Optimize and Market Your Website Cheaply and Effectively

As far as specifics about what keywords to use, that depends. It depends on what you are after as well as what other people are after. It's going to vary from market to market sadly, so we can't give you a magic list. We can tell you that you are most qualified to make this decision though. Beware of third party submission services. They don't get your site into google like you could on your own, and may even get you banned if they use certain techniques.

A clients sells widgets on the net. With his market, "widgets" is his strongest keyword. He used to use "widget" until he switched one day. The response was phenomenal. Plural widgets in his case was very effective. We would start off by searching on google for your competition. What keywords did you use to find them? Which keywords had the most pages found? Where would you like to see yourself? View the source of the pages that rank well and see what keywords they use. Search for the actual domain (i.e. widgets.com) and see what pages on the web have links to the high ranking sites. Stuff like that. You can get to number 1 without paying a dime. It just takes time and patience.

Enter the SEO. The search engine optimizer is a human being dedicated to increasing your result rank on search engines. Gone are the days of thinking spiders can do an effective job of this. Consider the human touch and develop marketing habits. Read Google's take on the SEO.

Also of importance is the PageRanking system by google. They give each page a rank once it's earned a certain amount of umph in their database. Higher ranked pages are considered more important. The more important pages show up first in your google query. For example, Macromedia is rated by google as 10 of 10. Gigfoot is today 5/10. 0/10 doesn't mean you are bad, just means you aren't considered a ranked page.

This PageRanking system has been something we've been focusing on since Fall 2002. Gigfoot's website was ranked as 0/10 when it was created in the spring of 2004. Gigfoot, through inbound links and large volume of content, is now 5/10. Another important point is this. If your site link is found on another site with a super high page rank, that link is considered with more bearing versus a non-PageRanked site. So if Macromedia thinks Gigfoot is worthy of a link, Google will think that is more important than if Aunt Betty's knitting site thinks so. For this reason, we also recommend having links to your pages from as many external sites as you can. Signup for web rings, or just hand out your site link to anyone who will publish it. Notice that a site link is 1000% more powerful than a banner ad. In actuality, banner ads don't help you a bit b/c your link is never even published with a banner xchange. Much better is a link like this one... Gigfoot.com web hosting. By getting not only the domain but a much desired keyword (web hosting) we are doubling the effectiveness of our link as far as a Google ranking is concerned.

For more information about the PageRank system, go straight to the source. Google PageRank. Important to note, we have also explored google's AdWord service, Overture submission service, yahoo submissions, and Inktomi submissions. These are all paid marketing options but none has brought the traffic for the investment that a high google page rank an an informative site that is useful to a lot of people.