So you want to...become an Internet millionaire? A web celebrity? Promote your retail store? Sell your service? Simple, put up a web site, sit back and wait for the surfers to find you and have the orders to roll in, right?

We all hear the glory stories about sites like Hotornot, MySpace, YouTube and many others that demonstrate the web's power to rally millions of people around a new site, service, or product. The web is an amazing resource for sharing information, promoting a product or service and supporting other marketing activities-but it is not going to help if people can't find you.

Browser bookmarks are a good method to grab and hold onto a website for future reference. Maybe you saw an ad, did a search or got a tip from someone about the site, bookmark it and that's it, right? Wrong. As the net has grown by millions of new sites every week relying on bookmarks could put you a risk of missing a better service, product, or source of information.

Research shows that, today, most people use search engines to find what they want. People have their favorites-whether it's MSN, Yahoo, Google, Clusty, DMOZ any one of a hundred others-and these become the trusted friends that help us locate the web site for a restaurant, job site, auto repair, entertainment, news or whatever.

Now picture this: you own a web site and want it to be at your audience's fingertips; but, can't seem to get it to come up easily in a search engine. Maybe it's too far down to do you any good...your target audience finds your competitor and stop searching.

Search engines all have different search algorithms and, consequently, you'll often find that the same search terms or phrases on different engines often bring back different results. The pages you see appearing across different engines are optimized.

Ah, the art and science of web site optimization.... There are many aspects to this discipline but, basically, it involves techniques to help make the site "findable" by web-spiders and list-able by search engines. Optimization is accomplished by creating parity between the web site URL, title, description, keyword META tags, ALT image tags and body copy. In addition to parity of terms, there are character count limits in the Meta tags that prohibit loading your tags with every conceivable combination of keywords-so, you need to pick the best ones.

If, for example, your business relies on local traffic be sure to include the city name in your tags/copy. One of my clients, Core-Care.com services Mac computers in Sacramento. Before optimization, their site was barely findable (#124 under Mac Repair, Google page 13); now, they are page 1, #1 when searching for Mac Repair Sacramento.

Beyond the mechanics of optimization is the separate matter of getting inside the mind of your target customer and making a best guess as to which terms they are going to search under. One of my sites is OliveTea.com, is optimized for olive related topics. Few people search for olive leaf tea; however, when searching for olive leaf extract, olive oil or olives, OliveTea.com pops up with a good short description. So, because the concepts are closely related, a good number of surfers are interested enough to click in and make a purchase. There are also tools like Google Analytics to help you figure out what people are searching for.

Another one of my sites, JeffsList.net is run by a database that can't be indexed by search engines. In this case the solution was to build an HTML home page that is optimized that leads to the main body of the site.

Site optimization is critical because a well optimized site attracts surfers, leads, customers, and sales 24/7/365 without spending a dime. Almost all other types of site promotion (CPC or "cost-per-click," banner, eZine, podcast sponsorship, text-link ...) cost hard-earned money and often don't bring enough targeted traffic for a good ROI. Reciprocal linking with other sites is another free method to build Page Rank, it works best when your site is optimized. Google is also starting to penalize sites that link to non-related sites so be careful when building links.

As I mentioned above, web site marketing is as much art as science-and optimization is one of the first pillar of success every successful site needs to address.