Search engine optimization, marketing, promotion and positioning
It's a black art, but does it work?. There's no doubt, that done properly, optimization and professional promotion can send volumes of traffic to your site. It's up to you to capitalize on it. So here are a few pointers that should help you decide how to promote your Web site on the internet. After all, if no one can find it, it won't work - ever!

There is a whole lot of guff talked about search engine optimization and promotion, lots of 'too good to be true' deals. "Let us register your site with 3000 search engines", how many times have you seen that? If you don't want to throw your money away on dodgy promotions, read on....

Search Engines and Directories
Once you build a Web site you must help people to find it. The internet is like a library, but the books in no order and someone's turned the light off. How can you find what you want?

This is where search engines come in. They will catalogue the library and deliver relevant topics when asked. There are getting on for 5 billion pages on the Web. That's five BILLION - or one for nearly every person on the planet today.

Search engines and directories are the means that people use to find what they're looking for. They scour their index for sites that mention the keywords (the topics) that have been typed in, and display the results.

Employ a Search Engine Optimizer (like us), specialists who makes sure that the relevant words and phrases appear in the best positions on the pages. There are many other considerations, complicated by the engines modifying their preferences on a monthly basis. The trick is knowledge and experience.

Part of the effort is to research what people are looking up. We pay for access to a database listing over 350 million searches carried out over the last eight weeks. That way, we make sure that we are constructing the page in such a way that people will find it.

There are those who try to fool search engines. If they are detected, the site will probably be penalized and shifted down the rankings. And, in many cases, removed from their listings completely.

And, it's worth noting, search engines all use different means to look for sites.

Most read the text on the page. That's one reason you found this page. Some use meta tags although most now ignore these, some use the description tag and some use even use what is called 'alt text‘, the text you see when your cursor is over an image on a page. Oh, and don't forget relevant links in from related sites. Most don't see frames, and can't follow the links properly so they ignore sites created using frames.

The rules are constantly changing - which is why we work full-time on them.