TRAFFIC, TRAFFIC, YOU NEED VISITORS
Assuming you have made your site, have awesome content that is keyword weighted, and have some income generating programs involved, it's time to get traffic to your site. This can be one of the hardest steps in starting and online business. It helps to have the site focused and narrow based upon good keywords so that it is indexed and ranks high on the search engines, but this isn't enough.
I really stress that the search engines are the best means to get visitors to you web site. But you have to rank high in the rankings to be effective and there's a lot of competition out there. Unless your site is in the first three pages, it's doubtful many people will get to your site. Just remember, each search engine has a different ranking alogrithm. Meaning what works on one search engine, may not on another.
MSN has the smallest number of searches per month than any of the big three. But statistics show that even though there are fewer searches, visitors finding your site through MSN have the greatest chance of buying. MSN likes a solid sized site and ranks a lot on the incoming links from other sites. MSN also likes a relevant theme based on keywords. MSN als tends to rank more of the pages within the site itself. So each page needs incoming links to rank high.
Yahoo used to rank sites like MSN but now they're acting more like Google. They like unique, original content and incoming links. Yahoo puts a pagerank value to each page. Although Yahoo likes links, it doesn't place a value on the link for 3-8 months. So it will take time ranking higher if you suddenly get a number of links from other sites to yours before you see the site going up.
Google is the search engine everyone needs to get on because it out ranks all the other search engines in the number of searches per month. Although it does have the worst record for the buying power of the visitors. I've already gone into detail on how to optimize your site for Google. What you should know here is that Google places a lot of emphasis on one-way, incoming links from higher ranked web sites. They put an "age" factor on these links too. This means that it will take even longer than Yahoo before you see your pages going up in ranking after you start getting incoming links.
Google likes to see unique content and dynamic growth. In other words, they like to see the web site grow over time and not just put up and remaining static. They figure that as your site grows, so should the number of incoming links if your content is unique. You must update your content regularly to please Google. Never stick a web site up with a few hundred to thousands of pages over night. You will get docked for this. Start small and build slowly.
By making your web site to please Google, you are pleasing the others at the same time. You probably will find that you are first put up on MSN's search pages, then months later on Yahoo, and Google last. Also remember that just because you are indexed on a search engine, visitors usually come to you when you're ranked on the first three pages for the keyword typed in.
How can you increase your search engine rankings and drive more targeted traffic to your web site? This is the 50 million dollar question. Most answers to this revolve around gaining one-way, incoming links. You can get these for free or you can pay for them. I want to caution you about paying for links to your site. This usually works against your site. These links are usually purchased by "link farms" anyway and the search engines caught on to this years ago. But you still see ads all over the net advertising to put your links on 10,000 sites, etc. Don't be tempted.
The strategy that I've found very effective and have been using for the past year or so is articles. Write articles on the subject your site revolves around and submit them to the various article directories. Many of these directories have very high rankings and links from them are worth gold when it comes to getting targeted traffic to your web site.
Here's how this works. You write an article to submit. When you submit your article, you also will have to include a "resource box" with it that is included with the article on the directory. If you would like to see what I'm talking about, go to
http://ezinearticles.com/?id=54574 or
http://www.goarticles.com/cgi-bin/showa.cgi?C=97221 which are a couple of my articles. At the bottom of each article, there is a paragraph that contains a link to my web sites. It is this link that becomes the incoming link.
Other web sites can use the articles that you submit to the directories. After a couple of months, there are incoming links to your site from everywhere. From the directories (with high ranking), from other pertinent web sites, from ezines, and from RSS feeds that pick up your articles. And with these incoming links, up goes your rankings.
Now, go to Google and search for "Jim Bruce grape author". Notice how many results you see. At the time I'm writing this, there are 193,000 results displayed. Most are to my articles on growing grapes and each has links back to one or more of my web sites.
There's another positive in writing articles and submitting them to the directories. Your name gets around the internet associated with a certain topic. This establishes you as an expert on that subject. And it establishes your web site as a place to go to get pertinent information on that subject (where people will come back again and again if they see that you are constantly updating it with more information). Hopefully, they will bookmark it for doing just that.
Of all the techniques that I've used, articles have been the best for gaining higher search engine rankings and targeted visitors to my web sites. It is a long term strategy with lasting results. So many techniques work today and are gone tomorrow as the search engine alogrithms change. Articles haven't done that. Mainly because so many web sites, ezines, RSS feeds, etc. are always looking for new and unique content. And the plus is, so are the search engines.
All of this increases your search engine ranking, gives people links to visit your site, and establishes you as a credible expert in the field.