A website alone does not make visitors come. For a web business, this can mean bankruptcy. For a personal homepage, it can mean heartbreak. But whatever your motivation is, cult status or high profit margins, you need visitors.
Visitors come in two basic ways. Either they are given your site address through email or business cards or through advertisements. This method costs a lot and is not very effective. The next best way to drive visitors to your site is through search engines.
Search engines are perhaps the single most important development of the internet. Without them, there would be no way of rooting through the thousands of internet sites on the web. By far, the most popular of these is presently Google.
Google has grown in popularity first because it quickly surpassed other search sites for the number of indexed pages. Now it remains number one because of the software behind the search engine, primarily PageRank. PageRank has made Google successful by ranking pages in order of importance.
No one other than Google employees really know how PageRank system works, but roughly it is a system that rates sites based on other sites ratings. Essentially, every link from one site to your site is a vote for your site. Every link from your site to another site, is a vote for that site. Higher ranked pages have a more valuable vote—much like larger states having more votes in the electoral college than smaller states. Any explanation beyond this simple one is a fabrication: Google protects the PageRank formulas to prevent people from manipulating the search results.
PageRank has of course been manipulated. Miserable Failure and french military victories are two examples of how PageRank has been manipulated through links. [Essentially, these sites became the top ranked site for the given search term. Links from other sites to these sites used the terms in the link, and so Google associated those words with that site].
The best way though to improve your PageRank is by getting other people to link to you—preferably other sites with a high PageRank. The best way to do this is offer valuable content. E-Commerce sites should offer information beyond the products they sell. For instance, if your site sells pots and pans and cooking supplies, then hosting a database of recipes or articles about hosting house parties would be examples of information other sites might be interested in linking to. If you simply put online your standard catalogue of merchandise, no one will care enough to link to you, and in turn, your PageRank value will drop. Returning to the pots and pans example, a search for the term "Pots and Pans" might rank you very highly if other people have linked to your site, but on the other hand, if no one has linked to you, you might very well be last on Googles search results page.
Adding your website to Google's index is the first step. http://www.google.com/addurl.html will take you directly to Google's software to add your site.
The next step is submitting your site to http://dmoz.org/. DMOZ.org is an index edited by humans. Google ranks their listings very highly, and a link from DMOZ.org will help boost your PageRank. The other search engines you should consider submitting to are: Yahoo, Lycos, and AllTheWeb. The are numerous other search engines that can be found through one of these.
Never pay for a listing in a search engine. At this point in time, the largest search engines are free for submission, and the smaller ones are unimportant. Never pay someone else to submit your site. Pay for Submission sites use robots to auto submit to search engines. Many search engines, including Google, will actually block sites submitted through these robots.
Despite what I have already said about Google PageRank, there are some other things that can be done to increase your position in search engines and improve your search results. Also include proper descriptions and keywords in your meta tags. Many sites will use meta tags as a starting point for indexing a page. There are quite a lot tricks that are so old they aren't worth mentioning other than to tell you not to do it. Never 'spam' your keyword meta tags. One instance of a word will suffice. Putting 'porn’ thirty-five times in your meta tag will not increase your traffic. Most search engines will penalize you for repeating meta keywords. Many search engines will also use your description as a brief explanation of the site on the search results page, so also make sure that is accurate.
Next, keep in mind search engines rely on text, not images for their databases. Most reputable search engines will generate key words for sites based on the content of the text on the site and ignore your meta tags altogether. Any pictures you do include on your site should include detailed ALT tags. Google's image search will pick up on these tags.
Finally, when you are first starting out, include the link to your web site anytime you post something in an online forum. Including your web address as part of a signature is common practice, but more importantly, if that site is indexed by google, you will generate a link to your own site.
Bringing visitors to your site is an important aspect of publishing a site. After all, what good is a voice if no one is listening.
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