Build your business by increasing traffic and getting the right kind of visitors to visit your website. I get many emails from people asking - How do I get more customers? or How do I get more business from my website? or How do I increase traffic to my website? This short lesson will give you the basics for increasing traffic to your site. Besides the basics you will discover the key to successful website promotion. Website promotion appears to be a simple process but to get good results is difficult. It appears to be a mechanical/technical process but instead it is more similar to advertising. Anyone can teach you the mechanics but to be good and increase traffic requires much more. It requires careful insight into your audience and precise selection and use of words. If there is one secret to increase traffic and get more visitors and customers to your website this is it. For example, the words that I am now writing are carefully selected with the search engines in mind. The secret to getting more visitors to your website has a lot more to do with the words you choose than the software you select to promote your site. It has to do with what words people are likely to use to search in Yahoo, Google, Alta Vista, Excite etc. to get the information they are looking for and what words you use on your site and where you place them. For example, notice how many times I have repeated the phrase "getting more visitors to your website." You should even notice that I put that phrase in the title bar of your browser. I design and promote this page as I write it. I did not write this page and then think about how to promote it. I integrated the promotion with the creation. The focus of this page is to attract people who would enter the phrases "more visitors" or "increase traffic" or "more customers" in the search engines. Did you enter one of those phrases into a search engine to come to this page? If so, it proves my point. You might now be beginning to understand what I am talking about the importance of words and phrases. The next logical question to ask is; why did I pick those phrases? Why not pick website promotion? I carefully chose these phrases for two reasons I often get people who are asking questions using these phrases and I felt that people may use them in the search engines too. Remember these phrases are contained in the questions: How do I get more customers? or How do I get more business from my website? or How do I increase traffic to my website? Other phrases like "website promotion" are so popular, I felt that it would be very difficult to get a good ranking in a search engine for these words. We would be competing with 5000 other sites that have focused on the phrase "website promotion". Now perhaps you can see the truth in what I said earlier that website promotion is not a mechanical process. It is not simply a matter of submitting to search engines. In my opinion it is often a waste of time and money to hire someone to submit your site to 300 or 1000 search engines. Sure the site will get indexed in Alta Vista or Yahoo but unless it is a very unique site on an unusual topic it will be buried somewhere in a list of thousands of other sites. To get results requires planning, trial and error, tuning up the site, strategizing and lots of time. We have listed the eight steps that we follow. But before that let's look at some basic terms. Terms Submit: This is the process of requesting a search engine to include your website in their database. Usually at the bottom of Yahoo Excite, AltaVista etc. there is a place to click that says "add my url." Click here and you will get to a form that allows you to submit your webpage. Rank: After you have been accepted by a search engine you can search for information or service you offer. When you do this, the search engine will list all the sites in their database, which are matching with your request. Position of your web site in this list when you search for a specific word or phrase is your rank. If the words and phrases in your site matches well with the word or phrase searched for, your site may appear on the first page or be ranked in the top twenty among your competition. But, on the other hand, if the match is not so good, you may get ranked on page 200 or even 800. If this is the case, few people will ever find you using the phrase selected. Each word or phrase may create a different rank. Indexing: Is the process of including your site details in the search engine database. When your website or a webpage is included in Yahoo database, we say your site is indexed with Yahoo. Six Steps to Good Results People often ask us what we do to promote their site. Perhaps they are under the impression that we simply submit to the search engines, get paid and hope for the best. But we do much more. We strive for results. We try to increase traffic and get more visitors to the website. ( notice how I slipped those phrases in again). We really don't mind telling you exactly how and why we do our work because we hope that you will want to use our services. The process that we are describing here is very time consuming and many people would rather let someone else do it. One of our slogans is "focus on what you do best and outsource the rest". These are the steps we at Stylus take when promoting a website: Research We analyze your site and determine who you want to target. We then search the search engines looking for how your competitors are promoting their sites. Select Words and Phrases We decide on what words or phrase are best to focus on. Often we will use one phrase for the home page and others for pages within the site. We will submit up to three pages if necessary. Modify and Upload Site The words and phrases are then carefully placed in the site. We know what the search engines are looking for so we place the words in just the right location to create a good match that results in a high ranking. This requires minor modifications to your site and means that we need to download your site from the server, make the changes, and then upload it. Install A Means To Gather Site Statistics It is important to know how many visitors or customers are coming to your site. Therefore we install a simple system to keep track of the visitors and hits. You will also have access to this so that you can quickly and easily monitor these statistics. Submit to Search Engines At this point we will submit the site to the 8 major search engines. We can submit to 300 - 900 smaller search engines too, but it usually does not produce results. Perhaps 95% of your site visitors comes from the major search engines like Yahoo, Alta Vista, Excite, AOL, Lycos, Hotbot, Google, infoseek and MSN. Check Ranking After about three to five weeks, we will check the ranking on Yahoo, Alta Vista and Excite etc using three phrases or words. We wait three to five weeks because it often takes that long for some search engines to index the site. We usually prepare a brief report for the client with these result along with a strategy for improvement.