If you have a physical store in addition to an online store, you can put your website URL on all of your receipts, bags, and promotional items.  This is a good way of getting your current customers to your website.  Note, however, that this may be a costly way of advertising.  Having your website printed on your bags may not be cheap.  The same goes for getting a cash register that will print your website on the receipt.  The cheapest form of advertising here may be to either print up small flyers on your own or to purchase one-time promotional items like bookmarks or postcards. 

Don’t forget to add your website address to any banners or signs you have in your store.  You can also add information about your site to your business letterhead, your business cards, and even your envelopes if you don’t mind having new batches printed.

If your site is a stand alone business website that isn’t connected to a physical store, you may end up doing most of your advertising online.  This can be much cheaper than advertising offline.  First, add a signature to your emails that includes your website.  This way, everyone you email will know about it.  While that might only include your friends and family, it’s still a good way of getting your site out there.  Likewise, add your website to any signature you use on message boards.  You can make a post on these boards about your site, but be careful: some message boards have very strict rules about this, and many consider it spamming.

Another option is to use social networking sites like MySpace, Facebook, and Twitter to advertise your site.  You can search through the many users on these sites and others to find those who may be interested in your products or services.  Then you invite them to be your friend.  Be careful here, too, because if you simply send out mass friend invites, people will see you as a spammer.  This is why it’s important to only invite people who may be interested in what you have to offer.  In addition to not spamming, you’re more likely to get these people to be your friend and to get business from them because they may actually want or need your product as opposed to random people who might not want what you offer.

Above all, there’s one very important rule to remember when advertising your site online, and it can’t be stressed enough: do not spam.  It doesn’t matter what form of advertising you’re using, if people see you as a spammer, they won’t ever visit your site.  They may even think your site is a scam, which will hurt your business’s reputation.

One of the biggest mistakes is pushing away human customers because you want to get a certain number of keywords in your text.  While keywords are important, they should never make your text sound like it was written for a computer.  This means you have to be careful that you always present useful information.  If you’re working on a webpage for a specific product such as children’s bedding, don’t repeat the name of the product over and over.  Sentences like “If you’re looking for children’s bedding, purchasing this brand of children’s bedding is sure to meet your children’s bedding needs” are obviously written for search engines, and live customers aren’t going to waste time reading them.

So how do you get keywords into your website?  Well, many webmasters overlook a lot of potential SEO locations.  One is the title bar at the top of your website.  Some webmasters completely forget to create a title for each webpage, but it’s very important to not only get a title on there but to also get at least one keyword in that title. 

Don’t forget the metatags as well.  These tags, which are only visible in the HTML coding of your website, are really only used by search engines.  They tell search engine robots exactly what topics your webpage touches on.  You should add as many descriptive metatags as you can that relate to your site.  Don’t stuff your metatags with keywords that aren’t related to your website thinking you can get more traffic.  If a search engine sees too many metatags that don’t seem to relate to the text on your site, it may penalize your ranking.

Another place many people forget to place keywords is in the alt text of an image.  The alt, or alternative, text is what appears if the image doesn’t load on a person’s computer.  You always want the image to load, of course, but whether it loads or not, a search engine robot will see the alt text. 

Note that using java menus or Flash menus can actually hinder your SEO work.  This is because search engine robots can’t crawl along these types of menus.  They won’t see any of the keywords you place in either.  Basically, robots can’t read scripts, nor can they “see” any keywords you put in images.  This is one reason why many websites have both a fancy graphical menu and a text navigation menu as well (usually down at the bottom).  This way, the search engine robot can see all of the keywords, plus users who may have issues with the fancy menu can always use the plain text links if they need to.