You have spent hours creating a HTML masterpiece, you have posted it to your web host and showed your friends and family your work of art. As much as your friends and family love your new website your site will not be pulling in any profits for you unless the rest of the internet world knows it even exists. For this reason knowing how to market your site and getting your site noticed by your target audience is the most incredibly important step in creating your website and getting your business off the ground.

Fortunately, getting your site noticed by your target audience does not have to be expensive. This means even those of us that are tight with their money can get quality exposure for their beautiful new website.

I am sure you have heard of Search Engine Optimization or SEO. SEO means optimizing your website so that when someone types the topic of your site into the search engine your page apears at the top of the list. This is very important because people generally check the first few web sites results and skip the others if they find the information they were looking for.

To optimize your site all you have to do this is pack your Web page full of keywords that people might use when searching for information contained in your site. The more keywords you have, or keyword phrases someone might use,the more often your site will be returned as a result for the person searching. This can be done by adding articles to your site on topics that relate to your topic, or through meta tags in the HTML code, along with many other ways.

Remember you want to be in the top 5 results posted as often as possible so be diligent about keywords and keyword phrases, they will help direct more traffic to your web site. However, make sure the information you provide on your site is useful and you dont just have a string of keywords to attract people to your page. If you have useful information about a product or service, people will look around. If all you have is a bunch of keywords and nothing that actually pertains to what the individual is looking for, they will leave and never come back. So, be alert to what you are offering potential customers and attentive to the way you bring them to your page.

Once you have packed your page full of useful information and as many keywords as you and your thesaurus can think of, you will want to upload your URL to various search engines like Yahoo, Google, Excite, Alta Vista, and any specialized search engines that focus on your particular business or service. This step is not maditory as the seach engines will eventually find your site, but by completing this step it speeds up the process that can sometimes take up to 3 months.

The best thing about these two steps it they can be done for free.

If you have done all of the above, and results are not pouring in then you may need to consider marketing your site on other related or non related sites by banners and the like to generate more traffic. This is a way of letting individuals know about your product that might not be aware of it to even search for it. By advertising in this way you are reaching a sector of individuals who want and need your product, but were never aware of it. This is very important if you have a unique product. The drawback to this step is there is a cost involved so the amount of banners you purchase is dependant on your budget.

This article just scratches the surface of all the ways to get your new HTML masterpiece noticed. The options are only as limited as your imagination. But to be successful make sure you do it in a responsible way. Internet users are fed up with pop up ads, Spam e-mail and other unsolicited information. Many people now have programs that block pop up ads, which means, if you are using this method to market your site you are wasting your time and money. You dont want to anger potential customers or have them close off their mind to your product, so be creative when you are marketing, aggressive and always respectful of current and future clients.