1. Choose keywords wisely. The keywords you think might be perfect for your site may not be what people are actually searching for. To find the optimal keywords for your site, use tools such as WordTracker. Choose two or three highly targeted phrases for each page of your site. Never shoot for general keywords such as “travel” or “vacation.”

2. Create a killer Title tag. HTML title tags are critical because they’re given a lot of weight with all of the search engines. You must put your keywords into this tag and not waste space with extra words. Do not use the Title tag to display your company name or to say “Home Page.” Think of it more as a “Title Keyword Tag” and create it accordingly. Add your company name to the end of this tag, if you must use it.

3. Write at least 200 – 250 words of visible text copy based on your chosen keywords. This is a crucial component to high rankings and a successful Web site. The search engines need to “read” keyword rich copy on your pages so they can successfully classify your site. Use each keyword phrase numerous times within your copy for best results.

4. Create Heavy Meta tags. Meta tags can be valuable, but they are not a magic bullet. Create a Meta Description tag that uses your keywords and also describes your site. The information in this tag often appears under your Title in the search engine results pages. The Meta Keyword tag isn’t quite as important as the Meta Description tag. Contrary to popular belief, what you place in the keyword tag will have very little bearing on what keywords your site is actually found under, and it’s not given any consideration whatsoever by Google. Use this tag, but do not obsess over.

5. Use extra “goodies” to boost rankings. Things like headlines, image alt tags, header tags <H1><H2>, etc.), links from other pages, keywords in file names, and keywords in hyperlinks can cumulatively boost search engine rankings. Use any or all of these where they make sense for your site.

6. Be careful when submitting to directories such as Yahoo and the Open Directory Project (DMOZ). Having directory listings are a key component to getting your site spidered and listed by Google. Making mistakes in the submission process could cost you dearly as directory listings are difficult to change later in the game. Therefore, it’s important to read Yahoo’s How to Suggest Your Site and How to add a site to the Open Directory before submitting.

7. Don’t expect quick results. Getting high rankings takes time; there’s no getting around that fact. Once your site is added to a search engine or directory, its ranking may start out low and then slowly work its way up the ladder. Some search engines measure “click-through popularity,” i.e., the more people that click on a particular site, the higher its ranking will go. Be patient and give your site time to mature.

8. Don’t constantly “tweak” your site for better results. It’s best not to make changes to your optimization for at least three-to-six months after submission. It often takes the engines at least that long to add your optimized pages to their databases. Submit it, and then forget about it for a while!

If you’ve followed these tips and still can’t find your site in the engines, the first place to “tweak” would be your page copy. If you added less than 250 words of visible text on your pages, this is probably your culprit. Also, double check your keyword density, and make sure that you only targeted two or three phrases per page. Eventually, you’ll see the fruits of your labor with many top ten rankings in Google and the rest of the search engines!

So let’s say you have a video online and you want to promote it. You already know your audience lives on Facebook somewhere, but you’re not sure how to reach them and you surely don’t have a ton of money to market this thing. Well, here are 8 ways to effectively promote your video on Facebook for little to no cost, with just the friends you have on Facebook.

1. Event Pages
If you’re on Facebook I’m sure you have received an event reminder to go to a party, bar crawl, or meeting of some kind. Well, you can use these pages to promote your video, as well. Say you’re going to launch a video in a month - first, you set up your event page, and make sure it’s very well done because you’re going to be sending it out to all of your friends (you don’t want to seem like a spammer to your friends so don’t mass message them too often or this won’t work). Next you send your event invite and then follow up with 5 or 10 friends a day to get them on board with the event. Eventually, you will have 30 – 40 people saying they want to be reminded when your video is live. Once the initial users are signed up for the event you can start a simple Facebook ads account and spend as little as $5 a day to promote your event page (although fan pages work better to promote and have people become fans of). $100 later and you have over 300 people wanting to be reminded about your video, not a bad turnout thus far.

