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Marketing Your Website Part 3
From this point on we will assume that the website where you're hoping large crowds of qualified visitors will arrive as a result of your marketing efforts is all set up to handle them.

So how do you go about driving those eyeballs to your website?

Well the single most effective, and fortunately one of the lowest-cost methods is the good old search engine. Let's face it -- where do you go when you're looking for information, products, services or entertainment on the Internet? -- that's right, chances are you head straight for Yahoo!, Altavista, Google or one of the other popular search engines.

How To Get Listed
When adding their website to a search engine, many people make the mistake of simply going to the "Add URL" page and typing in the address of their website's front page without doing any homework -- big mistake!

The first, and most critical aspect of getting highly ranked in any search engine is to figure out what people are going to type in as a query when looking for sites like yours. Many people make the mistake of trying to get highly ranked for simple queries such as "skateboards." Last time I checked on Google, the search term "skateboards" returned nearly 40,000 pages so getting near the top of that list is going to be awfully hard and might not be worth the effort.

There are several sites on the Web that maintain lists of the 4 most popular search terms used on major search engines -- see if your site can be legitimately associated with one of them.

Important: while it might be tempting to load your webpage with the word "sex" because it's always a popular search term -- remember to ask yourself whether that will result in QUALIFIED visitors or just extra load on your server?

Which Search Engine?
What ever you do -- ignore all those "list with 2,000 search engines for $29" spams and websites. While you might think that being listed on 2,000 search engines would be a great thing -- it's not. Search engine traffic obeys the 95/5 rule -- ie: 95 percent of all search queries are made on the top five percent of search engines. In fact, there are really only a handful of search engines that get any real traffic.

While the list of "best" search engines is something of a subjective one, my pics are: Google, AltaVista, Excite, Lycos, Infoseek. These five engines handle more than 80 percent of all search queries that are performed each day on the Internet so if you focus your efforts on getting highly ranked on these sites you'll see the maximum return for your time.

How To Get Highly Ranked
This is one topic that has spawned hundreds of books, billions of spam emails and thousands of high-priced seminars given by "experts" of variable pedigree.

The reality is that there are a number of simple steps you can take to ensure that you're ranked reasonably well -- but there is no way to guarantee that you'll always appear on the first page of results from any given search engine.

Step 1: Once you've identified a few well suited search queries, try them on the major search engines and see what pops up. The sites that are returned as a result of those searches are the ones which you will have to compete with to get a high ranking. Note that the sites listed and the order in which they rank will differ from search engine to search engine -- that's because they all have their own method of determining how any given page will rank.

For each search engine, examine closely the title, meta-tags (if any) and general page construction of each of the top 5-10 results. This will give you some valuable clues as to how that search engine goes about ranking the pages in its database. A word of warning however -- a growing number of search engines are selling the top 5-10 positions in their results to the highest bidder so try to verify that the rankings are bona fide.

Here are some aspects of a webpage that appear to have a profound effect on rankings:

• Page title -- many engines give this the highest weighting
• Page URL -- if you use a keyword in the URL you may get ranked higher
• Heading text -- many engines place heavier weighting on text marked as a heading
• Image ALT tags -- the ALT text associated with first few images may help
• Meta Tags -- but be careful, these are a double-edged sword (see later)

Step 2: When you've got an idea as to how each engine goes about ranking its pages, build separate entry pages for your website -- one for each engine. It is these engine-specific pages that you want to submit to each search engine -- but make sure you submit the correct page to the correct engine :-)

Meta Tags
You can often spot naive web designers by the way they use the meta tags hidden in the heading of a webpage.

The unskilled designer tends to think that they should cram every possible keyword into the "keywords" tag so that the site will be relevant to the maximum number of searches. Bad news -- although this was once a good idea, most search engines these days establish the ranking of a page in a manner which is inversely proportional to the number of keywords in the meta tags and title. In fact many of the most highly ranked web pages these days don't even use the "keywords" meta tag.

To elaborate -- if you've decided that you want a high ranking for the search term "fastest skateboards" then that's what you should use for your title and/or meta tag keywords. Then, if someone enters "fastest skateboards", your page will appear to be 100% relevant. If you dilute your keywords or title by adding other words such as "best", "free", "quality" or whatever, then your ranking will drop because the search term is no longer a 100% match for your title or meta tag keywords.

When it comes to getting highly ranked in today's search engines, less is often more.

Don't Waste All That Effort
Another critical point to watch is to make sure that there are no errors in the HTML code that makes up your pages. I've seen a number of sites that should rank really well simply not appear in search engines -- because a simple HTML error has meant that the search engine's robot software was unable to make sense of the page. Just because your browser is forgiving enough not to show such a simple error doesn't mean the search engine robot will be able to cope. Check, check and re-check.

And what did I choose as Aardvark's "search term"?

Check out my ranking on Google.com out of more than a million matches with the search term "Internet industry news"

Continued tomorrow...

As always, your feedback is welcomed.