Work at home parents who opt to put their businesses online learn early on that it is not enough to get a domain name and put together a nice looking site. As in any business, eCommerce success depends upon how well you market. In Part 3 of our series on Building Your Home Business Online, we look at the:

WIRING AND PLUMBING - Meta Tags, Search Engines and Submission

It's not enough to put your business up on the web - how will customers find you if they don't know you're there?

In the real world, customers get out their Yellow Pages. On the Internet, they go to their favorite search engine.

Search engine submission is a science and something of a big business. Directories like Yahoo and the Open Directory Project are powered by actual human beings who review the listings before they are added. Engines such as Google use "spiders" to crawl the web and find your site. Your chances of getting listed are better for both if you take the time to submit your site. Your chances of getting ranked higher are better if your pages contain the three most important Meta Tags: Title, Keywords and Description.

A Meta Tag is a special HTML code that provides information about a web page. Unlike normal HTML tags, meta tags do not affect how the page is displayed. Instead, they provide information such as who created the page, how often it is updated, what the page is about, and which keywords represent the page's content. Many search engines use this information when building their indices. (Thanks to http://www.webopedia.com for this definition!)

According to the folks at WebDeveloper.com, only 22% of web pages include search Meta Tags. If you are using them and your competitor is not, you have a search engine advantage. Read the rest of Web Developer's nifty Meta Tag tutorial here: http://www.webdeveloper.com/html/html_metatags.html

There are dozens of programs to help you create Meta Tags over at Cnet.com - here are a couple that look promising:

Meta Tags Builder: Freeware http://www.bilalphilips.com/services/webmaster/metatag3.htm

Meta Maker Wizard: Freeware http://www.streak.demon.co.uk/download_mmw.htm

Once you've designed your page, built in your Meta Tags and keywords and uploaded your site, you are ready to submit your pages.

Some web hosts offer this as a service to their clients. If yours is one of them, find out how extensive their service is - you may have to supplement it by doing some submissions of your own.

Our friend Merle, who specializes in website promotion, has written an article that briefly explains how it is done and why it is such a time-consuming process:

http://www.mcpromotions.com/search1.htm

Then, go to her Search Submissions Page, which is a shortcut to the submission form for each of the major free search engines:

http://www.mcpromotions.com/engine.htm

Some search engines require that you submit your site on a monthly basis. This is a task you could outsource - or you could automate it with the same software most of the site submission services use:

http://www.webposition.com/d2.pl?r=MBV-5558

As advertising-supported Internet portals have done poorly in the last two years, many search engines now require payment for your listing. This trend was begun by the newly profitable Yahoo, which charges $199 to review your business listing in a timely manner (mind you, that fee is just to expedite a staffer to look at your site - it does not guarantee that yours will be added!) While it is still possible to get a free listing on Yahoo, this has become something of a "Holy Grail" with web marketers.

In the last couple of years, Pay-Per-Click search engines have all but taken over the cyber-world. This very profitable business model allows you to buy your rank on the engine.

This is an increasingly important marketing venue because many major engines are now powered by listings from Pay-Per-Click giant Overture (formally GoTo.com).

Purchasing your Pay-Per-Click listing is a little bit like buying a collectible at eBay. You come up with some keywords (there's that term again!) that people are likely to use when searching for your site. The more popular the keyword, the more you have to pay...

...for example, the term that best describes the ParentPreneur Club site is "work at home"...

...to get the #1 listing for that term at Overture, the current rate is $0.94...

...which means that if I wanted to be ranked number one, I would have to pay 94 cents every time someone clicked on my Overture listing...

...which could become very expensive very quickly.

Now, "work at home" is one of the most popular search times on the Internet. By refining the search term to something a little less popular (not to mention less expensive!) I can still attain a high ranking and save some money.

For instance, a number one listing for the term "work at home parent" goes for just $0.40 - that would more than cut my cost in half. But if I settle for the number three listing, I would only have to pay $0.17 cents per click... and my site would still be shown at the top of such engines as AltaVista, MSN, iWon and others.

And if I selected the term "home business parent," I would have the whole field to myself and only have to pay five cents per click.

Overture has a Search Term Suggestion tool, which shows you how many searches have been done on your keyword in the last month. I ran "home business parent" there and discovered that no one had searched on that particular phrase. That would make bidding on that term a bad investment. I ran "parentpreneur" in there - which also is a five cent bid - and discovered that 32 searches were done on it in the last month. Does that make it a good choice? Those are the kind of questions you need to ask yourself when you begin a Pay Per Click campaign on Overture and other paid search engines.

We could easily devote an entire book on search engine optimization and Pay-Per-Click strategies. In fact, we have some very good free e-Books on just this subject in our ParentPreneur Club Library:

Search Engine Ascent Search Engine Gold Search Engine School

http://parentpreneurclub.com/cgi-bin/ez/pl.cgi?me

If you've followed the advice in this series, you are now the proud owner of a website and listed in the search engines. Are you finished? Probably not - in Part 4 we examine some options you may wish to add that will make your website more functional - more fun - and hopefully, more profitable.