Many web page developers seem to think that if you build a page, people will come.  Unfortunately, life isn't quite so simple. With several billion pages on the Internet, the odds of someone bumping into yours is rather remote, unless it is well promoted.

Web page promotion entails registering your URL with one or more search engines and portals. Now that you've found a home for your new web site, it's time to tell the world about your new site.  You must register your site to be listed in the Search Engines, Directories and Announcement sites.

True Search Engines utilize software, often referred to as a Robot or Spider, which crawls the web in search of new or updated pages to index. They constantly crawl the web until they have indexed every page. When submitting your web site, you will only be required to enter your URL (web address) and the robot will spider your site and records the full text of every page within your site. It will continue and follow any external links you may have on your site and eventually index every site on the web.

Although the spiders will eventually find your site, it may take quite some time. Submitting your URL will speed up the process.

When building their database indexes, many search engines also consider meta tags. Meta tags are specified by the web page developer using HTML statements that are invisible to the visitor. Alternative spellings and synonyms of important words on your page should be included as meta keywords.

The web page developer can also specify a meta description which summarizes the page content. This descriptive text is used as the page summary in search engines. If a meta description has not been specified for your page, the robot or crawler will just select a few random lines of text from your page to be used as the page description.

In short, you should take advantage of meta tags and use them wisely. 

Directory: In order for your web site to be listed in a directory, you must register it. They do not search and index the web or spider your web site. You must fill out a form and manually submit each page of your web site.

Directories are usually set up in categories and subcategories and will contain a "Add URL" link within each category. To register your web page, browse through the categories until you find an appropriate category for your site, then go to the "Add URL" link and fill out the submission form. 

Announcement Sites : Announcement sites offer you a great way to announce your new site. When you register, your site will be listed in the "What's New" section for a short period of time and then will be archived for their visitors to continue to view.

If you have a website you want to promote, you should check out SelfPromotion.com.. It's a resource for do-it-yourselfers where you can learn to prepare your pages for the search engines, and then use a sophisticated URL submission robot to submit your web pages to all the important search engines and directories. You'll also find tutorials about website promotion, submitting to Yahoo and much more. Best of all, you can use the site for free -- if you like it, pay what you think its worth.