How would I go about marketing my clients websites. How do sites like www.cheaptertraffic.com or www.smalldot.com submit to so many sites?

One of those sites is down & the other is a photo of some cute kids - so not sure how these tie in, but...your question is very broad.

For search engines - you have 2 real choices

- sub out the work to an SEO consultant
- learn these skills yourself. This is no small task - but there are many resources available on the web to help you. The site webmasterworld is a great place to start.

Submitting a site to the search engines pretty much gets you nothing - you don't have to really submit your site - and for search engines like google - you will only get listed when google finds links to your site. Certainly ignore any services that offer to submit to 1000's of sites etc - these are just worthless.

hope this helps

Originally posted by SYAlam
How would I go about marketing my clients websites.If you're talking about clients for whom you design sites, you'll cause them more trouble than benefit if you submit them to "thousands of search engines." No traffic, lots of spam, and the risk that being listed in hundreds of what Google, for example, calls "bad neighborhoods" will result in no PageRank benefit at least and the "PR zero" penalty at worst.

If you're thinking about doing search engine optimization yourself for cllients -- and I mean no offense by this -- start by studying and learning about the topic. While your site has a good, professional look, it's really not well optimized. Before you can help out other clients, you should start at home!

So I'll echo NovaW's answer: either learn to do it yourself, or hire someone else as a subcontractor. Think of it as if you were a web host wondering how to design sites for clients: You could either take the time to acquire the skills yourself, of you could start a relationship with a web designer and either send clients to them or have that designer work under your name under contract. SEOs work with design firms in the same ways.

Thanks for all of the help! Now I will begin to research SEO and apply it to my own pages. I love this community, I get instant replies!

Originally posted by SYAlam
Thanks for all of the help! Now I will begin to research SEO and apply it to my own pages. Cool. For one thing, as you learn, pay attention to the difference between "optimization" and "submission!" :)

Your thread topic mentions "optimization," but in your first post you ask how companies can "submit to so many sites." Well, in general search engine optimization firms don't do that kind of mass submission. We tend to focus on maximizing positioning on a limited number of major search engines and directories. Submitting a site that hasn't been properly optimized is essentially a waste of time... but get a site great positioning on just one or two major search engines and your work will pay off.

I was in a situation with one of my sites where I was desperate to get it to the 1st page of a google search and this is how I did it.
I went to every search engine you could find and manually entered all the relevent details. Even used links to other search engines around the world to apply for site submission . Even did a banner exchange with a search engine to get listed days later on there engine.
2 months later i was sitting around page 8 on google engine then 3-4 months later I was on page one.
Call it lucky or persistance paying off, but I am there through putting hours into trying.
One benifit I have noticed that may improve site ranking is your site title. If you want someone to search for your site by searching "rally cars" make sure that the Title of your page is Rally Cars. ( hope that made sense?)
I am trying something with another site at the moment and I dont know how it will work but this is what I am trying. Well I input a whole lot of text to my index.html page that reflects what I would like people to search for in the search engines. eg rally cars, wrc, Rally Australia etc... ( just like meta name keywords) but I dont want this seen so I change the font colour to blend into the back ground so it is invisible and decrease the font size(font size saves space on page) So what you have is a description of your search words on your page. So you ask why do this, well I found on my other site when aiming for top spot in google that I could not describe all the search words I wanted people to use to get to my site.(eg if you sell Ferrari's but you want people who search Lamborgini's at your site, you cant put Lamborgini on you Ferrari site) So this may give me a broader traffic from my broader description of hidden search words. I do it this way because some search engines dont do a meta keyword search.
Well it may work or it may not but I will give it a go!


Keep at it as it is frustrating when your search engine aint listing you, keep applying week after week.

Have Fun
Regards
Travis

Hidden text on the page is an old trick that was commonplace a few years back. The situation today is that you have a very high risk of getting your site banned from the key search engines (like Google) if you use hidden text.

The Search engines check for hidden text & consider it to be SPAM. Avoid it at all costs is my advice.

One other comment on optimizing a single page - keep the focus narrow on individual pages - only targeting one keyword/phrase, then create the content of the page to match. When you try to make a page fit many keywords then you dilute it's effectiveness from an on-page factors viewpoint.

Originally posted by NovaW
The Search engines check for hidden text & consider it to be SPAM. Avoid it at all costs is my advice.Mine too! Definitely don't do it with any domain you value; if you're taking the (spammy) approach of building gateway sites or throwaway minisites for search engine purposes it's one thing, but it's pretty likely to get your domain blacklisted within a couple of months.

And remember that the more competitive your market and the better position you get, the more competitors are looking at your page in one browser window while they have www.google.com/contact/spamreport.html open in another.