Web Publishing - Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)

You can have a million dollar site but nobody will find it unless you have published it correctly.  This basically involves some main processes.

• Traditional media promotion such as advertising or editorial.  Also make sure that your URL is on all of your stationery.
• Try to get your sites URL linked on as many other web sites as possible - genuine links only.
• List your site with the major directories and search engines.
• Pay per Click (CPC) campaigns such as Adwords
  
• Most important of all the back end (coding) and structure of your web site and domain must be meticulous - this means clean correct markup, server side includes, 301 redirects, javascripts, metatags, permalinks .... Google (and Bing) penalise sloppy coding - does this sound complicated? That's because doing it right is complex.

There is no easy answer to this, so anyone who tells you there is, is either lying or very poorly informed.  You may see emails or adverts offering to list your site on thousands of search engines for next to nothing, well there really aren't thousands of 'search engines'.  Most of the so-called speciality search engines actually get their information from one of the very few major engines.  Even the major engines share or swap data with others.  And finally there are the pay per click campaigns such as Adwords - these can be effective and expensive unless you get it right and monitor constantly.

Keeping up with all of this is a specialist field and publishing your site can cost many time what cost to create it in the first place.  Your site may need doorway pages, meta tag tuning or a complete behind the scenes overhaul to ensure maximum search engine optimization.  There are no free lunches when it comes to publishing your site. If you are in a competitive market and you want to be and stay at in the top ten, then it will cost and we are not talking about hundreds of dollars.  But remember one large advert in a major newspaper can cost $5000 or more, so it is all relative.