Checking Up

Registering your Web site with the main search engines is crucial to building site traffic, so don't guess about whether you're listed with Excite, Infoseek and the rest--check it out, free of charge, with Internet Marketing Group's Did-it.com Detective (http://www.did-it.com). Input your URL, and, within minutes, you get an e-mail report of how your site fared. For ongoing monitoring of your site's status, Did-it.com charges $49 for a year's worth of monthly reports and also sells promotion packages designed to enhance your site's visibility on the ever-more cluttered Net.

Another tactic for building traffic is to have a clever or easy-to-remember domain name (that's the wording that follows "www" in a URL). One hitch: You can't use a name that's already taken. Find out which names are up for grabs with a free search tool at http://www.checkdomain.com The real plus of Sane Solutions LLC's Checkdomain is it lets you try variations until you hit an available name that is exactly what you want to communicate.