The most powerful marketing tool you have online when you start your business is your ranking on a search engine. That does not mean it is the only tool you have, of course; you should never slow content development down, shun link exchanges, or ignore the possibilities of submitting to article directories. However, you absolutely cannot afford to ignore the search engines.

When you first develop your site, you learned the easy way or the hard way that you must submit it to the search engines before they can catalog it properly; and of course you did.

And you learned - again, easy or hard - that there were automated submitters, free engines that would submit your site to dozens of search engines for you. This, if you've ever filled out submission forms by hand, is a godsend, saving you hours and hours of work.

But after that first round of submission, you may never get around to it again. That is a mistake. With every new article you write and post online, you should submit the permanent URL of that article.

After all, each article is going to boost your ranking. Each article should have a link back to your home page, which may boost your overall ranking a little. And each article should have slightly different keywords, enabling your site to come up on many more searches than it would have otherwise.