once per month (per page) is usually enough. Once a page is indexed, re-submitting it will have very limited value unless it has been changed. Better to spend time getting other sites already higher in the engines to link to your web page!
For more details on Netlinking don't miss Brian D. Chmielewski's excellent article on netling below.

~ A Touch of Branding: Get a favicon.ico for your site. It's a free/cheap way to add a logo to the visitor's address bar and in their Favorites folder if they bookmark you!

~ Pay-Per-Click Marketing: The following will provide you some tips in venturing into pay-per-click search engine traffic.
Yahoo! and Google drive the bulk of paid search traffic, and as such can be extremely competitive and expensive. Some of the second tier Pay-Per-Click search engines include:
Enhancement
Kanoodle.com
Lycos.com
ePilot.com
FindWhat.com

These engines are not as competitive or expensive, but don't generate as much traffic as the "big two". Hundreds of other PPC engines exist. A simple Google search will provide you with lots of PPC advertising options.

Many PPC engines offer "New Advertiser" discounts, or match funds to help start your campaign. Google a bit and you are sure to see what I mean. Vouchers, discounts, and coupons abound, but they come and go frequently. This "discounting" is a very common tactic for smaller engines trying to build their user and advertiser base.
For a large list of PPC engines, some of which offer matching or free start-up funds visit payperclicksearchengines.com