In some respects creating a web site and publishing it on-line is the easy part. It is not much use having a website, if nobody is going to see it. In order to bring you site to the attention of on-line customers it need to be marketed on-line. The are two primary methods of online marketing:
Paid advertising involves placing adds on third party web sites for a fee, usually the fee is charged when an internet user clicks on your add. This is called paid per click advertising or PPC. With PPC the results can be seen immediately, with customers going directly to you site. Unfortunately however this can be expensive if you have many competitors bidding against you to place adds on third party site. The good news is that if managed effectively PPC can deliver results on a budget.
Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is the art of improving where your site appears in a search engine such as Google&trade for a particular search term. The reason i call it an art is because nobody except the search engines them selves know exactly how search results are ranked. There are guidelines provided by search engines to guide website owners on how to rank well in their results. Most of these guidelines relate to the quality of a web site and its content. After all a search engine is not going to assign a high ranking to a web site of poor quality that has nothing new to offer. Another insight into how to place well on a search engines is given by U.S. Patent 6,285,999, this patent was files by Google&trade founders in 1998. The patent which is currently used by Google&trade outlines how link popularity is used to rank results from a search engine query. Link popularity refers to the number of incoming link to a web page from other pages on the internet. To capitalise on this it is necessary to have as many good quality incoming links to your site as possible. This will drive visitors to your site as well as improving your search engine rankings. No company can offer guaranteed number one placements on any search engine, but following the guidelines above your site can optimised to place as well as possible on the major search engines.