FACT. Without effectively promoting and marketing your website, no one is going to find you on the web. Creating a web page for your website is not the end of the online marketing story. In fact, it is only the beginning.

Since, indirectly, you are operating an internet business that promotes your products and services, like any other business, you need to communicate. Interact. You need to let people know you are around and what you offer.

If you have not been making much progress in the early stages of your internet business, this is more than likely the reason why.

To ramp up your online business for free, you can start with the following tips yourself, or of course you can use professional services.

If you use a content management system (CMS), make sure you have prepared your meta tags inside every page of your website. Your CMS should give you easy access to the following three tags: Title, Description and Keywords. If you don’t have a CMS, then get in touch with your web developer and they should be able to assist.

TIP To see how meta tags are being used, you can type in your desired search term into a search engine and look at the meta tags of sites that come up. To see the meta tags of a page, right click on a web page and select view source. At the top of the page you will see the meta tags.

These include Yahoo!, Google, MSN, etc. In internet jargon, this is called search engine submission. This should be the first thing you do as soon as your website is up and all your pages include meta tags.

Having your link submitted to directories, forums or related sites with high PR value will also result in an increase in your site PR when Google bots crawl on the pages of your web site. For example, if you get a link on a good ranking website, you will start to rank better also.

Join discussion boards where your prospects are gathering. You can interact, submit articles etc. This gives you the chance to leave your website URL on the board for people interested in what you offer.

Be an active member, as it is actually unethical to post only once or twice on a board.

A great way to start promoting your profile and your business. Create some activities and groups around your professional activity or your personal likings.

There are many sites online that specialise in listing directories of articles. If you include a link to your website in your author’s resource box, publishing your articles on these sites is a great way to establish links back to your website.

Furthermore, other sites or e-zine publishers might even want to publish your article on their site or publication!