Helping a web page’s rankings is as simple as holding a garage sale.

The problem I want to address is the need to submit your web sites to search engines.  Too many people sign up for a quick and easy web site, have it running in an hour or so, and then never touch it again.  Unfortunately, that is where their story begins and ends in relation to how their business does on search engines.

Pretend your web page is the most awesome product ever created, and you created it in your garage.  The garage, your place on the web, is one garage in millions worldwide.

Who is going to know about this awesome product?  You built it.  It is the best ever.  How come the world is not beating down your door to get it? Your garage is beautiful, and it contains that awesome product.

The reality is only your friends and neighbors know about it.  Or maybe that odd salesman that happened to walk by, or the old lady who’s dog keeps crapping in your yard. Not really your target audience.  But you want the mega ad agencies, ie google, bing, etc to tell the world. When they do, your clients will come in hordes (hopefully).

It is time to have a garage sale and notify the world! Your garage sale can be done, for free (no charge for sweat equity right?).  Here is some simple suggestions:

1. SEO- Search Engine Optimization.  (The better worded Garage Sale ads get more traffic)  Books are written on this subject, but chances are there is a plugin for your site to help with this. One of my favorites is by Joost de Valk and can be found here: http://yoast.com/wordpress/seo/  Take a few minutes to read his web site, he knows what he is doing.  This plugin even gives red and green warnings to let you know what you are missing.
2. Time to make a map!  In a web page, we need to make an XML type map.  The days of a sitemaps on your web page are gone.  The search engines want something made especially for them.  Here comes the XML.  Fortunately for you, there are some great plugins to make this automatically. The above mentioned product does a nice one, but if you have a blog, shopping cart, tons of new pages added daily, etc etc, I like  this one.
3. Now it is time to make the posters!  So your pages are now somewhat SEO.  Next thing you need to do is submit them to the search engines.  To make your life easier, create a Google gmail account.  You can have that email forwarded to another email addy if necessary.  You need to submit your site to A. Google Web Master Tools  B. Yahoo Site Explorer C. Bing Webmaster
4. In conjunction with #3, be sure you list your sitemap.xml on each of those web sites.  This will help them help you.
5. And finally, document all those that visit your garage sale.  Easiest and most powerful way to do this is install google analytics.  It is a simple placing of a code on your web site.