The purpose of web site promotion is to allow your potential customers to find your web site when they do not know the specific site address. These potential customers will need to use a specialized web site called a search engine to locate your site. Web site promotion is the process of explaining to each of the search engines what your web site is about and where to find it. While search engines do their work in different ways, there are specific actions we can take to increase your site's positive search results.

Currently there are two major types of search engines: the list engine, or true 'search engine', and the directory-based engine. The difference is in how the listings of each type are compiled. Yahoo is an example of a directory, made up of categories that are compiled by human editors who decide what will be included or excluded from the directory. At times, the people at Yahoo and the other list engines are extremely busy and do not list the site as soon as we would like. It is not uncommon for Yahoo to take as much as four to six months to list a site.

HotBot is an example of a search engine in the classic sense, one that systematically steps through the web and indexes the information it finds. This type of search engine utilizes a computer program called a crawler, or spider, which visits the submitted web site and reads it. In some engines the spider will follow links and read them, and may return at intervals and look for changes to the site. After it has been spidered, a page is indexed, or added to the engine's searchable contents. A website can be spidered but not indexed, and often there can be weeks to months between the two actions.

Each search engine also has its own individual way of learning about your site. Engines will search the text on the web page, or the titles of the pages, or the keywords, or a combination of these. The same search done on different engines produces different results because of these individual approaches. Some engines index more pages within a web site than others. Some engines update their index more often than others. It is becoming more common for search engines to rank sites that advertise higher in the listings.

Every four to six months, engines can drop your site from their index in order to 'clean up' their listings; they keep their links current by having you do the work of resubmitting your current site. Conversely, engines that receive the same site submission many times in a short period of time may ban the site listing from their engine.

It is possible to achieve noticeable results at improving the positioning of your web site, but it will require a concerted effort and continued diligence to maintain the listing once achieved.

You may not know how well your site is listed with the search engines. Using automated software, we can query your desired keywords to the top 20 search engines and prepare a report to tell you where your site ranks. This will tell where we need us to focus our efforts when re-submitting your site.