MainGate Graphics and Web Design is pleased to bring you the first installment of its web design newsletter geared toward small businesses and organizations. Our goal is to help you market your business on the web. After all, why have a web site if no one can find it?

1. Reciprocal Links
   The best way to ensure a top listing is for your web site to be linked to a lot of other web sites. This is known as link popularity. automated search robots jump from page to page on the Internet via hyperlinks. The more sites that link to your business, the more likely it is that a search engine will list the company’s web site. To raise your web site's link popularity, your business needs to contact other like web sites, search engines, and web portals and ask for reciprocal links. With each new relevant link, your web site increases its rank.


2. Relevant Content
   Most potential clients will not search for your firm by name. Rather, potential clients will search for a company by typing in a phrase such as "Florida Real Estate" etc. Search engines rank web sites higher if they offer relevant content that contains such words or subjects. For your company to be found, your site needs to offer authoritative information on your business through articles, newsletters, bulletin alerts, links, statistics, and more. By offering this information, the search engines will associate your web site with key words that will allow potential clients to find your site.


3. Edit your Meta Tags
   Meta tags are HTML-coded information that search engines look at when crawling on your web site for information. In the simplest form, meta tags consist of a title, a description, and relevant key words. To optimize the web site, your company should decide on the most important words to place in title, keyword, and description meta tags. In addition, your business should create different meta tags for each page of the web site. This will allow each page to be indexed differently by the search engine, thus creating several mini-web sites.


4. Register your Web Site
   To capitalize on your company’s link popularity, meta tags, and content, your web site needs be registered with the top search engines and as many other web sites as possible. At MainGate Graphics & Web Design, our registration process includes:
   1. Submission to free search engines, including Google, Open Directory Project, other major search engines/portals, and other community and local search engines
   2. If you want to pay for placement, we will submit you site to paid search engine, including Yahoo!, Ask Jeeves, Inktomi, FAST, Overture, Looksmart, Google AdWords
   3. If desired, we can register your site at professional organizations, clients, trade groups, consultants, publishers, educational institutions, and other relevant organizations that you request.