You may have invested a tremendous amount of time, energy, and money in developing a top-notch website. You may use your site to promote your business, to sell a product, or to dispense information. But even the most beautiful site on the Web and the best business, product, or information available won't bring you returns unless visitors can find your website. The only way to drive traffic to your site is through website promotion.

Depending on your resources and your goals, you can use one or more of these website marketing tools to drive visitors to your site.

Search Engine Optimization: Also called SEO, this form of search engine marketing involves discovering the words and phrases - called "keywords" - that will cause your site to rank high in search engine results. When you incorporate these keywords into your content, keywords, and meta tags, the search engine robots that crawl your site will notice, and you can improve your site's ranking and positioning among search engines.

Pay-Per-Click Advertising: Also called PPC, this form of Internet advertising allows you to place keyword advertisements with search engines and specify the maximum amount you're willing to pay each time a visitor clicks onto your ad and is taken to your site.

Email Marketing: It's easy to collect names and email addresses from visitors to your site, and email software allows you to send mass email promotions to your subscriber list. You can advertise your products or send out informative newsletters that lead your subscribers back to your website.

Content Article Advertising: Virtually everyone who runs a website is hungry for content. Through posting interesting articles on article content hubs, you can gain free website promotion. This is because, although you allow other sites to reproduce your articles, you can include a short biography at the end that links back to your website.

Press Release Marketing: Press releases are another terrific way of garnering extensive website promotion. Basically, you write something newsworthy about your business, website, or product, and submit it to one of the press release distribution websites. Again, because there is such a demand for content, it's likely that your press release will be used in both online and traditional media. The trick is to write a release that is relevant to something already in the news, so that you are presenting a new angle for follow-up stories.

These are just five of the ways you can engage in website promotion. There are several others, such as pop-up advertising, banner advertising, web traffic exchanges, and links from other websites and blogs. The most important thing to remember is, whatever form of Internet advertising you choose, getting the right information is key to attaining online success.

Chris Robertson is an author of Majon International, one of the worlds MOST popular internet marketing companies on the web. Learn more about Five Steps to Website Promotion or Majon's Internet directory.