Search Engine Promotion
To rank well for your chosen keywords, make sure the words you choose accurately describe your site, make sure your site follows Google's Webmaster Guidelines, and get lots of high quality links.
Use meta tags and make sure that every page of your site has a title tag, a description tag, and a keyword tag. (Find a free meta tag generator here: Tools) For your meta tags, choose a search term (keyword or keyphrase) that accurately describes your site, use the search term in your title tag, your description tag, your keywords tag, and at least once as text in the body of your page. Repeating a search term over and over again won't help, just write naturally. Don't choose a generic search term and apply it to every page, you need to be specific and use a different search term and unique description for each page of your site.
Don't use automated programs or schemes to promote your site.
If you are going to hire an SEO service read Google's SEO Info first.
Check your navigation, make sure that it takes no more than two or three clicks to get to any page of your site from your index page. Then visit our Tools section and use the various validators to check your html syntax, you can also check your pages for broken links, misspellings, and more. If your site is really large and has lots of deep links consider making a site map.
Visit Google's Webmaster Tools and sign up, even if you don't add a sitemap you can still get all kinds of reports and statistics for your site for free.
Some Search Engine and Directory Info
Google: To check on your site in Google type site:www.yourdomain.com in Google's search bar, you should see all the pages from your site. If you don't see any pages and your site is brand new go to the Google add url page and add your index page. In about a month you should see most or all of your pages listed. If every page isn't listed yet, don't worry, Google will find them soon if you have a good navigation system and you have other sites linking to you. If your site is not new and it is not listed then go to Google's Webmaster Tools to find out why.
Yahoo Directory: If you have a non-commercial site you may be able to submit it for free. If you have a commercial site you can use Yahoo! Express to submit your site to the directory. It costs $299.00 a year for a commercial site to be listed with Yahoo. Read: How to Suggest Your Site
Yahoo Search: For information about the Yahoo search engine (not the same as the Yahoo Directory) go here: Yahoo Search Submission
There are lots of good places to submit your url, concentrate on submitting your site to smaller topic specific search engines and directories that are related to your site. Check each site carefully before you submit, it won't help you to be listed in a crummy spam directory. You want quality links.
Go to our Linking Advice section for lists of art directories and other linking ideas.
Related Resources
Go to our Web Design Tips area for general design advice.
WebmasterWorld
Web site owners should visit this site regularly to read and discuss the latest news.
Search Engine Watch
Tutorials, tips, and forums.
