How to increase Web Site traffic

Unless you are actively promoting your site through traditional mediums like magazines, radio and TV,  the majority of traffic to your site will originate from one of the major search engines with estimates ranging from 67% to 90%. 

Search Engine Optimization - this is defined as the skillful manipulation of the location and frequency of keywords within your web pages.
Search Engine Submission - the knowledge of which search engines to submit to and how.

Search Engine Optimization

1. Develop Unique and Appropriate Keyword PHRASES.   Individual keywords are usually too competitive to rank well with unless they are very unique to your business.  Instead develop 2 or 3 word phrases that precisely describe your business.  If your business is generally local include the city or state as one of your keywords.

2. Location and Frequency of your keywords are critical.  Keywords should appear in your page title as well as high up in the page text.   Location of keyword placement is critical.  Other important places that your keywords should appear are the meta description, meta keywords, alt tags, headers and link addresses.  

3. Use Meta tags to insure an accurate page description and to use variations of keywords that were not used in the page text. Repeat your most important keyword phrases in both the description and keyword Meta tags but be aware of over doing it as this could be construed as spamming and result in not being listed at all.

4. Frames and image maps may make your links invisible to some search engines preventing them from traveling further into your site.  The search engines that are not frame compatible are Alta Vista, Excite, HotBot, and WebCrawler.  The search engines that do not support image maps are Excite, HotBot, Lycos, and WebCrawler.

5. Increase the number of links to your page. Consider trading links with associates or complimentary sites or going with a service like LinkExchange. This is known as Link Popularity and the more links from other web pages to your site the higher it will rank on several search engines, particularly Google.

6. Update your pages frequently. InfoSeek and some other major search engines will schedule re-crawls on pages based on how often the pages change. This is also likely to result in a higher rank in search results.  At least change the page enough so that your file date is new.

Search Engine Submissions

1. Who are the Major Search Engines - for webmasters the following services are the most important to be listed in as they can potentially generate so much traffic.  AOL Search, AltaVista, Ask Jeeves, Direct Hit, Excite, FAST Search, Google, HotBot, Inktomi, LookSmart, Lycos, MSN Search, Netscape Search, Northern Light, Open Directory, RealNames, Yahoo.

2. Submit manually to the major search engines listed above. I suggest not trusting the all important submission process to the automated services for the major search engines but use them to cover the hundreds of lesser search engines if you wish to have total coverage.

3. Re-submit regularly, after every major update to the site or at least every six months.

4. Be aware that each Search Engine has it’s own set of rules for determining relevancy and ranking.

5. Buy Your Way In - It is becoming more and more common for search engines to require or at least give preference to those who are willing to pay.  Approaches include Paid Submission, where you pay to be listed; Paid Inclusion, where you pay to be more deeply listed and Paid Placement, where you are essentially ranked higher than non paying submissions.  Some of the search engines that are leading the way on this approach are AltaVista, GoTo, LookSmart and Yahoo.

6. Learn more by visiting http://searchenginewatch.com for more detailed information.