The most powerful marketing tool you have online when you start your business is your ranking on a search engine. That does not mean it is the only tool you have, of course; you should never slow content development down, shun link exchanges, or ignore the possibilities of submitting to article directories. However, you absolutely cannot afford to ignore the search engines.

When you first develop your site, you learned the easy way or the hard way that you must submit it to the search engines before they can catalog it properly; and of course you did. And you learned - again, easy or hard - that there were automated submitters, free engines that would submit your site to dozens of search engines for you. This, if you've ever filled out submission forms by hand, is a godsend, saving you hours and hours of work.

But after that first round of submission, you may never get around to it again. That is a mistake. With every new article you write and post online, you should submit the permanent URL of that article. After all, each article is going to boost your ranking. Each article should have a link back to your home page, which may boost your overall ranking a little. And each article should have slightly different keywords, enabling your site to come up on many more searches than it would have otherwise.

The Right Way To Autosubmit

The first thing you need to do is ensure that your new article is search-engine optimized, with clear and frequent keyword use, metatags completed, and headers and subheaders complete with uses of your keywords. Make certain also that you've designed your articles in such a way that they link back to your home page. If you have other sites you want to promote, putting links to these sites on your article page wouldn't hurt, as long as the topic is still in the same general field; this gives you the side advantage of promoting your other sites as well.

Make certain your name is on the page somewhere, exactly as you want to be searched for. One of the things you're trying to achieve with your marketing is personal name recognition, and that can only happen if you consistently use the same reasonably-unique name.

Now that your article is optimized for your purposes, go out to the autosubmitters and submit it with the article's URL. Ensure that you have the article set up in such a way that you won't need to move it; there are few things as annoying as clicking on an interesting article link only to find it dead or another article sitting in its spot! Make certain that the keyword for this article is in its title.

You should not use exact same keyword for your articles as you used for your home page. Keep it similar or at least related, but give it a unique keyword of its own. That way, people searching for something a little off your home page topic but who are still potential customers can find their way to your article, and trace that path back to your home page, other articles, and stuff to sell.

What Else You Should Do

In addition to optimizing your autosubmission, watch your web page statistics. If you are getting 500 hits per week on your home page but 750 on your newly-submitted article, you're doing something wrong on your home page. You may be focusing on the wrong community, or you may not be updating your home page enough. Compare what you're doing on the two pages to see if you can figure it out. If you can't, then try putting more content on your home page related to the article that's getting high hits.

And if you optimize and submit all your articles in the same manner (as you should), you can use statistics compared between the articles to determine whether your customers are more interested in one area of your topic than the others. Take advantage of this information. If you can detect an emerging trend in this way, you'll be in a great position to exploit it.