My last four articles have focused on developing a Web site and getting it online. This column will discuss general promotion of your site, once it is built and online.

There is a general misconception that a person or business can build a site, put it online and immediately have millions of visitors seeing their information. In fact, many people fear this and are afraid of being overwhelmed if they put their business online.

The fact is, there are billions of Web pages on the Internet and thousands more being added every day. This usually makes it a struggle to get your site found by your target audience.

Successful Web sites will have a plan, just like a marketing plan for any new business, that will outline the strategy for driving traffic to their site. In many cases, traditional advertising (print, radio, tv, etc.) would be most effective.

The first step should be to add your Web address to your business cards, letterhead, brochures and any printed material or advertising you already distribute.

But, for the purposes of this column, I will try to focus on general online promotion.

First, it is important to build, or hire a firm who will build, your site in a search engine-friendly way. This starts with using clean, valid html code. It is a good idea to stay away from programs, or Web developers who use programs, such as Microsoft Frontpage. These programs automatically generate the code in a way that will interface with other Microsoft products, but, your final Web page will usually not be valid html or optimized for search engines and the Internet.

Also, when coding these pages, it is important to give your site a title, keywords and description that will reflect what keywords your audience will use to find your site. Search engines look at all these things, as well as the actual text on the page, to rank your site.

Once your pages have been optimized, it is necessary to register with the top search engines so they know to index your site. Unless someone goes out and requests this indexing, it can be a very long time before you will show up in any search results.

Fortunately, this is very easy to do. Normally, you will find a link right on the search engine home page that says "Add URL" or "Add My Site". This button will take you to an area where you can enter your address and click submit. That's it! The site will usually give you an approximation of how long until your site will be indexed.

You will find software and Web sites claiming to add your site to many search engines at one time. I have found only limited success with these and highly recommend hand-registering your site with the top search engines (excite, Lycos, HotBot, AltaVista, WebCrawler, Google, Scrub The Web, Infoseek, Infospace, Go.com and Yahoo!).

For the other, less popular search engines, I like Scrub the Web as an automatic submission tool. This can be found at http://www.scrubtheweb.com.

Another very popular and effective way to get traffic to your site is through e-mail marketing. It is very important to do this legally and you should research this topic in detail before sending out promotional information via e-mail.

Spam, or unsolicited bulk e-mail, is illegal and, because we all hate to receive it, can really get people upset with your site.

However, developing your own e-mail list can be a very effective and friendly way to get people to your site. If you start asking each customer and actively give people a reason to join your list on your site, you will quickly develop a targeted audience that you can drive back to your site. Plus, with some basic software, it can be very easy to send one message to all your recipients on the list.

The original Internet advertising came in the form of banner ads. These are the usually wide narrow ads you see at the top and bottom of popular commercial sites. The number of people that an average banner will drive to your site is usually far less than that of e-mail advertising, but banners also help build identity and, with the proper audience, can be very effective.

Of course, there are many other ways to promote your site and not all of them need to be Internet-related. I think the best advice is to try and think like your customer or audience. Where are they on the Net and what would motivate them to go to your site? Or, what search terms are they likely to use when going to a search engine?

And finally, once you get them to your site, be sure to have quality, professional information available and a good reason for them to come back.