Once you've built your masterpiece, you have to spread the word. Submitting your Web site to search engines, directories and related sites is critical to success. The real Web-savvy companies have whole teams of geeks who spend their days figuring out how to get better rankings in search engines.

Unfortunately, there's a lot of fools' gold, bad advice and even downright scams in the Web site promotion field. If you go about promoting your site the wrong way, you can actually hurt traffic instead of helping to build it. Here are 10 things you should definitely not do, no matter how tempting some spam message makes it sound:

1. Spam Not!

2. Don't shell out big for submission services.

3. Don't waste time on the flotsam and jetsam of the Web.

4. Don't rush through your Yahoo submission.

5. Never submit your site until it's open for business.

6. Don't forget to integrate your URL into your business.

7. Don't mess with black magic.

8. Don't put anything in your Web site directory that you don't want the public to see.

9. Don't neglect to measure your traffic.

10. When you're finished, don't stop!