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The success of your new online venture will be determined in large part by how much traffic you are able to generate on your website. It is only by visiting your site that prospective customers will have the opportunity to understand the benefits of your product or service, and potentially initiate a purchase. Given that there are tens of thousands of websites on the Internet, getting potential customers to visit yours merits considerable attention.
There are many methods that can be used to generate website traffic, and space does not allow a proper treatment of any of them individually – let alone collectively. In this article, we will talk briefly about two of the more popular methods of generating traffic: search engines and viral marketing.
Search Engines
One of the more popular methods of raising awareness is through the use of online search engines (e.g. Yahoo, Google, AltaVista, etc.). These search engines help customers find specific sites by displaying websites that are relevant to the keywords used in the customers’ search requests.
To completely understand how to maximize your website traffic using search engines is becoming more difficult as competition heats up in the online world. However, there are still some basics to consider when working with search engines.
Submitting Your Site to a Search Engine Directory
A search engine must be aware that your site exists in order for it to be displayed when a potential customer searches using specific keywords. To get your site listed with a search engine, you submit it to the search engine.
Each search engine has its own submission guidelines. In general terms, however, the search engine will request that you enter your URL and some descriptive information. The search engine will then scan its directory of sites when a search is requested, and return appropriate matches.
Basic search engine submissions are often free, but improved results are usually obtained when you pay for a listing on a search engine. This can give you preferential ranking when a potential customer performs a search.
“Crawler-Based” Search Engines
Some search engines are not directory-based. They actually send out “spiders” to scour the Internet for website content, and create an index based on what they have found. To assist these types of search engines in finding your site, proper use of “metatags” is important. Metatags are keywords that are inserted into your site that enable a search engine to determine how relevant your site (or a particular page on your site) is to a particular search request. Using the right metatags is an important step in being found on the Internet.
There is much more to search engine submission and optimization than what is described above. For more information, we recommend that you check out www.searchenginewatch.com and www.searchengineworld.com.
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