After you publish, you'll want potential customers to be able to find you — and search engines are one way many Internet users find the products and services they want.

Unfortunately, there's no fail-safe way to ensure that your site will appear in search results on any of the major search engines, but there are some things you can do to help your site get noticed.

Important: Please note that while Yahoo! can offer suggestions, we cannot guarantee your site's placement in search results — or that it will be listed (indexed) at all.

The tips below will help you get started. For detailed information on promoting your site, visit the Promote tab of your Web Hosting Control Panel or see our Small Business promotion help.

Submit Your Site
To help you get noticed, we'll submit your site to the biggest search engines for consideration in their search engine results. If you're using Site Solution, we'll submit for you automatically. If you're using another site building tool, you can submit your own site with just one click. Learn how to submit your site.

Site Solution users enjoy another advantage: We've made the inner workings of your Site Solution pages easy for search engines to review and understand, so they can more easily evaluate your site for placement in their search results.

Add Meta Tags
Meta tags are little bits of HTML code that provide information about a page but are not viewable by the user in a browser. Most search engines examine a page's meta tags, which usually include a page title, description, and keywords, to index the page and help determine its ranking in relevant search results. Although not the only way to elevate your site's search engine rankings, judiciously adding meta tags to your pages can help.

Learn how to add meta tags to your site.

Hint: Don't use your keywords only as a tag. Include your keywords in your page titles, descriptions, headings, and content as well.

Cultivate Links to Your Site
The more quality sites link to yours, the more relevant your site will look to search engines, which can improve your site's ranking in search engine results.

How can you get other sites to link to yours? Contact businesses related (but not competitive) to your own, and ask for a link exchange. Read and participate in popular forums that match your site's focus or interests — many will let you include links to a web site in your forum signature. Request that local organizations like your Chamber of Commerce include links to your business on their web sites.

Build a Quality Site
This may seem obvious, but a site that looks professional and offers a good experience for visitors will get more traffic, more referrals, and, in the end, higher rankings.

Our Site Solution tool makes it easy for anyone to build a professional-looking site - even with no design experience. With Site Solution you can focus on your site content instead of worrying about web-building mechanics, and our designers have made sure your site will look good. Learn more about Site Solution.

Keep Your Site Fresh
Sites with frequently updated content typically rank higher in search engines. Update your site with recent news about your business, articles or tips related to your products or services, and anything else that will make your site a destination for readers who could become customers. Publish testimonials from your customers or positive reviews of your business in other publications (with links to those reviews).

Above all, be sure your content is clear, every word is spelled correctly, and all your links work. The more professional your site appears, the more likely potential customers are to choose your business over your competitors.

Use a Sitemap
A Sitemap can help search engines find and evaluate the pages in your site. When you publish your site with Site Solution, we'll automatically create a Sitemap for you, but you can also create your own. Learn how to create your own Sitemap.

Try Other Promotion Tools
On the Promote tab of your Web Hosting Control Panel are many promotional tools and recommendations to improve your site's ranking in search engine results, spread the word about your business, and more.