Websites are a great way to get the word out about your products and services—but only if your prospects can easily find their way to your site.

In addition to using traditional marketing communication tools such as trade-publication advertising and direct mail to drive people to your Website, understanding how search engines work can increase the chances of attracting visitors to your site.

The following tips will help you optimize your Website for the major search engines, including Google, AltaVista, Excite, Lycos and Yahoo.

Craft HTML “meta tags” with care.
Meta tags include the title and description of each page, and your keywords. Some search engines use these tags to rank your Website in search results. Writing tags that truly reflect your business and its products will enhance your ranking in the searches you most care about—those conducted by people looking for a supplier like you. And if the meta tag titles match the visual titles on your pages, even better.

Use regular words, not jargon, as your Website’s keywords. People conducting searches tend to use normal language. For example, they’re more likely to search on the word “directory” than the phrase “identity-management document.”

Place keywords in the visible text portion of your pages. Search engines scan text, not images; therefore, it is important to keep keywords out of the graphic elements of your Website.

Create a site map page on your Website and submit its URL to the search engines. If the site map includes links to your Website’s other pages, search engines will have better luck locating those pages.

Include spelling variations for keywords. Legitimate spelling differences may exist for a given word. For example, someone might call a newsletter delivered by email an “e-newsletter,” an “enewsletter” or an “email newsletter.” And beyond that, people sometimes make spelling errors when they are conducting a search, so consider adding common misspellings of your keywords.

Eschew glitz. BtoB magazine recently reported that in an iProspect study of Fortune 100 companies, 97 percent of respondents used Flash and other dynamic delivery methods that reduce the likelihood of search-engine indexing.

Go flat. Search engines do their most intensive searching within the top three layers of a Website. Put your keywords on these pages, and place appropriate and page-specific meta tags on each page to generate more hits.

Pay for placement. Consider buying ad space on search-engine results pages. For example, Google.com’s AdWords program sells small text ads linked to specific keywords. And Overture.com offers preferred search-results placement on a cost-per-click basis.

To learn more about optimizing your Website for search engines, check out http://www.searchenginewatch.com .

To obtain a report on suppliers of search engine optimization services, visit http://sherpastore.com/page.cfm/1759 .