Having a website is great. Making it work commercially for you is also great, but not as simple as it may appear. Please remember your new site is the equivalent of a beautiful brand new raindrop, in a storm! Hey, you can find it. All you have to do is wait for a couple off weeks after you launch the site, then type the exact url into a search engine and voila, up it pops. Problem is that your prospective customers don't browse online like that.

Customers will type in a keyword or phrase relating to the type of product or service they are seeking. For example, someone living in Happytown with burst pipes, will typically search on a keyphrase like 'plumber happytown'. Ok, so you are a plumber and you service the Happytown area, I presume you'd like your website to star on the search page results, preferably at or near the top of the first page? Lets look at how this can be achieved.

Firstly your website needs to say clearly what products or services you offer. It's no use waffling on in your pages. If you are a plumber, say so, and also mention clearly all the services you can offer and all the areas you can off them in. Next your site should contain relevant keywords and phrases, fitting tightly the likely search terms your prospective customers might use. Over time the search engines will visit your site and make a record of it. Then when a browser types in the relevant keywords, you will probably feature somewherein the results. Expect your new site to be 'recognised' by search engines after one or two months, and gradually crawl up the totem pole over the following two years or so. Is this good enough? If not, read on.

The formula that the search engines use to decide which site will be where for any given jeyeword or phrase search is quite complex and the subject of seemingly endless debate between 'experts. What I can tell you is that one of the prominent things that they score is your backlinks. What are backlinks? Well they are url links to your site, sitting on other relevant sites online. For example, if the Happytown hardware store has a link to Pete the Happytown plumber on thier site, score one for Pete the plumber, as this is what constitutes a valid backlink.

A tried and true way to accumulate backlinks is to write articles relevant to your business and have them published online, the more times the better. The technology behind this approach is beyond the scope of this article, but it is tried and tested, and it WORKS.

All the best with your website, and have a ton of fun marketing it.