Web site optimization and submission is something that needs to be planned out well in advance - even before you start building the first page on your web site. However, if your site is aly in existence, realize it cannot remain stagnant. The Web is dynamic and constantly changing - therefore the content on your pages must also change, at least from time to time. If the content does not change, then why would a visitor need to return?

One of the most important things you can do is to choose the right keywords. How? Do your research or hire a professional to do it for you. The tool professionals use is also available to you - Wordtracker. Wordtracker was created by Andy and Mike Mindel back in 1997 to answer THE fundamental question in the search engine industry:

"What are people searching for on the Web?"

Web site optimization and submission starts with knowing what your prospects are searching for in relation to your company's products or services. Wordtracker helps website owners and search engine marketers identify the keywords and search phrases that are relevant to their or their client's business and most likely to be used as queries by search engine users.

Marketers can also determine how many competing sites' pages are using those keywords and can identify the keyword phrases that have the greatest traffic potential.

Wordtracker periodically compiles a database of over 330 million search terms which is updated on a weekly basis. All search terms are collected from the major metacrawlers - Dogpile and Metacrawler. When you want to find out what is being searched across the spectrum of major search engines - search Metacrawler, they search the search engines.

You must identify what are the best keywords, or keyword phrases (commonly simply referred to as 'keywords') that are receiving the highest number of searches, yet have the fewest competing pages (sites). There is a common misnomer on the Web in that everyone refers to searching for a Web site, when in fact, all search results point to a single page. However, recently, Google has now expanded its search results for some of the larger Web sites and is now displaying not only the homepage of a site, but also links to a number of their main pages. In some cases, for very large sites, they are even including a 'Site Search' dialogue whereby you can search that site directly from the Google search results.

A key concept to keep in mind is to optimize each page of your site for only one keyword. Think from the perspective of the search engine; the search engine spider's primary job is to figure out what your page is about and how relevant the wording on the page relates to the title of the page - the most important place where your keyword needs to be. Therefore, put your keyword in the title of your page - and don't dilute it with extraneous words. Then also use that keyword in the header tag of your page and also repeat it once or twice throughout the body of the page content.

However, the most powerful agent in web site optimization and effective indexing of all of your web pages that you can do on your site is creating an XML Sitemap. All of the major search engines now have a means for you to submit your XML Sitemap to them. So, what is a sitemap and why should I have one? Follow this link for a full explanation. Essentially there are generally two types of sitemaps: an HTML sitemap which is helpful for users to find content on your site, and an XML sitemap which is designed to help search engine spiders successfully crawl all of the pages of your site. However, there are also specialty sitemaps you may want to have if your site contains video you want to be included in the search indexes or if you have mobile content specifically designed for delivery on mobile devices such as cell phones and PDAs. If you have regularly updated news you want people to be able to find, then you can create a News Sitemap. If you provide programming code and definitions for others to use, you may want to create a Code Search Sitemap.