Ryan Leland

Here’s my attempt to put together a quick guide for getting people traffic on their websites. Hopefully this is useful for somebody. I’m sure others will add to this, or have further ideas. This is just a good starting point for those with a small business site, or personal site that can’t afford an SEO expert.

Getting your site ready and Search Optimization

“Search Engine Optimization,” or the craft of modifying a website to rank highly in search engines, has been around since the mid-90s, when the first index-based search engines were launched.

In the early days, it was a relatively simple process: You just added popular words to the header tags of each page, and then it showed up in the search engines whenever someone searched for those keywords.

As search engines have advanced, however, so has the search engine optimization (SEO) industry. In order to compete with Google’s army of Ph.D. researchers, search engine optimizers struggle to keep up to date on the latest theories and conjecture about how the carefully-guarded — and always changing — search engine algorithms work.

Some examples of factors that can affect your search engine ranking:

• Number of links to your site from related sites
• Number of years for which your site’s domain name is registered
• Age of a specific page on your site
• Quality of writing on the page
• Use of headings within the text
• Number and frequency of updates to a page
• Use of keywords in the URL
• Amount of text on a page
• Rate of external linking to your site
• Number of pages on the site
• Domain extension (.com, .net, etc.)
• Use of frames, Flash, or PDFs
• Downtime of your web server
• Geographic location of your web server

That all might make your head spin, and sound really complex, and it can be. There are plenty of guides out there to help get your site ranked higher. Your best bet though, is to have a simple and effective message on your site, and make it worth coming back to.

Also, you can’t overlook design, or functionality either. You can have the best content in the universe, but if the page looks bad, or is confusing to use, chances are you won’t have many return vistors.

Getting the traffic

Step 1 Open Directory Project - http://dmoz.org/. Find the appropriate category for your site and submit. Most major search engines index this directory on a regular basis.

Step 2 Submit to Search Engines. Not everyone is down with submitting to EVERY major search engine, but it is worth your time in the long run. There are services out there that will submit to search engines for you, but take caution, as some may use techniques that can hurt your ranking. Here is a list of the top 50 search engines.

1. Yahoo! Search
2. MSN
3. Google
4. Open Directory
5. ExactSeek
6. ScrubTheWeb
7. SearchSight
8. EntireWeb
9. Link Centre
10. GigaBlast
11. AbiLogic
12. World Site Index
13. 01WebDirectory
14. Exalead
15. Accoona
16. MavicaNet
17. What U Seek
18. IllumiRate
19. AMRAY
20. BusinessSeek
21. Info Listings
22. Sphericom
23. AbiFind
24. Wikidweb
25. Zeezo
26. FWD
27. Pedsters Planet
28. Arakne Links
29. Info Tiger
30. AnooX
31. Cipinet
32. Burf
33. NetInsert
34. Claymont
35. DareDirectory
36. WebbieWorld
37. TopSites
38. Amfibi
39. IRKA
40. Clickey
41. SgtSearch
42. SplatSearch
43. SimpleDir
44. Cache Directory
45. TowerSearch
46. SearchWorth
47. Web Directory
48. CherryDir
49. Dramba
50. AnyApex

Step 3 Social Bookmarking. This is becoming a very trendy Web 2.0 replacement for search engines. Search engines are way too crowded, and people are quickly figuring out they can find more quality content on social bookmarking sites. It’s beyond the scope of this guide to fully explain them, so here’s some links.Social Bookmarking for Traffic http://www.sitepronews.com/archives/2006/mar/22.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_bookmarking and the List_of_Social_bookmarking Sites.

Step 4 Blogging. Okay, blogging does work, but as a SEO technique, I’m still not sold. If you can blog about your business or website, and it isn’t painful for you to write (or painful to read), then go for it. It does work. This brings me back to what I said before though, that your best bet is to have a simple and effective message on your site, and make it worth coming back to. Meaning if you can incorperate an RSS feed on your site (the only advantage of a blog in my opinion), then blogging doesn’t have as much value.

One major thing some people fail to understand is that you still need to get traffic to your blog, to get the traffic from your blog to the website you’re wanting to promote. *sigh* And that’s why I’m not a fan of blogging for traffic. Or, at least don’t take time away from improving your main site, just to work on blogging for traffic.