Even the best-designed website will fail if it is not well publicized and is only found by direct searches. Accordingly, it is imperative that either your potential customers know about your website, or that it appears high enough on a search engine's listing to stand any chance of being clicked.

There are a number of ways that you can promote your website; banner advertisements and pay per click systems are two very popular choices. However, there are a growing number of other solutions that you may also wish to consider.

Page ranking is the method by which a search engine, such as Google, measures the popularity of any given website. In very simple terms, search engines will rank the web page based on how many links there are to the website.

This is because the more sites that link to your website, the more credible it is likely to be. As such, links are very important to improve the rank of your website.

However, before you rush off to set-up thousands of inbound links, there is much more to consider. In order to maximize the value of each link, you should also concentrate on attaining quality links from other high-ranking websites. In simple terms, a high quality link is more valuable than a normal link.

By improving your website's ranking, your site will stand a much better chance of appearing in the top results on Google for any given search that matches your site's keywords. This rule holds fast for all widely used search engine.

Promoting your website is a relatively simple task. The following are a few simple tips to help you:

- Offer to trade links with other similar websites. Many website owners are willing to exchange links. Make sure you are selective when choosing websites from which to get links. You are unlikely to receive links from your direct competitors, and you should concentrate on targeting websites related to your business.

- You can also use articles related to your business to promote your site. There are literally hundreds of article submission sites on the internet, and each of these have hundreds of articles written on a vast array of different subjects. If you do not have the time or writing ability to compose these articles, you can engage a ghostwriter or freelance writer to create these articles for you.

- When you are putting together your website or any other marketing media, you must always ensure that you are producing good quality content, as this will reflect on the quality of your enterprise.

Again, if you are not particularly adept at writing, you can always engage a professional to do it for you. The higher quality your text is, the more links you should be able to generate.

- Do not sign up with link farms. Many beginners are tempted by this idea, but search engines are designed in such a manner as to be able to detect them and will automatically exclude them, and their links, from any search.

You can download a free checker from Google to determine your page rank. This useful tool will help you to monitor the effect of your promotional work and enable you to target future efforts accordingly.