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A web site is like any tool: great when it's put to good use, and usually blamed unfairly when it isn't. At the lowest level, it promotes your business; at a higher level, your web site may actually be a fundamental operational part of your business! But whether you've spent several hundred pounds or several thousands on its development, it could be money wasted if potential clients don't know it's there. Installing a phone doesn’t make people call you unless they know your number.

Managing your online presence does not end with the launch of your web site. You may have had the web address printed on all your stationery, you may now be incorporating it in any traditional advertising campaigns, but without spending time on search engine promotion and optimisation you could still be missing out on a potential revenue stream.

When it comes to search engines, Google is God, used for over 70% of all Internet searches (and no doubt prayed to for inspiration by researchers and shoppers all over the globe). Even if your search engine of choice is not Google, there is a fair chance that its results are generated from Google's database. All this means that it is by far the most important search engine on which to concentrate your site promotion efforts. Take care of Google and the other search engines will pretty much take care of themselves.

There are any number of companies who offer search engine promotion as a chargeable service, some of whom will claim to guarantee that you will rank above your competitors in search engines. This does, of course, beg the question: 'If my nearest competitor comes to you for the same service, how can you offer him the same guarantee as me?'. Search engine rankings are a matter of technology, not alchemy.

Logical conundrums aside, there are a number of tricks that can be implemented in order to 'persuade' search engines to give a site a higher ranking. Naturally, the programmers who control the inner workings of search engines soon grow wise to these tactics, and tweak their algorithms to negate any advantage gained. In fact, Google may even remove a site from its listings where they are found to employ these techniques.

10 Steps to Nirvana
As this whole subject is shrouded in techno-babble, mystique and hyperbolic advertising, we have attempted to lay down some basic, sensible pointers and guidelines. These show you how to achieve good search engine results that require little maintenance - and no big fees to search engine promotion consultants in order to keep up to date. By following as many of these guidelines as you can, search engine nirvana might just be yours to attain.

Plan it before you do it: a number of the pointers below are far easier to follow if you take the information on board before your web site has been built. If you already have a web site, don't panic: most of the tips are still fairly easy to apply.

Choosing keywords and phrases: this is difficult to do well, although the more unique your business, the easier it will be. If there are only four web sites in the world about how to tie-dye a poodle (to pick a surreal example), outranking your competition will be less of a challenge. If you're an estate agent, life may be a little harder, although it's probably a little late in the day for careers advice! Try to think of your organisation's unique selling points and the words that the public would use to express these (search engines use the words that a user types in, which may not be the words you might use to 'sell' yourself: search engine users are looking for a company or product that fits your description, not your marketing). Using unique words or phrases improves the chance that your site will appear in shorter list of results, but it is still important to also use the same phrases as your competitors. You also need to take the more important phrases that signify your business and ensure they appear numerous times throughout your site – preferably in page titles, headings and opening paragraphs (as search engines see these as more relevant).

Meta tag myths: search engine promotion used to be as simple as adding a few lines - called meta tags - in the HTML, which contained a description of your web site along with a list of pertinent keywords or phrases. The scope for abuse was limitless: include plenty of sex references (well, it works for Cosmopolitan and Marie Claire, why not the estate agency?),and your visitor numbers would multiply overnight. (Your ISP would also be knocking on your virtual door for more money, now that you're using so much more bandwidth – and possibly abusing their acceptable use policy.) Needless to say, people using search engines got tired of search results that bore no relevance to their query, so search engines no longer rely so heavily on meta tags. By all means, have some in there - the description may be listed as an overview of the page's content in some search engine results, and is worth a few seconds of your time - but don't expend undue effort on them.

Clever copywriting: search engines rely heavily on the actual content of pages in order to pick keywords that match to searches. Taking time to compose copy for your pages that contains key phrases is a big step towards ensuring that your site will be found when these phrases are entered into the search engine. (Taking time to compose your copy may also encourage the world to want to visit your web site more than once: this is an area where most web sites would benefit from greater time and effort.) After all, if you specialise in selling 'drongo widgets', you would expect that phrase to appear throughout the copy of your site. Draw up a list of keywords and phrases and ask your copywriter to incorporate as many as possible into as many pages as possible: the really important ones should appear in the first paragraph (search engines will approve, and customers may be thankful too.)

Keep the html clean: your site may look fine in Internet Explorer and Netscape, but that doesn't mean a search engine trying to index it will be able to cope. If your site is littered with incorrect html, a search engine may fail to understand your page, and it will not be indexed correctly (or even not indexed at all). Make use of one of the many html validators available on the Internet: if any of your pages do not validate correctly, fix them! (A reputable web design company should produce high-quality HTML code in any case, but there's no harm in checking.)

Title the pages correctly: ensure each page of content within your site has a title that relates specifically to that page. Many search engines use the title of your page as the entry in the search engine. If your site has many pages all with the same title, it will be difficult to distinguish between them when looking at search engine results. Good use of the title tags is paramount to good search engine results. (The title is also stored if a user bookmarks a page for later reference, so you'll be doing everyone a favour.)

Proper use of H tags: an H tag is used in html to mark headings within the content. Headings have a higher weighting with search engines and can influence which keywords are given more prominence. Make good use of them throughout your site. As web users tend to skim read content, good, accurate and descriptive use of headings helps everyone.

Consider a frameless site: there are many pro's and con's to using frames, which we will not go into here, but let us simply recommend that - as far as search engine promotion is concerned - a frameless site certainly simplifies things and can often result in 'cleaner' search engine entries. Speak to your web designer as early in the production process as you can.

Get your site listed elsewhere: this may sound like common sense, but there is more to it than first appears. Google's system of ranking pages involves examining how many sites link to yours: the more that do, the more relevant your site is considered to be. Avoid 'link farms' and link exchange programmes, as search engines are wise to these techniques, but search for specialist directories and submit an entry for your site.

Keep it fresh: try to give people a reason to return to your site, be it a discussion forum, regular news updates, competitions or whatever best relates to your line of business. You might not have had anything to offer a visitor the first time around, but on a later visit they may be something that catches their eye. Give them a good reason to want to come back.

Web sites enable you to 'play the numbers game'. The more traffic you can attract to your site, the more people know of your existence. The more people that know of your existence, the more likely you are to reach someone who wants what you have to offer - either now or in the future. On the web, users have to come to you – there is no 'passing trade' - so they need to know you exist and what you can do for them. The points above should ensure good results time and again without the need for constant tweaking.

While Powernet does not offer search engine promotion as a service (as results cannot ultimately be guaranteed, and any result can take a number of months to come to fruition), we are more than happy to undertake work on your behalf to ensure you have a web site that is well suited to achieving good search engine results.