Advertise your website via Google and Yahoo

After you set up your Web site, it’s time to let the world know about it. Having spent many years in the advertising business, I can spot businesses that want to fail. They open their doors and expect the world to beat a path to them and make them rich. This doesn’t happen ever.

You must take an active approach to letting the world in on the goodies you have for sale. This means spending a good deal of time promoting your site by running banner ads and getting your URL into a search engine. There are no shortcuts.

About a trillion people out there want to take your money for advertising your Web site. As with all transactions regarding your Web site, knowing who you’re dealing with is key. If you want to run your banner on someone else’s site, don’t spend money; ask to do an exchange. The more advertising that you can get for free, the better. If you decide that you want to pay for advertising, I recommend that you wait until after you’ve made a profit selling merchandise from your site.

A simple link to your Web site from your eBay About Me page will draw people to your site initially. You’ll be pleasantly surprised. Getting your URL into a search engine For people to find your site (and what you’re selling), they must be able to locate you. A popular way that people do this is by searching with a search engine. So you should submit your site to search engines. Go to the search engines that interest you and look for a link or a help area that will enable you to submit your site. Be sure to follow any specific instructions on the site; some may limit the amount of keywords and the characters allowed in your description.

To submit your URL to search engines, you need to do a little work. (Nothing’s easy, is it?) Write down twenty-five to fifty words or phrases that describe your Web site; these are your keywords. Now, using as many of the words you came up with, write a description of your site. With the remaining words, create a list of keywords, separating each word or short phrase by a comma. You can use these keywords to add metatags to the header in your HTML document for your home page. Metatags are identifiers used by search engine spiders, robots that troll the Internet looking for new sites to classify on search engines.

If you have a problem coming up with metatags, check out the free Yahoo! GeoCities handy metatag generator.

Google

Google crawls the Internet regularly with its spider, Googlebot, looking for new sites to index on Google Search. If Googlebot has missed your site, go to the following and let Google know that you’re site is ready for listing. Google doesn’t guarantee that your site will be listed, but the process takes less than a minute. What could it hurt?

Yahoo!

Yahoo! is one of the more difficult sites to list with, although you can get a free listing if you fill out all the forms correctly and wait six to eight weeks. Yahoo! guarantees that you’ll be reviewed in just seven business days. You’ll hear a lot about search engine optimization (SEO) when getting your Web site set up. This basically means that you want to use the right keywords in your metatags to get the spiders to see your site.

Paid search advertising

Paid search advertising helps you get visitors to your site. When you go to a search engine, you’ll see several searches on the right side of the page (Google) or on the top of the search results (Yahoo!); these are the paid listings that match your search. Each time you click one of these links, the site owners pay a fee for directing a new visitor to their site. The two major players in the field are Google Adwords (adwords.com) and Yahoo! (/smallbusiness.yahoo.com/marketing/).