There are many ins and outs to promoting your business website. Below I have listed a few of the gotchas and tips I've learned along the way.

There is no magic bullet - There is a ton of free information on the web about how to promote your website and get it ranked high in the search engines, for example, www.apromotionguide.com gives you some great information on how to get started promoting, but it's what is not said that is relevant.

Promoting a website is not free. It takes time and in most cases, to obtain a top 10 ranking on the major search engines, you should have a marketing budget of no less than $1000 to start.

Some free promotion ideas:

Write articles and submit them to free submission sites. If your article is used by other websites, your credentials and web address is posted to promote your site. The more promotion the more potential hits to your website and the more reference links back to your site.

Optimize your meta tag description and keywords tags. If you are new to this type of promotion, I suggest hiring someone to assist with picking out your keywords and site description. It's well worth the investment.

Join forums and contribute. Find forums that deal with similar topic material as your website and join them. Add a small banner ad as your signature so that when you post in the forum threads, your signature will promote your website.

Exchange links with other websites. Compose emails and find sites with the similar general genre and contact them. Introduce yourself and ask if they would be willing to exchange links with you. Remember, the more links on other sites back to your site, means higher rankings in the search engines.

One final tip is to keep the content on your website fresh. Update it every 2-3 weeks and resubmit to the search engines. It's always a good idea to resubmit if you have made major changes to your site no more than twice a month.

To re-cap, there are not any magic formulas. Promoting a website takes time and a lot of effort. I know, I'm promoting my wife's site and I have learned a ton. Her site pertains to her sewing pattern designs and can be found at www.threebsinsanity.com. There is a lot to learn about promoting your site. People who have been doing this for years will admit that they do not know the exact formula that will give you the best rankings because the search engine companies are always changing their criteria. Be persistent and work to promote your site and over time, it will pay off. Remember, "Rome was not built in one day!"