2. Fan Pages
Fan pages are the more advanced form of the Events Page. Fan Pages allow you to build a very social community around your video with much less commitment. To say you’re going to an event is much harder for a person to do then it is to push the little Become A Fan button. Because Facebook makes it so easy to become a fan you will find that you will get 10 times the amount of fans than you would find saying yes to your event. You can use your Fan Page to power your Events Page by advertising Become A Fan through Facebook ads and you will garner more fans. So now that you have more fans you start to promote your event on your fan page. The people who start saying yes to your event and who are already fans of your video (even if it’s not yet released) creates a super qualified person who really wants to watch your video, increasing your event page to over 500 within a week (around $200 – $300 spent thus far).

3. Your Friends As Admins
Adding one or two of your friends as admins to your page now increases your reach by 2 or 3 times. Let’s say you have 300 friends and your friend Jack has 500 friends and you add Jack as an admin. You not only have scaled your reach directly to 800 people, but just think of the compounding effect. Jack might have 500 friends, but lets just say 5 of Jacks friends become fans of that page and they each have 500 friends as well. The way Facebook works (you probably already know this) is if those five friends become fans of your page, Facebook tells their friends they became fans, which again compounds on itself. Your chosen admins can make your fan page grow epically, thus creating a built in audience for your video and event page (and you’re still at a total cost of $300).

4. Posting To Other Fan Page Walls
Many self-proclaimed purists won’t like this step, but I’ve found it very effective. Find pages that are very similar to yours (similar type of content) and post your fan page link to their wall. Don’t forget to say something that has some relevance to the wall you are posting on otherwise it doesn’t look authentic enough for it not to be ignored or removed. If you do this a few times to some high fanned pages you can easily pick up another 100 – 200 fans in a few days with minimal effort (also free).

5. Post To Your Friends Walls
Find a few people you know pretty well that have a lot of friends and post the link to your fan page on their wall and mention something relevant in the text field of your post. People will naturally be curious and click to check it out even if they don’t know you or your project, and of course the commitment level is so low they most likely will fan the page if it looks well put together. This might sound like your spamming your friends with these posts, but this is your baby we’re talking about here, they should and will be glad to have a post from you on their wall to help you out. You can easily garner another 100 fans this way in one day, and for free.

6. Smart And Engaging Updates
So now that you have over a 1,000 fans and growing (the compounding effect) to your fan page, you need to chill out on the posts. Only post once a day (twice at most and only if it warrants it). The more you post, the more people will ignore you or un-fan your fan page. Also when you post, make sure it’s not only about your project, post things from around the web that you find interesting (but they have to be really good). You can plan out two posts a week about your project but I would keep it to two max because there’s only so much people will take of the same thing over and over again. You want to ask questions a lot, questions elicit responses and engagement. Once you have trained your fans that your posts are worth reading, and not only worth reading but deserving of a response, they won’t hesitate to take action on your post to go see your video.

7. Holding A Simple Contest On Your Fan Page
You can even hold a contest on your fan page for the price of a t-shirt. Not only do people respond well to contests, they live for them. A small gift of some kind mixed with some fan pics posting to the wall for a contest will put engagement through the roof and get people coming back day after day.

8. “Feature A Fan” strategy
Let’s say you have a contest for the entire month before your video is out. Fans post pictures to the wall everyday to be eligible for the contest prize, which is a nice t-shirt at the end of the month to the winner. Everyday pick one fan who submitted a picture and feature them on your one daily post. This is by far one of the most effective methods of getting your users engaged on the site. On a fan page I was involved in, we saw user interactions grow by 500% over the month we ran the Feature A Fan strategy. Everyone likes to have a little fame and that’s their day to brag to their friends that they made the Featured Friend List on “Video X’s” Fan page.

So to summarize, if you have a video along with a very tight budget there are still some great ways to leverage Facebook in order to make a very meaningful impact on how many people get to see and know about your video for free. One last thing I would like to stress; don’t forget about your fans. One of the biggest mistakes I’ve seen is people abandoning their fan pages once their video has launched leaving your fans in limbo. Your fans are like a plant, if you don’t feed them with new posts they wither and die. Your fans will be there when your video launches, and they will still be there when it’s been out for a year. Keep that mini-community up to date so when your next video/project is coming out you aren’t scrambling to complete the 8 steps again. Good Luck!