First rule of promoting your new web site is - make sure all of your current advertising media has your site address included, from your business cards and stationary to radio advertising.

Marketing your web site requires a certain amount of investment of both time and money. Not really any different than other advertising avenues. Today, the growth of online marketing has brought about an evolution to search engine marketing. Currently there are three main ways to market your site: SEO (search engine optimization), PPC(pay par click), PI(paid inclusion).

Search engine optimization (SEO) is the art and science of making websites perform better in the search engines. There is no magic to it -- it's all about understanding how search engines read web pages and what factors they take into consideration when deciding how to rank a page. Things to consider when developing your site: writing or obtaining exellent articles, keyword density, use of wording synonymous with the artcle topic, utilize the 'h1' tag and utilize your keywords in the URL and meta-tags.

Pay Per Click (PPC) advertisements appear on search results pages and are separated from the normal search results. They are located on the top, bottom, or right side of the page and they usually appear in a colored box. In other terms, PPC are called sponsored ads. Sponsored ads are placed on the results pages according to bids. Ads of an advertiser who bid higher for a keyword or phrase is served on the top and those who bid at a lower amount receive a lower rank on the search results pages. Each time someone just clicks on one of these 'sponsored' ads, it costs the advertiser.

Paid Inclusion (PI) is where a web site pays a fee to a search engine that then guarantees the web site will be displayed in the search results for specific keyword or phrase. For example, a web site selling baseball trading cards could pay a search engine to ensure that its site appears in the search results when someone searches on the phrase "vintage baseball cards."  Different search engines treat Paid Inclusion differently, some search engines will have their spiders crawl a Paid Inclusion site more often than a non-paid site. And how the Paid Inclusion site is displayed varies among search engines.

Of course, not every site is looking to become a regional or national icon. Any local businesses should have a site, but being in a top 10 or 20 position on a search engine isn't always necessary.