This is a good article that I found a while back:
The Web Marketing Checklist:
29 Ways to Promote Your Website
by Dr. Ralph F. Wilson, E-Commerce Consultant
Web Marketing Today, July 28, 2004
This article originally appeared in Web Marketing Today, Issue 39, December 1, 1997. As one of our most popular articles, it has was revised most recently on July 28, 2004.
Cited in PC Magazine, 9/21/99, p. 36
How can you get more visitors to your website? What can you do to stimulate traffic? Here's a checklist of 29 items you need to consider. Many of these you're probably doing already; others you meant to do and forgot about; still others you've never heard of. Of course, a great deal has been written about this. You'll find links to thousands of articles on site promotion in our Web Marketing Info Center (
www.wilsonweb.com/webmarket). While we're not breaking any new ground here, we've tried to summarize some of the most important techniques.
Search Engine Strategies
The most important strategy is to rank high for your preferred words on the main search engines in "organic" or "natural" search (as opposed to paid ads). Search engines send robot "spiders" to index the content on your webpage, so let's begin with steps to prepare your webpages for optimal indexing.
1. Write a Page Title. Write a descriptive title for each page of 5 to 8 words. Remove as many "filler" words from the title, such as "the," "and," etc. This page title will appear hyperlinked on the search engines when your page is found. Entice surfers to click on the title by making it a bit provocative. Place this at the top of the webpage between the <HEAD></HEAD> tags, in this format: <TITLE>Web Marketing Checklist -- 29 Ways to Promote Your Website</TITLE>. Plan to use some descriptive keywords along with your business name on your home page. If you specialize in silver bullets and that's what people will be searching for, don't just use your company name "Acme Ammunition, Inc." use "Silver Bullets -- Acme Ammunition, Inc." Words people are most likely to search on put first in the title (called "keyword prominence"). Remember, this title is nearly your entire identity on the search engines. The more people see that interests them in the blue highlighted portion of the search engine, the more likely they are to click on the link.
2. Write a Description META Tag. Many search engines include this description below your hyperlinked title. This sentence should describe the contents of the body text of the webpage, using the main keywords and keyphrases used on this page. If you include keywords that aren't used on the webpage you could hurt yourself. Place those words at the top of the webpage, between the <HEAD></HEAD> tags, in a META tag in this format:
<META NAME="DESCRIPTION" CONTENT="Increase visitor hits, attract traffic through submitting URLs, META tags, news releases, banner ads, and reciprocal links">. Your maximum number of characters should be about 255; just be aware that only the first 60 or so are visible on Google, though more may be indexed.
When I prepare a webpage, I write the description first in a sentence or two, using each of the important keywords and phrases included in the article. Then for the keywords META tag, I strip out the common words, leaving just the meaty words and phrases. The keywords META tag is no longer used for ranking by Google and many other search engines, but it is sometimes used for paid inclusion technologies. It is currently used by Yahoo, so I'm leaving it in. Who knows when more search engines will consider it important again?
3. Include Your Keywords in Header Tags H1, H2, H3. Search engines consider words that appear in the page headline and sub heads to be important to the page, so make sure your desired keywords and phrase appear in one or two header tags.
4. Make Sure Your Keywords Are in the First Paragraph of Your Body Text. Search engines expect that your first paragraph will contain the important keywords for the document. You don't want to stuff keywords here, however. Google expects a keyword density in the entire body text area of maybe 1.5% to 2% for a word that should rank high. Other places you might consider including keywords would be in ALT tags and perhaps COMMENT tags.
5. Make Your Navigation System Search Engine Friendly. Some webmasters use frames, but frames can cause serious problems with search engines. Even if search engines can find your content pages, they'll be missing the key navigation to help visitors get to the rest of your site. JavaScript and Flash navigation buttons look great, but search engines can't follow them. Supplement them with regular HTML links at the bottom of the page, ensuring that a chain of hyperlinks exists that can get from the front page to every page in your site. A site map with links to all your pages can help, too. Be aware that some content management systems and e-commerce catalogs produce dynamic, made-on-the-fly webpages. You can recognize these with question marks in their URLs followed by numbers. Overworked search engines sometimes stop at the question mark of long, complex URLs and refuse to go farther. If you find the search engines aren't indexing your interior pages, you might consider URL rewriting, paid inclusion, a site map, and targeted content pages.