One of the most important aspects to a successful web presence in being found. You can increase your visibility through a number of easy, free steps that will help users find your site. Make sure that you follow the following 4 steps to give your site every chance of being a success.

1. Submit your site to the major search engines

Once you have submitted your site to a search engine their robots and spiders crawl the web, and they should run across your site within a month or so. There are two types of crawls: fresh crawls and deep crawls. Your site most likely will first get a fresh crawl in which only pages the 'bot' deems most important are crawled. After the robot runs a deep crawl of your site, most, if not all of the pages on your website that contain links from other pages will be crawled and subsequently listed on the search engine. 

All pages that you have selected to "disallow robots" in the site structure tab will be excluded from the crawl and will not be ranked in a search.

Google (Introducing your site to Googlebot)
www.google.com/addurl.html
www.google.com/submityourcontent/index.html

Bing (Introducing your site to MSNBot)
http://www.bing.com/docs/submit.aspx

Yahoo (Introducing your site to Slurp)
http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/submit

2. List on Google maps

http://maps.google.com.au/ 

By creating your own business listing, you drive traffic to your site and customers through your front door. Millions use Google Maps each day and business listings are free through Google Local Business Center. 

One mistake that we see people make is that they do not link their new website to their Google maps account. As Google web results often list Google maps results first you MUST log into your account and link your website so that users can find your business.

3. List on all directories

The internet has many free business directories that allow you to push your website into prominence. Research how your target market is interacting online and submit your site to the relevant free directory.

Some directories include:
www.localbusinessguide.com.au 
www.truelocal.com.au 
www.hotfrog.com.au

4. Update your site's SEO entries

Your website should come with granular SEO management capability allowing you to specify SEO tags for each page individually if desired. An important feature that you should request from your developer is the inheritance of SEO tags of a page from a parent page when you have not specified page specific tags.

Start by updating the keywords, title text and description on the home page and as you develop your site create more specific entries for each page.

Conclusion

There are some very basic steps you can take to ensure that your site is indexed by the major search engines and discovered online. Before you pay someone to improve your search engine 'rank' make sure that you have completed the above and watch your website's online visibility start to increase.