When I started my business I was looking for ways to advertise and so I submitted my site to the usual search engines I was disappointed in the results as I was expecting this major rush of orders. I had made a website about 15 years ago and put it on the search engines and it was listed around # 26 in 2 days so I expected the same results with the business site I made that I had gotten with my personal site WRONG.

If you have some money to spend on advertising I would go with Google adwords this will get you hits right away but you must research what keywords to use and how much you want to pay per click. The amount you pay can be as small as 10 cents or as high as you want. I suggest starting off low and adjusting day by day to get to your maximum return on investment. I have been doing this since about 2 weeks of opening my business in September of 2006.

I also found a real good counter for free. This counter has a page I can go to and it will tell me how many unique hits I have gotten, how many repeat hits, where they came from if a search engine what search terms were used. This counter can be found at http://www.easy-poll.com I actually found this when I was looking for an easy poll to put on my website.

I then began reading and learning what I needed to do to get my site ranked and displayed on search engines. The first thing I did was look at my meta tags I used a free meta tag checker to see if my meta tags were search engine friendly the site was scrubtheweb.com . I found they were not very search engine friendly so I corrected them but did not change any of the keywords the page maker had put in the keyword tag. If you can not edit your meta tags you need to contact your page creator and have them make the changes for you.

The next thing I did with the meta tags was to take keywords from the tag and run them thru googles adword keyword analyzer to see what variations of the words were out there and how much search traffic there was for them and how much competition there was for that word or phrase. I then added them to my keyword tag some of what I added had high search volume but low competition.

I then started looking for other ways to list my site to get my page rank up and found many free directories to which I could submit my site. Some of these required recipicol links as I continued to submit to these sites I found that my page had gotten lost in all the links. So the first thing I did was to create a links page separated from my home page by a link. Then I started to submit only to one way linking directories. I have submitted to over 800 directories for FREE and recently found another 500 to which I will submit my site. One draw back to the free links is it can take several months to get your submission reviewed and added.

One of the sites I have used is addurl.nu this one list about 1000 directories they have a few paid and some links are slow or out of service I did not post to those directories. Why did I not post to the slow directories? Because the search engine robots will probably not be able to crawl their site and people don’t want to wait for a page to load so it would simple be a waste of time my link would probably never be seen.

This site also shows the current page rank of the directories. Why is this important because submitting to a directory with a page rank of 0 gives you a link but submitting to a directory with a page rank of 2 or above makes your page look more important. When you submit to some of these they send you an email saying your link is pending and then they also give you other directories where you can place your link.

You can find a lot of link exchange programs but must be careful not to get caught up in link scams if they promise 1000’s of links in a few days I would be suspicious and careful. Real links take time usually not a few days. The same goes with search engine submissions there are sites that say they will submit your site to thousands of search engines but some may not even be in the same country. Also most search engines and directories require a security code to be entered for the submission to go thru this is to prevent automatic submissions.

I have also started exchanging links with other sites like mine this is important because exchanging links with sites like mine gives us both a higher score than if I sold tires and linked to an ice cream stand. I give my link partners their own link page so my home page still looks good but a visitor to my site can easily find my links page.

I also checked their ranking on9dir.com this site gives me a read out of the number of pages indexed by the search engines, number of links by the search engines, their alexa ranking as well as their page rank. Another page You should look at is addurl-free.com not only can you add your link here but there is a page you can go to that gives many statistics about your site.

My sites page rank is about a 2.5 not terrible considering it is only 9 months old and I spend little on paid advertising. So have heart you can improve your response rate and do it with little or NO money it just takes time and a will to succeed.