Now that you've got a website its time to start thinking about promoting it. Search engine listings are the number one way to generate traffic to your website. The following information will help you effectively promote your website through search engines.

Search Engine Selection
When submitting your site to search engines consider the search engines that will generate the most traffic to your site! There are a core group of search engines that will generate the most traffic to your site. These major search engines below are all excellent choices to have your website listed with:

Google
Yahoo
AllTheWeb.com
MSN Search
Lycos
Ask Jeeves
AOL
Looksmart
Netscape
Excite
HotBot
AltaVista

Search Engine Rankings
To be effective, your site needs to rank in the top 10 listings, and ideally the top 3. Here are some ways to ensure that your site stays on top.

Keywords
Choosing the correct keywords for your website is a critical part for obtaining desirable search engine rankings. Your goal is to increase the targeted traffic to your site. For demonstration purposes lets say your website is promoting a computer show in new york. When choosing keywords related to computer show, you have the opportunity to target a general market (such as the keyword computer show or a geographical market (such as computer show in new york). The keyword computer show may attract a wide range of computer show related searches, but the keyword computer show in new york is more targeted if you are targeting the state of New York and are looking to attract visitors in New York.

Its important to know how many times people searched for your keywords and their variations last month in the major search engines. This will help you to choose keywords that people are actually using, as there is no point in choosing a keyword that nobody is searching for.

For example, if one of your keywords is "computer show in new jersey", its important to know that computer show new york attracts more visitors:

Searches done in Dec 2005
Count Search Term
144 computer show new york
77 computer show in new york
56 computer fair new york

You can learn from it that "computer show in new york" has been searched only 77 times during the last month in the search engines, yet the keyword "computer show new york" has been used 144 times. That's 2 times more!

Meta Tags
Meta tags for your web site are an important part of your search engine submission strategy. The Meta tags should be inserted between the and tags of your document. This is an example format for a web page source, which includes the proper Meta Tags in it.

Search Engine Optimization
There are other factors to consider when submitting your site to search engines. Meta Tags and Keywords are a great start, but often they wont help you generate the type of traffic your looking for if your site is in a competitive market competing for the same keywords. When this is the case, youre next step should be optimizing your web pages. Elements that involve search engine optimization include the location of your keywords through out your meta tags and page content. Also keeping your listing current is important.